Direct FM RF Digtisation!

What is FM RF Digitisation?

By digitising the frequency modulated radio (FM RF) signals stored on analogue video tapes directly, all signal processing can be done digitally in software yielding a much higher quality picture and sound than any other digitisation services on the market you get the fully preserved picture & audio signals, not just a baked as-is file like everyone else.

In layman's terms

The FM RF capture process allows us to create a direct copy of the tape's original untouched information in its original analogue state in a digital file.

This digital file can then with standard FLAC compression take up far less space then uncompressed digital video for cold storage a true future-proofed virutal copy of your tape.

The virtual tape as it were can then at any time be virtually played or decoded from its preserved analogue state to a normal digital video file.

We can do the same process for HiFi audio from most camcorder tapes or TV recordings made on VCRs with NICAM Stereo support.

A real-world Example

A VHS wedding tape with chroma (colour) phase and video level errors at the beginning, both captures were made at the same time on the same VCR.

Instantly you can see lines at the top of the image are made uniform and the image is clear and detailed this is due to the decoder being able to look at each RF sample of each frame of information and make adjustments automatically or manually, ware as the standard video capture has failed requiring re-capture, and more wear on the tape.

Prosumer VCR with Timebase Corrector Faillure

FM RF Capture Decoded with VHS-Decode (2021)

Lossless Time Base Corrected Files

With the introduction of the TBC format (.tbc) consumers and broadcasters finally have a lossless digital 4fsc format for analogue media in Composite or S-Video on file flavros !

Perfect for archival presentation, playback to analouge systems and easily encoded to a wide range of standard video files.

4.2GB/min PAL (2.1GB each for Y luma & C chroma data)

3.4GB/min for NTSC (1.7GB each for Y luma & C chroma data )

Metadata is in a .JSON like VITC Timecode & Closed Captions.

Standard Video Files

With archives conforming to and beyond legacy standards analogue footage can be exported with the active area + VBI producing standard IMX (512/608 height) digital archives compatible with consumer and broadcast archival systems.

We can provide files in the following formats:

V210 10-bit 4:2:2 - Uncompressed (.avi)

FFV1 10-bit 4:2:2 - Lossless Compressed (.mkv)

FFV1 8-bit 4:2:2 - Lossless Compressed (.mkv)

ProRes HQ 10-bit 4:2:2 - Lossy Compressed (.mov)

AVC/HEVC 4:2:0 8-bit 8mbps - Lossy Compressed Proxy/Dailys (.mp4)

Prices:

VHS/SVHS/Video8/Hi8:

£15 per tape - FM RF Archive & FFV1 Reference Capture.
£20 per tape - FM RF Archive & FFV1 Reference Capture & Decoding of the FM RF Video/HiFi.

MiniDV & Digital8: £6 per tape (DV/DVCAM/HDV) (.dv / .m2t & or Indexed .mkv files)

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