2025-01-22
Our capture chain, 2025 edition
People ask what we use. A consumer S-VHS deck with a working TBC, a separate frame synchroniser, a plain analogue-to-SDI converter and a capture card that records uncompressed. Nothing exotic, all second-hand.
We capture at the deck's native rate and keep the full frame, including the head-switching noise at the bottom. Files are stored losslessly, which is why a ten-minute short comes out at two to three gigabytes. Web copies are re-encoded small so you can watch a film in the page before pulling the big one.
Cleaning is minimal: we fix levels, remove obvious dropouts frame by frame, and stop. Denoising is published as a separate file when we do it at all.