The PAL Video Toolchain Episode

0:00Another format joins the rest of the pack as something that I can digitize. In this case, it's PAL video, PAL VHS tapes. This one, no this one took forever because it turns out there are so many little moving pieces in making it work. But as I'm watching video from New Zealand get digitized, well maybe it was worth it. This is Jason Scott talks his way out of it, a podcast about technology, history, and getting myself out of debt. Thanks to Jeff Atwood, Chris Higgins, and the hundreds of other supporters on Patreon and elsewhere who have been supporting me and helping me get out of debt. Let's start with the basics. PAL is the video format used by screens and televisions in every other part of the world

1:00except for North America, Japan, and a few other selected areas. PAL is in many ways the majority of how video is transported. Yet NTSC is the format that most of what I work with comes in. So when people donate PAL to me, I had to set it aside. I didn't have any of the equipment. Being able to handle PAL like a handle NTSC video turned out to be layers upon layers of configuration testing NDB. You see first of all, you need a VCR that can read PAL. You usually have to acquire those from other countries. It means shipping them in. It also means doing all sorts of fees and verifications that what you are getting is what you are asking for.

2:02The nightmare scenario of buying a pretty good deck only to find out that it's an NTSC deck that they imported years ago is pretty high. Weirdly, a lot of decks and components don't tell you that they are PAL only NTSC only or either. So eventually I got my hands on a PAL VHS deck. But that deck puts out a signal that has to go to my Blackmagic ingestion card, which you can read. But then I run into another problem. That problem being, well, you can't just put a raw signal out of a VHS deck of an older tape and have it run. If you do that, it will slowly, very slowly, desynchronize until an hour or two in, there could be many seconds between when somebody says something on the video and you hear it

3:05or the other way around. Because without a time-based corrector, you don't know if the video is going to stay synchronized. So I needed a time-based corrector. There's an entire worthwhile debate in which components you should get to do what. And there's always a deal of having to work with cost versus opportunity versus how much you're going to use it. I have PAL tapes, I have dozens of PAL tapes, but I do not have hundreds of PAL tapes. I have enough. I have enough that they were taking up my office and I knew what they were, but I couldn't work with them. So I use a DVD player that has a built-in time-based corrector as the go-between from the deck to the ingestion card. Putting my hands on a dependable Panasonic DVD recorder that had a time-based corrector

4:05that could speak PAL, well that took months. But I did ultimately get my hands on one. Once you begin the process of wiring it up, you get Component Audio out of the deck, S Video out of the deck, put it into the DVD player, pull it out of the DVD player, and then go into the ingestion card. You have to configure the DVD player to not shut off after four hours, a convenience that worked out really nice 10 or 20 years ago, but which I don't need. And you also have to look at the video, play the video, make sure it's not getting discolored or out of sync, test it, compress it, and figure out how you're going to record it. For whatever reason, I ran into problems using Virtual Dub, which is the program I usually use. But Blackmagic has its own Media Ingestion program, which I used and produced a one-hour video

5:11that was a little bit large, but worked. You can imagine, after months of trying to figure out which component I would get from somewhere, and which sort of tests I would do, to finally have functioning video, sitting as an AVI file, on my Windows box, ready for its next steps, it was exhilarating. The videos themselves are about satellite television and about travel in New Zealand. They are collections of instructions and conferences, video magazines. Most of them related to either ham radio, satellite radio, or travel. In some cases, they're simply satellite television recorded as a demonstration of what a satellite system could do. It looks very nice. I pulled it in and created the files, but they're huge.

6:12I mean really huge. I was already rocking at 18 or 19 GB an hour, but these are running at 76 GB an hour. So the next step is to figure out, recompressing them. But recompressing a PAL video means you better make your Virtual Dub be configured for PAL video, or it's going to turn it all into NTSC video. And this is where years have taught me something. And maybe this is the lesson. Every one of these steps is meaningful. Every one of them has a potential to go very wrong. Once you get excited about having your chain work, you begin pushing things down that chain. But any mistake you make, any misconfiguration, any forgotten setting that you need to add, it gets multiplied each time you do a title until you have 15 tapes saved and every one of

7:20them has a fatal flaw. So I've been doing what I think I should have done when I was younger, which is paste the process out. Today I got the audio working, a tested compression, a tested remixing. But tomorrow I'll do it all again. I'll make sure each step works. And when I have it set the way it should be, I'll save them as a clearly marked set of configurations. And I'll note to myself what I did to get here. Again, this isn't a lot of video, but it's unique. It traveled across the world to get here in boxes that were shipped over the ocean. And those tapes should get the amount of respect that I can give them in the present day. Meanwhile my other machines are all doing work.

8:20Things are getting accomplished. I don't feel like I'm in a quagmire about this. I just feel the next step is happening. There's something about this that's very different from the rash aspects of my youth, where I would do processes like this and not hit as many steps. Are there more steps to hit? Other better ways to do it? Possibly. I keep the originals. I never throw anything away and I don't destroy this media in the process of digitizing it. Now, I put it together. I make AVI files. I manipulate them. I come up with a process. And then that process just works. In another window on the same machine, I've been digitizing cassette fronts, putting them into a scanner, scanning them, running an automatic cropper and straightener on them,

9:23and then saving out those straightened cropped tips. In a way that makes them look pretty good, look pretty fun. They go with the original audio tapes they were part of, and then they also get cropped. And then I also put them on a flicker account. To enjoy all of the different ways that cassette tapes looked. It's joyful to me to have all of this media passing through my hands as I do my work, knowing that for some people there will be one thing, one piece of media that will be revelatory for them. Today was a good day. Today I started the process of having pal video and a set of tapes that traveled so far in so many hands become digital. I'd rather celebrate where we are than be dismayed at how long it took.

10:30Everything takes time. Everything has a reason for taking time. And as these digital ambassadors of the Pacific Rim come to the world, I'm glad to have played a part in escorting them there. This is Jason Scott talks his way out of it. Thanks to James Baycoiano, Ernie Hershey, Michael Rubin, David Fisher, Sean Kelly, Sembiats, Benjamin Guts, Trexie the Cat, and Anonymous, along with the hundreds of other supports on Patreon and elsewhere who have been supporting me and helping me get out of debt. Speaking of process, my friend Kyle said to me, it's quite a flex that your Patreon only allows people to join up at $25 in an episode. And I said, what? Turns out that if you've been podcasting for eight years on Patreon, over time, some

11:36of the reconfigurations, some of the remakes of how the whole thing works, made it drop tears, made it drop options for contributing to this Patreon. Weird, huh? So it turned out that there was an entire bunch of years where people were joined up. You'd use it, but new people might have trouble figuring out how to become members. That just got fixed. A few people joined as soon as I fixed it. Sometimes finding opportunity is just a matter of checking the process, checking base premises and testing. Just like pal video.