VHS Audio Question

[alleycat]

Hi All,

Probably a daft question. 

I've done a few projects where I'm preserving some movies that have only been released on VHS. I've used a professional company with high spec equipment to capture them and they have been saved as very large prores files.

In terms of the audio, would it be worth creating DTS HD files? I don't know much about audio but I presume VHS is lossless like laserdiscs? Or will it make no difference and I should just go with AC3? 

Thanks

[Stamper]

DTS-HD is overkill, go with PCM as these VHS are all stereo.

[alleycat]

Thanks Stamper will do.

[deleted user]

If they're Hi-Fi tapes I think the quality can be pretty good and worth saving losslessly imo. However to say that tapes are entirely lossless is wrong, it's an analogue format, not digital like Laserdisc PCM tracks. Laserdiscs can have both analogue and digital tracks, VHS are all analogue afaik. With that said, the loss of a VHS tape is not comparable to a lossy codec. A lossy codec just throws away a lot of information like high frequency content, where the lossiness of a VHS tape means that - over longer time - you may get gradual degradation/stronger noise. Like an older vinyl record can pick up a few crackles and pops over time, but the audio still can sound excellent.

Hell, I'd save lossless even for a non-Hifi tape. You never know, someday someone may invent a method to do really nice audio enhancement or noise reduction and then people can do that with your restoration, where the options would be more limited with a lossy codec. The advancements of machine learning have been pretty impressive so far, for example, I can imagine very advanced restoration algorithms to come out in the coming decades.

[alleycat]

Thanks for the info TomArrow, I'll go for lossless.

[Evit]

For my VHS audio capture I always use PCM 16-bit or even better 32-bit if I need to do post-production work on them. DTS-HD would only make sense as a delivery format if you were dealing with 5.1 tracks but VHS are just stereo or mono.