Just got my RT4K this morning and have a whole pile of tapes to digitize, so this upload’s timing is pretty ideal. This is extremely useful so thanks for another great explainer vid, Bob!

The Retrotink 4K is the best analog-to-digital solution there is, especially for the cost. However I wish the time base correction did more correction. At places where I paused the original camcorder tape in camera, it will often jump and sometimes even show a quick frame from several minutes ago that for some reason is still in the RT4K's buffer. The RT5X also does this. It doesn't seem to have issues where I paused the recordings on a VHS tape, just old 8mm and Hi8 tapes that were then transferred to VHS. EDIT: I'm gonna try to get a JVC Super VHS as that's how the recordings were made. I currently only have a Mitsubishi S-VHS so maybe it doesn't like JVC recordings I dunno. Wouldn't hurt to have a spare VCR anyway.

This is BRILLIANT! My skater friends have TONS of videos still locked on VHS. What a godsend!

Bob! This is a great video! I’m a sysadmin at a library and help with a variety of patron needs, especially VHS to digital conversations, up until this video, there just wasn’t a solution that could be implemented without a substantial amount of staff time, until now! We’ll be able to offer this service again! Genuinely grateful for this!

As someone who used to work in a post house tape room, I really appreciate you covering this. Great results without hunting for costly, bulky and old equipment or spending weeks messing with vapor synth.

Can't wait to see your Domesday Duplicator video...btw, the team over at VHS-Decode are in the process of finalizing the MISRC hardware, a successor to the DdD, which will be able to capture multiple streams simultaneously(so manually syncing multiple audio/video captures will finally become a thing of the past).

Even though I can't afford to get into Retro Gaming or Pro-Level Tape Transfer yet, this is still really informative and entertaining to watch. KZfaq channels such as yourself, MLiG, and MVG really make my mind run wild with different scaler and hardware possibilities!

Had my 5x-pro laying around because of how much retro gaming I do. This video informed me a ton and I'm glad it can "replace" an expensive vintage TBC for something more cost effective for general home use.

What timing! I literally used my retrotink 5x to digitize over 100 hours of family videos that were stored on mini vhs. The tink made it so easy that the hardest part was swapping the mini vhs’s out every hour. Glad to see this practical use of the product being covered, especially since I didn’t realize how expensive/ low quality the “home videos digitize” market was.

I digitized all of my family’s home videos with my TINK 2X mini and HD60 Pro in late 2020. There were lots of signal drops and other issues. Going to redo this project with my TINK 5X and your tips! Thank you!!

Thank you! This made my day. I've been eagerly waiting for this video ever since I got my RetroTINK 4K.

Great video! I'm glad we're seeing modern capture techniques like this and domesday. I'll be happy to see us move on from the current "recommended" techniques involving WinXP, huffyuv and insanely priced TBCs.

Thank you for this guide. I am recording my mom and dad's old home VHS tapes, and I will give them to my dad on a flash drive for Father's Day. Thank you!!!

This is extremely timely and helpful! My family was just talking yesterday about how we need to digitize our tapes before they go bad, I realized I could probably do it with the RT4K, and low and behold you posted this only 10 days ago! Thank you!!

just commenting to express my appreciation for your content and ability to cover complicated topics in digestible ways. been interested in VHS digitizing for a while now and i learned more in this video than in countless hours of googling.

Also it should be noted that if you use S-video, be sure to disable 3D Comb Filtering completely in the ADC menu. If left enabled, you'll get a trailing afterimage that can be noticed mostly on fast-moving objects. You don't need 3D Comb Filtering with S-video anyway, so just turn it off.

Bought a retrotink5x last year to transfer my parents wedding, my grandparents wedding anniversary and videos of my brother after we found them when cleaning my abuela's house. Bought a s-VHS player with a built in TBC since their was warping on the top of the picture but now the retrotink5x fixes the warping by its self now. My parents where happy that the tapes are now on the computer since one my mom overwrote the her original wedding tape by mistake so she though it was lost and we don't have anything of my brother digital since he wasn't around in the digital world.

Thanks Bob! Being a fan of your concise summaries and reasonable methodology, I've been looking forward to this video since that first VHS live stream!

Вы прекрасно все обьясняете! Рад,что нас сближают наши увлечения!Спасибо вам!

Truly appreciate the amount of effort you put into these videos, this is outstanding information and will be a reference for people for years. I have some old tapes I would like to convert and this is probably overkill, but I still enjoyed all the detail.

You mentioned the QTGMC process in one of your titles-that’s generally the best way to handle mixed framerate content like 24p animation with 60i overlays. I’ve used it extensively in my AI upscale of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show.

My family has a whole stack of Hi-8 tapes that i promised id digitize years ago, but after a few days playing with a Dazzle, j wasnt satisfied enough to wanna continue, as I'd likely wanna re evaluate my process. Very excited to learn from this video - perhaps I'll finally finish the project!

Correcting IVTC issues especially on Anime is especially difficult and often comes down to throwing out individual fields and then scaling the one you keep, or (hopefully) manually matching them with specialized tools, so I wouldn't expect the Retrotink to be able to handle every case. But running it through the Retrotink with no filter and then working on the upscaled output later would still prove very useful for Anime with no HD re-release

Thanks Bob! Absolutely fantastic video that helped me set up my RetroTink for VHS capture.

Thank you - Thank you - Thank you! This is precisely what I needed to know. Great video!

Seeing this makes me realize I'd love to have a physical media player for my VHS and DVD rips that that emulates scanlines and VHS-style fast-forward and rewind, maybe in a VCR shell/case. It would be great for VHS anime rips in particular.

Bookmarking this for later/ adding to KZfaq engagement with a comment. This is going to be so helpful. God bless you, Bob. Or Beer bless you, if you prefer.

Wow what a dope video. We make documentaries on VHS here in Prague and have been looking for a better method to transfer. Thanks for the in-depth video!

I have used so many devices to capture vhs and so many suck. My favorites have been a standalone Sony DVD recorder with internal time base correction, a combination of a cheap AV2HDMI dongle with an $11 hdmi capture dongle using QuickTime to record, and a very old windows XP PC using Dazzle usb 1.1 capture have been my go to vhs capture methods among the dozens I’ve tried. This looks very cool but I don’t see myself spending $500+ on a retrotink to digitize vhs tapes. I’m happy to see the analog to digital conversion community still striving for perfection though. Preservation is so important.

I JUST ORDERED A TINK 4K AND I AM SO EXCITED THAT I HAD TO COMMENT HERE

finally someone talking about time base correction, thanks for making this!

What an excellent video! I really liked how you highlighted the aspect of time & effort per transferred tape. Personally, I’ve used an old SVHS deck by JVC that has a DV out and then done deinterlacing and upscaling in ffmpeg, and this has definitely meant that I’ve skipped capturing certain tapes completely because the amount of effort required (tranferring files from my MacBook to NAS and then running ffmpeg for half an hour to produce the two H264 files I want).

Considering my $1000 vcr went kaput this vid could not have come at a better time

Just bought a Retrotink 4k from the restock!!! YES

Thank you so much Bob for this amazing deep dive. I don't have a capture card and although that's a basic first step, I didn't really know what I would need to attempt this. I have a 5X and have been considering upgrading to the 4K, especially since I've been having trouble getting the firmware updater to recognize the 5X. Your video made me realize with my current setup I'm not quite ready to get the 4K for video capture and I really need to upgrade my computer setup first. After doing that, I do feel I'll have the confidence to digitize some of those old home movies, with this reference in tow.

Congratulations on your tips and solutions for RetroTINK. An experience I had with a promotional video that came as bonus media on a CD. The video came in a MOV file that was certainly compressed to fit on the 700mb CD (this CD is from 2001). This video was recorded at 15fps and the promotional video was probably recorded on a digital camera from the 90s, as the song is from 1995. Due to the blurred colors it could be that it was recorded on an analogue camera. very likely. The most interesting thing is that I tried to scale it to HD at 60fps using PC programs and the 15fps effect simply doesn't change. The only software I didn't use was TopazVideo due to my PC being limited and I don't have a dedicated video card. But it's incredible I used 4 video conversion and scaling software and the fps rate doesn't change. I managed to trick this by increasing the speed time which apparently disappeared the feeling of video recorded at 15fps. I even uploaded the video on my channel of this version that I supposedly cheated on. ajajaja.

Japanese auction sits are a gold mine of cheap high end VCR, I bought a Victor HR-VFG1 which is the japanese equivalent of a JVC hr-9911U in box with boat shipping for $250 CAN.

On behalf of my laserdisc collection, thanks.

Nice video, with one caveat: Even if you're in North America, home camcorders often used 0 IRE rather than 7.5 IRE, so if you're using 7.5 and the shadows are all black, you probably need to use zero.

another minus for the SoundBeast device (and most other devices I've tried in this class) is that is "de-interlaces" by discarding half the frames. You can see this by stepping frame by frame in the comparison section at around 23:37 (press , or . on the keyboard) and the retrotink maintains 60fps while the Soundbeast only steps every other frame. Thank you for uploading the video in 60fps by the way!

Great Video Bob. I live in Brazil and an important thing to have in mind if you pretend to digitize VHS with brazilian VCR's, you have to use a VCR that has the option to chage from Pal M to NTSC because as far as i tested scalers wont work correctly with PAL-M signals, it will be in black or whit or all wobbly and no good to watch, so for you to properly capture you will need to set your VCR to NTSC, not all VCR's released in brazil have that option, but lots of them will, in same cases you will need the VCR cotroller to change the video region.

Man this was an excellent video. It just kills me the 4K can't do 576i output yet. :C I had to buy an Intensity Pro 4K to use temporarily to get around that and capture raw interlaced. If that day ever comes, I will immediately slap down all $750.00 for one.

I am extremely satisfied with the Retrotink 5X Pro I bought some years ago, it's been delivering on it's promises and I couldn't be happier. The 4K version is bound to be even better and I'm looking forward to see it's capabilities in the future. Perhaps some KZfaq videos got some info on it in great detail, I'll definitely go look for them. Digitalizing analog video seems like a conversion process of VHS tapes to digital media, it would be cooler if it was the other way around to digitalize into analog video. But that's just my take on it. Even better would be if it was possible to simulate a CRT screen using modern hardware and monitors.

I use an original 2x to digitize my grandma’s camcorder tapes. She had a Hi8 camera so dropouts weren’t an issue. I now use my 5x and it’s great.

I've digitized a ton of my VHS tapes, old home videos etc, using Retrotink 5X Pro. Now that I have the Retrotink 4K, I'm almost tempted to go back and try it again. The results were good already.

This came at the perfect ish time. I just used my tink5x yesterday to transfer a recent tape I recorded over the last year. Gonna now watch this and see if there’s any tips I can use for my next tape

I never would have guessed you would plug Reasonably British like that! Such a sad day for Lordsmurf... his already small business for his overpriced overhyped old school digitization equipment must be in jeopardy!

I have been waiiting for this video forever

Oh boy, I can't wait for... _someone's_ reaction to this... 😂

Great timing on this video Bob as I’m hoping to backup some old 8mm and vhs tapes. This was super informative. Looking forward to that upcoming archival vid too!

I took a totally different approach to digitalizing my old VHS. I used a Panasonic DVD Recorder as a passthrough device to take advantage of its TBC elements and capture in my PC with an analog capture device (Diamond VC500). I kept everything in 480i to let the upscaling and deinterlacing to the reproducing device. This way I can always take advantage of better upscaling and deinterlacing algorithms that will come in the future, like AI-based upscaling, for example.

Great stuff! This is extremely useful information for me!

Awesome video, very curious about this for watching and scaling laserdiscs

Absolutely fantastic! Thank you so much for this. Currently using the 5x pro, but just ordered the 4k tink today and this is going to be perfect for setting up my tape transfers. Do you have profile setup for Japanese tapes? I have them as well, in addition to my NA tapes. Thanks again!

Does the time base correction fix field alignment? Like would it straighten out the vertical border in the top right corner of the samples at 26:07? Seems like it does based on how the Tink output looks later on but a side by side would have been nice - geometric distortion is in my experience a more commonly encountered flaw than time desync when transferring VHS.

Great work Bob, looking forward to the upcoming video. We all know modern screens are pretty bad at upscaling for games, but they are kind of built for handling video content. De-interlacing on the fly can be a bit of a mixed bag so I will de-interlace when digitizing but I personally don't see much reason for storing captures in 1080p or 4K when pretty much everything that plays video can upscale SD on the fly just fine and takes up less storage space. Just my opinion, would love to get more info about capturing in 480i or 480p from either the Tink 5X or 4K, or other methods. VHS decode looks very impressive but also a lot more work to set up and much more time to process.

I have one ordered currently. I’m really excited to see how my vhs tapes look… I paid a little for my vhs player it has both component and hdmi first VHS player I’ve ever owned with hdmi out

Excellent work Bob.

Thank you Bob! I always thought that we can use some of these scalers to digitize vhs tapes & DVDs Also thanks for heads up on your Wednesday Update! I finally was able to order a Retrotink 4K

Have some old family videos this may help with. Thank you.

Every video I see on the RT4K makes me want one more. Looking forward to the OLED CRT video you mention. Curious on what you think of filters like that potentially causing burn in.

Great video, thanks. In the clips of the 4K & 5x after 26:30 the 4K clips looked a lot better than the 5x ones to me. Would you say this this typical for these devices, or was there some other reason for the difference in quality in this case?

Perfect timing man

Just subscribed. Truely awesome video. Just to clarify tho. Do both the 4K and the 5X have a TBC or just the 5X?

32:02 inverse telecine works wonders on 25fps PAL film content too. Just wish there was a 25hz de-judder option like there is for 24hz!

I have an S-video VHS DVD all in one machine. I have copied VHS to DVD and it works great. All internal.

Awesome video thanks dude! 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

I have the JVC HR-S7800U with the built-in TBC, but I have a single tape that slants to the left with it off, and has tearing at the top with it on, where one field is good, but the other is wavy. I had to use the Panasonic unit you have there in passthrough to fix it. It's known as a poor man's TBC. It drops some frames here and there though, but at least it doesn't tear anymore. I use a Hauppauge 1800 with AmaRecTV. Virtualdub keeps losing audio sync after 55 minutes or so, but AmaRecTV has been rock solid. I tried using a scaler before, and it did look impressive, but I want it output as 30fps, interlaced, so I can deinterlace and interpolate to 60 in post. All the upscalers are only outputting at 60, not 30. 😥

I use a HDD/DVD-Recorder with scart in (from my vcr) and hdmi out (to my Elgato HD60S). I really would like to buy the Retrotink 4k, but I would use it too rarely for the price and it would collect dust the most time.

Thank you so much for this video Bob! My conundrum is I have a ton of Sony Video8 analog video camera tapes from the 80s-90s that I recorded and my Camera died and finding a working Video8 camera or VTP is pretty impossible. So many of my teenage videos are locked away for me and it's sad.

This is a great video! I wonder how the Tink4K handles color space since SD used the 601 standard and HD/UHD use the 709 color standard. Does the Tink4K correctly convert 601 to 709? Also I noticed Bob using a RGB capture setting rather than YUV? I was curious why since video uses the YUV standard. Lastly, since this is HDMI, how does setting full or partial impact the video levels?

About magnetized tapes, my VCR lost HiFi sound once when I was playing a tape that looked like it had been magnetized by me as a teenager. In the end I tried recording for a few seconds and it started working again. I don't know if the head got magnetized or clogged with magnetic dust from that tape, or something else. The first thing I would do is adjust the tracking, so it wasn't that. Unfortunately I'm not sure anymore if I took the tape out or not, feels like I would have tried that. Anyone know if that's possible, do the heads magnetize and do they automatically demagnetize when you take the tape out or something?

Best setup to digitize Betamax ???

So for someone permanently on a Eurotrip (living in pal territory and using a scart vcr) are there any other settings to consider?

Yaaaaay! Makes me wanna buy a 2nd retrotink lol

Awesome this helped out a ton! I'm getting tired of taking chances with those cheap converters on Amazon. I will look into getting one of the RetroTINKs soon, but are there any specifics that would lead you to recommend one more than the other, like would you recommend the 4K or 5x more? Or is either one just fine? P.S. I'm glad you mentioned Reasonable British, I loved his capture card comparisons too, but I had no idea there were other RetroTINK devices outside of the one he reviewed until I found this video.

Could you make a video tutorial explaining how to configure RetroTINK 4K also for the PAL VHS format of VCRs, please? Thank you

Fantastic video. I feel like there's a niche crowd (based on my random assumption) looking to preserve analog video using a video upscaler/line doubler, and it's great you made such a detailed and informative video for us. I had a general idea of what a TBC does, but this video really helped explained what they do and the results one can expect. I think you've practically convinced me to pick up a Retrotink 5x for my tape conversion. Fortunately my tapes aren't near the level of damage as the one you tested with during the video, so I think other than a small amount of distortion which shouldn't take much away from the conversion, my tapes should be looking great in digital formats. I do have a question. During the 6 way comparison around 7:24, I noticed the RT5x is a bit more washed out than the other captures. Is this due to whatever settings you had the RT5x set to?

Nice! I use a Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle & a separate AVT-8710 time-base corrector. I then upscale in DaVinci. Would be nice to have a single device for all 3 steps.

5:38 - you flip through the Picture Control setting without commenting on what it is or what it does. It controls the noise reduction on JVC decks. - edit = NR OFF - sharp = minimal NR + edge sharpening (causes halos) - soft = heavy NR - auto/norm = standard NR, mostly to remove chroma, some softening may occur (depends on source) The recommendation is either Auto/Norm or Edit -- test with each source to see which looks better. Also, as someone with a bunch of import anime laserdiscs, I wish you hadn't mentioned a different Japanese color standard and then immediately moved on. I had never heard of it. A tutorial on how to compile/install Brovicon would be good, too. A simple interface doesn't mean much if you have no idea how to run it.

Since the pandemic, capturing analog video became the most debated topic on the internet, Probably more than analog vs digital debates.

I would suggest turning the RT4K off completely and back on after upgrading firmware. I've had issues with mine losing one audio channel after upgrading until properly restarted

Ewent’s Video Grabber is surely a good, cheap alternative. I digitized many tapes with this PC external device and the results are very good for me. Yes, there’s no upscaling (i believe) and not all those RT4K features, but it does the job perfectly for me. And no on-the-fly tape watching on the tv, but great for capturing.

I once came across combing artifacts in a PAL movie I recorded from TV (PAL, obviously) in 25p. It was the only time I saw them in a PAL movie. I can't remember now if I got rid of them in full, but I know I used a very CPU-intensive deinterlacer plugin in Virtual Dub in 2003...

Great content

Regarding the comb filter-I’ve been working on an AI upscale model for making NES composite look closer to RGB. It would be interesting to do a comparison.

Hey Bob. In the video, you seemed to somewhat suggest we output to the highest resolution our particular scalers can handle - 1080p for the 5X and 2160p for the 4K. 480 doesn't go evenly into either of those numbers - wouldn't it make sense then to just output and capture at 480p to keep integer scaling?

Great! Any advice on capture cards? I wouldn't need it for anything else than converting a few old VHS tapes. Is one of the very cheap

Have you tried capturing VHS through YPbPr? For some reason this looked so much better to me. My VCR is a DVD combo unit and has component out which also works for VHS and while it looks the same as composite connected to a TV it really makes a difference with the Tink5x. YPbPr is handled by a different part of the system (for lack of a better term) and not by the SDP. It's really strange and I like the look.

As a wild idea, if you copy the video at least 3 times, with different levels of brightness, and use some HDR software on the individual images, I wonder if there is enough info to get an HDR effect? Would be interesting to find out.

When using Black frame insertion on modern OLED displays, which cuts down 50% of motion blur, can you compensate for the 50% OLED BFI brightness loss by using the TINK4K's HDR brightness boosting trick, like you can with the darkening caused by using scanlines? If so, does it have any negative impact on colours? Thanks!

Thanks for making this video! I’ve been messing with RT5X VHS capture for a couple months and have some questions about your recommendations. #1, you say not to use the ‘TBC’ V-Sync option, though Mike Chi’s patch notes for the 3.7 firmware specifically mention this option for VHS capture. Can you clarify why you avoid it? #2, I don’t have a ‘MA Smoothing’ deinterlace option on firmware 3.71 which also seems to be the latest publicly available, but in your video the firmware version is 3.94. Is this option added in 3.94, and is there any information on a public release of this version?

would taping over a second of let's say the the very beginning of the VHS with color bars be an adequate solution to the color correction? or if you don't want to mess with the tape, another tape that HAS color bars? I'm thinking either dubbing it from a VHS tape that has that or somehow dubbing it from an MOV file or a dvd. It's a chaotic DIY idea but it's possible.

What do you think about using AI upscaling on personal videos? Would it be better to capture at a lower resolution and do AI upscaling - since the details don't matter as much for home videos, but improved clarity would be nice?

Great video! RetroTink is awesome. What do you think about going from a VHS composite out to Panasonic DMR-ES15 recorder---S Video out from ES15 to Canopus ADVC-115---Firewire 400 from ADVC 115 to Mac (with adapters). Capture using FCP X or OBS? I heard the ADVC has a built in TBC as well.

Excellent. Another reason to buy this. If you are doing a CRT emulation on the RetroTINK in future it would be interesting to see if it can be used to "enhance" video quality of DVDs in any way. A lot of cartoons, TV-shows and concert videos are released on DVD only. Maybe this can bump the quality a bit?

You are a Godsent! I was just looking for tbc-1000 and ready to drop 1k usd. Question....i need an HDMI capture card, right? I have been using a pinnacle USB 710 but just got 20+ Betamax tapes from my grandmother and need TBC. What do you recommend for capture carD with the retrotink? THANK YOU!

How does it handle Macrovision copy protection? My Laser Disc player only has composite output. I got Toy Story on LD for Christmas and want to play it through my RetroTINK 4K to watch on my 4K TV. If I remember correctly Disney was heavy handed with Macrovision on their VHS tapes so i assume their Laser Discs are no exception.

I tried last year to transfer a load of VHS. Getting a working VHS was hard enough. Then most of the tapes had failed. All from the early mid 90's. Gave up. Ahh well memories eh.

This is amazing. I'll have to re-digitize all my tapes again lol... QUESTION: Would it make sense to use the built-in TBC on my JVC S-VHS VCR, or the Tink 5X's TBC? I'm assuming using both is a bad idea. Thoughts?