[Proposal] Halloween 2020 pipefan413 preservation: THE EXORCIST (1973)

[pipefan413]

I'm wondering if this might be the trouble:

This is done using the Media Express software and software version 10.11.4 (Windows), a combination that produces perfect sync. (Later versions have issues with sync drift, loss of video sync, or both.)

https://forum.lddb.com/viewtopic.php?p=1...84#p109260

I'm using a Decklink Studio (very similar card but with more analogue connections) and the Blackmagic software version 11.6. Maybe the driver is the problem. About to try rolling back to 10.11.4 to see if that makes any discernible difference.

It did!



So reverting to the older version and recording directly with Media Express rather than AmarecTV appears to achieve accurate sync. It also produces 24-bit audio instead of 16-bit, which is odd because I thought the card was incapable of that, but there you go, that's good too. Less good: it produced GIANT files. I'm not sure if these are completely uncompressed or just using a Blackmagic codec that's extremely inefficient compared to things like UtVideo, MagicYUV and Lagarith, but this could kinda be a problem for long-term storage; I guess I could just pipe every raw capture through AviSynth and encode to one of those three more efficient codecs, but that's a lot of processing time added into the workflow. For now, though, I guess it'll do, because AmaRecTV is stuck in 16-bit as far as I can tell and the 24-bit capture is a big plus for analogue audio editing. But yeah, if it works, it works!