I swear, EVERY step towards digitizing the French version of Winds/Metamorphoses uncovers more problems.
I’d purchased yet another VCR, this one fully serviced/repaired, and with the ability to play back SECAM tapes. When it arrived, I tested it with a home movie recorded in NTSC… which the VCR detected as PAL. Since the tape was playing at the wrong speed, the audio was slow, and the video was scrambled. The input format can be changed manually, but doing so requires a remote, which was not included.
Testing the VCR with the French tapes went a little easier – they were detected as SECAM, but the tracking kept going in and out. A quick search online turned up a post by someone having a similar issue, with one of the responses claiming it was a grounding issue, and explaining how to fix it. I was nervous about opening up a $300 VCR that I could otherwise return for a refund, but I REALLY wanted to finally be able to capture these tapes.
After following those instructions, I put the VCR back together… and now it wouldn’t accept a tape. After taking it apart and putting it back together a few more times, it finally worked again. I’m not sure what I did to fix it, but at least it IS fixed – the tracking problem is gone, and the NTSC tape is now detected as NTSC. Even the duration counter – another thing that wasn’t working before – was now fixed!
Since VHS is such a lossy format, one of my goals is to capture each of these tapes several times, and then stack those captures to improve the image quality. Capturing the first tape went smoothly, the first time, but when I tried capturing it again, later, the VCR spat the tape out. On closer inspection, the tape had broken when it was rewound all the way to the beginning. I’m certain it can be repaired, but this was perhaps the most unexpected new problem that could pop up.
Fixing that tape may in fact be a non-issue. After capturing the second tape, and comparing the captures from both, the quality of the first tape is considerably lower. Not only that, but the cropping is the same between them.
The broken tape also being useless, quality-wise, and also kind of fitting. I’d purchased both of the tapes I could find specifically in case either one of them ended up being a dud. Now one of them is, twice over. But it also means I’d essentially spent $150 for a tape that is useless. Or $300 for the other tape. I’m probably better off just nothing doing the math on what this project has cost me so far…
