Laserdisc capture - general thread

[willie1959]

I have both editions the SE /TE on laserdisc [of The Abyss]; they are plentiful on ebay. The SE I transferred to dvd at full bit rates. 4 discs one dvd for each side . My next goal is to up the bit rates to Bluray quality very slowly. Trying to figure out how to capture the screen with MSI Afterburner. Had good success with it on good prints. Tried bandicam but had problems with jutter. I have 4 laserdisc players. My biggest challenge is try to eliminate some of the analog artifacts from the laserdisc. ah just checked I did get it on to bluray looks good on my small 4k tv to 43 inch. yes I need to recrop.

[spoRv]

willie, I appreciate the fact you are capturing laserdisc. But, let me tell you (from a long time laserdisc collector, lover, and project maker using it as source) that, even if you are using the best player in the world, with the best laserdisc title, capture card, software, you will never end up with a quality comparable to HD - if you are lucky, it will be next or a bit better than DVD, depending on the title.

This is not to discourage you, but just to avoid to waste your time with useless capture, when you could focus on other titles - as The Abyss has plenty of versions in HD - HDTV and WEB-DL.

So, do your homework and see if a given title is available in DVD, BD, HDTV, HD-DVD, D-Theater, WEB-DL etc - if not, you have a good chance to capture it and eventually filter it to get a better result.

Of course, I strongly encourage you to do as many tests as possible - trial&error is the best path to learn anything IMHO.

[willie1959]

thanks but you are talking to man that has over 10000 movies on laserdisc , dvd and bluray. All have been transferred to hard drives. I have good success transferring laserdisc to bluray  and its not all about HD. Its about poor sound tracks and teal and orange transfers on bluray. I have been doing 2k scans for some time now.

[spoRv]

10k titles? Kudos, hat off! ...now I feel like a newbie in comparison, and must add that I envy you quite a bit...

Agree, audio often is better (or use old/different mix, that is preferable in my book) than DVD/BD; also agree about color grading, but video, sadly, is not on par with audio. I think that HD transfers for LD is overkill, but still a mere MPEG-2 capture done with a DVD recorder is not enough; hence, a good capture in SD using a lossless codec (HuffYUV, for example), then a good AVC encoding is the best solution - of course, IMHO.

That's why we are here, after all: get the best sources to obtain the best final result; usually, LD audio (if/when available) is transferred "as is" (apart conversion to 48KHz for PCM and DTS), while LD video is taken as color reference to regrade the BD - for example, I've used some LD captures for the purpose, like The Thing and Alien saga (Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Alien Resurrection).

If you would like to help the community, some captures of audio, effects, commentary tracks from laserdisc - analog, PCM, DTS, AC-3, bit-perfect or not - would be really, really welcome!

[willie1959]

I have been transferring the laserdiscs to dvd . Some titles have started to show rot so I want digital copies. I have asked a buddy of mine if he can install an analogue to digital output into one of the players so I can get 720p he thinks he can . As for anyone needing downloads tracks ect should be no problem . I the only request is that I have looking to find is a PVP copy of john Wayne's the Alamo 1960 as shown on TCM about two weeks ago . I believe a digital copy could be made more watchable the laser disc copy the print is poor. I had a power failure here so I lost the recording. I have never done downloads myself. I been at this since the mid 90s. sadly I believe some of blurays they issue today are terrible. Why do they have to be teal and orange? The best restorations are the starwars trilogy from harmy

Also for the three strip technicolor buffs I have almost all of the technicolor movies from 1922 to 1954-55 when it was discontinued . on hard drive 4tb around 500 movies

[spoRv]

Moved the posts here, to not derail that thread, and because I think it deserves its own.

Your help would be really appreciated, I thank you in advance in the name of the whole community!

Don't know if you are aware of this (most probably you are), but happycube on lddb forum made a software to capture laserdisc video via digital output (modded player is needed, of course, and a special capture card); but 720p would be not useful, as the signal was recorded at 480i (NTSC) or 576i (PAL); the quality would be a little bit better than hi-end players (and a lot better than low-end ones!)

Alamo: dunno, try to start a new thread in the proper subforum, maybe someone has recorded it.

Technicolor movies: are you talking about LD captures, right?

[deleted user]

Don't know if you are aware of this (most probably you are), but happycube on lddb forum made a software to capture laserdisc video via digital output (modded player is needed, of course, and a special capture card); but 720p would be not useful, as the signal was recorded at 480i (NTSC) or 576i (PAL); the quality would be a little bit better than hi-end players (and a lot better than low-end ones!)

Are you talking about the one where he basically captured the "raw signal" and then further processed it digitally to form the image? That was pretty impressive, but it wasn't really a digital output I think, just the "RF signal" recorded at 28 MHz. 

I don't think there's much of a point in installing a digital output to an LD player, especially one that upscales. You will likely get better results upscaling with any software your computer has than with some realtime upscaling chip. 

I'd just take the best output you can get (I would guess S-Video or even better, component) and a good video capture card, capture that losslessly, then further post-process to improve quality. This is if you want the best possible quality.

Correct me someone if I'm wrong.

[spoRv]

Yep, I mean the RF signal. It would surely improve the quality of low-end LD players, albeit I don't think it could beat an hi-end MUSE player - unless one would risk to tap the same RF signal from one of them!

[zoidberg]

Comb filters in capture cards are superior to the comb filters in all but a handful of the later laser disc players. Composite is almost always the best way to go when capturing laserdiscs.
It's widely believed that the factory installed AC-3 RF outputs output the full bandwidth RF (with a DC offset) but I think in reality it's already low pass filtered. I'm not aware of anyone who has captured the RF in that manner.
Long live laserdisc!

[althor1138]

Happycube's software is still a work in progress and finding a decent way to digitize the rf signal can be tricky. I was using a hacked hauppauge card if I remember correctly. The results were sometimes great and sometimes bad. The HDD space required for going this route is immense and needs a hdd with at least 7200 rpm to write the raw rf fast enough.

IMO, going with a good capture card and capturing the composite output is still the way to go at the moment. I use the theater750hd pcie card. It seems to do tbc correction as well which greatly improves the quality of the picture. Problem is, most people get a bsod while using the card and i've only ever gotten it to work in win7. I stupidly upgraded to win10 and can't even use the thing now. I'll probably have to build a separate pc with win7 just to use it again.