VHS Capture stuttering / wrapping frames

[JohnRCC]

I am in the process of digitising some of my family's home movies. I have a Video8 camcorder hooked up to my PC through a USB capture dongle via composite cable (I also have a VCR for digitising the VHS-C tapes I have; the issue below occurs with both devices but the example footage I've included is from the Video8 camcorder).

I've set up the OBS scene to match a PAL video input (720x576 @ 50Hz, deinterlaced) and I'm getting both video and audio through, but when playing back any video it's extremely jumpy and occasionally "wraps" the frame around the output window.

The video below shows a snippet of a recording, however this stuttering also appears in the live view even when I'm not recording:

See also below screengrab demonstrating the "wrapping" I'm seeing:

Should be clarified I don't get these artifacts when viewing the tapes on a TV / through the camera viewfinder. I suspect it may be the capture card but I digitised some VHS-C tapes using it on another PC a few years ago and had no issues.

Is there some framerate/synchronisation setting I've missed when configuring the software? I've attached screenshots of all relevant settings in OBS. I think I can also rule out CPU issues as suggested by a separate help forum post I read (non-OBS) as I've been closing all other software when running OBS and CPU usage is only about 10%.

TIA

Edit - Session log file, FWIW: https://obsproject.com/logs/vq49zQ6z3xEdMdpS

 

[Gra67]

Hi John, did you sort out your stuttering?

I was suffering with exactly the same issue, but weirdly switching to another VCR cured it. Unfortunately, the other VCR did not output a very good picture, so I was torn between stuttering or quality for my VHS tape archive.

My encoding was to MP4, using my NVIDEA GPU with CQP at level 22, with everything else at the highest quality.

Out of desperation, I just started trying different settings and stumbled up a fix. I simply reduced the quality of the Preset setting in Output-Recording - Encoder Settings, from P7 to P5. All of a sudden, clips that panned left to right, up and down were far smoother, and objects moving across the screen were too.

I'd used a preset to P7 because that was the best quality and because I was using my NVIDEA card to encode, my GPU and CPU usage were very low, so I thought everything was coping. I was clearly wrong!

I guess for your settings, it would be lowering your "CPU Usage Preset"?

Anyway, I be interested to know, either way, if you sorted it.

Cheers
Graeme

 

[JohnRCC]

Hi John, did you sort out your stuttering?

I was suffering with exactly the same issue, but weirdly switching to another VCR cured it. Unfortunately, the other VCR did not output a very good picture, so I was torn between stuttering or quality for my VHS tape archive.

My encoding was to MP4, using my NVIDEA GPU with CQP at level 22, with everything else at the highest quality.

Out of desperation, I just started trying different settings and stumbled up a fix. I simply reduced the quality of the Preset setting in Output-Recording - Encoder Settings, from P7 to P5. All of a sudden, clips that panned left to right, up and down were far smoother, and objects moving across the screen were too.

I'd used a preset to P7 because that was the best quality and because I was using my NVIDEA card to encode, my GPU and CPU usage were very low, so I thought everything was coping. I was clearly wrong!

I guess for your settings, it would be lowering your "CPU Usage Preset"?

Anyway, I be interested to know, either way, if you sorted it.

Cheers
Graeme

Hi Graeme

Thanks for the tip -- in the end I went out and bought another capture card as I was seeing the same issues on a different PC altogether. I ended up going for a Startech brand one that ended up working great after a bunch of faffing around with drivers. It was only about £20 so not a huge expense.

However maybe your suggested fix will work for the original card; I'll have a go and let you know.