Repair a Sony TRV240E Digital8 camcorder for video capture

[@alphabeets]

It’s so great to recover a unit and get it working again. Nice work as always.

[@ConsumerDV]

This is a very timely video, as I need to repair the pinch roller on my Digital8 camcorder. At 6:40 you borrowed the pinch roller from another camcorder, how did you do that? Did you squeeze and pull the plastic locknut, and then the roller fell off? Or did you put something under the roller and slide BOTH the roller and the plastic locknut off the spindle? Did it slide off easily? I tend to break anything I try to mend, so I want as little intrusion as possible.

[@video99couk]

I put a medium flat bladed screwdriver at the bottom of the pinch roller against its bracket, then rotated that to ease the pinch roller off. Then I dropped the pinch roller and it's plastic top piece in the camcorder and had to fish them out!

[@Televid4]

Head tips on the Grundig V2000 should still be okay. I remember a 2x4 machine that had once come in for repair to me along time ago that had been worked on by somebody else who had removed the screws from the head disc thinking that the head comes off from the top. After installing the screws back into the right mounts the machine started to display a wobbly out of sync type of picture (not a clogged head symptom) which confused me into thinking there maybe issues on the Video board. So I took off the head once again and cleaned the tips and installed it back in to the machine. After this repair, the machine worked fine with a really good picture. I think on some V2000s the head tips just remain mounted permanently regardless of whether you remove the screws or not. Best of Luck, Colin...

[@video99couk]

I hope we're lucky on that one.

[@ConsumerDV]

Prerecorded 8-mm tapes had PCM digital audio as well as mono AFM. I cannot comprehend what Sony and other 8-mm developers were smoking when they adopted mono AFM for 8-mm. This has been fixed by Canon, who released the first Hi-Fi Stereo AFM camcorder in 1989. But prerecorded tapes kept Digital PCM I believe.

[@videocaptureguide]

17:45 I agree that if you're playing a Hi8 tape in a Digital8 camcorder, you might as well output to firewire (DV25 format). Because, as you said, the D8 camcorder is digitizing the video internally even before outputting via S-Video output. So, the S-Video (SD capture) will suffer from the DV25 conversion along the way, even if you do SD capture. I did a test to confirm this with a Digital8 camcorder and a Hi8 camcorder outputting the same footage via S-Video.

[@FlipvanSchalkwyk-e8z]

The built in digitisers on those camcorders by far outperform any third party digitisers. Get brilliant results when capturing 8 or hi8 tapes when using the firewire output.

[@videocaptureguide]

@@FlipvanSchalkwyk-e8z I have a Sony MiniDV camcorder and a Sony Digital8 camcorder. I agree that the results are very good, but they use the lossy DV25 and there is some pixelation if you zoom in especially with movement. There are a lot of cheap/bad SD capture devices on Amazon and I would pick the MiniDV or Digital8 over those. But when compared to a very good SD capture device, it's very close, but I would use the (very good) SD capture device.

[@FlipvanSchalkwyk-e8z]

@@videocaptureguide You can use handbrake to make use of both fields per frame...that gets rid of the pixelation as well as the "teething" effect during movement... I still use Adobe Premiere 6.5 for capturing and get better results than most of the modern capturing software

[@Encelados90]

Well, that's the old "War of opinion" that's been going on for decades: which is the better format for digitisation - DV-AVI, which is considerably compressed or capturing RAW/lossless and only compress after editing and all the necessary enhancements are done in postproduction... I have both a Sony TRV730E Digital8 camcorder as well as a Sony EV-S9000E Hi8 deck with an internal Time Base Corrector and tons of other enhancement features and have been spending a considerable time testing those two methods. While the DV-AVI route is convenient and foolproof, the lossless-capture route entails a lot more adjusting and controlling. It's also essential to use high-quality components to capture analogue from the S-Video output of the EV-S9000E deck. I have found that the image of the EV-S9000E deck (using the uncompressed route) was SOMETIMES slightly sharper and brighter in saturation/hue than the DV-AVI compressed one. But not in all instances. Whether this is due to the deck itself (EV-S9000E vs. the TRV730E), I cannot tell. I guess it depends on the condition of the tape as well. However, I feel that if you're going to capture analogue material, there should be as little interference to the data stream as possible so that you'll get the full range of possibilites for postproduction. I wouldn't mind capturing raw/lossless for archival purposes, then use these master files for postproduction/editing/enhancement and in the end you can still output as a DV-AVI or MP4 or whatever file you want.

[@mostlyfinnishlifeeventsand5112]

@@Encelados90 "The built in digitisers on those camcorders by far outperform any third party digitisers. Get brilliant results when capturing 8 or hi8 tapes when using the firewire output." - I wouldn't be SO sure. A decent external digitizer with high framedrop tolerance can fare MUCH better than the digitizer in the Sony. There are few cassettes requiring this (I only ran into one - a Hi8 LP); there, there was MASSIVE audio drift when used my TRV-355's direct FW output. When outputting from the same camera to a Canopus 110, there was absolutely no drift.

[@Capturing-Memories]

VCRs and camcorder have a clever design of the pinch roller where a narrow neck is made in the center of a larger shaft hole, that neck is made with the right clearance with the pinch roller shaft which allows it to swivel while riding on it to make it adhere to the capstan shaft perfectly in parallel without any prior alignment to the pinch roller shaft, I've only seen this design once before on the RCA audio cartridge player.

[@FlipvanSchalkwyk-e8z]

Most of the home videos the audio is mostly of kids laughing and people having "loud" fun...so to have PCM stereo sound...what the heck. As for the overscan...on 4x3 footage shown on a wide screen tv...the black bars on the sides is almost invisible. The 'noise' at the bottom...actually certain lines represent data for stuff professionals can add for broadcast purposes...does not really worry people nowadays...mostly they prefer the "retro" look...something from way back when we were still kids 😁 Cropping out the overscan and top and bottom noise is rather time consuming...for rendering a lossless 1 hour video to mp4 takes more than twice the amount of time. But this is still the best hobby a pensioner can have 😃

[@Capturing-Memories]

Some may argue that DV has compression artifacts, therefore analog out from S-Video will be superior regardless the availability of TBC or not. I personally had PAL VHS-C tapes captured using the Edirol VMC-1 into DV and recaptured them using analog lossless AVI and I've seen a huge difference, Albeit VCRs were not the same.

[@video99couk]

Though do bear in mind that DV's chroma compression is lower on PAL than NTSC.

[@mostlyfinnishlifeeventsand5112]

@ definitely. DV is acceptable for PAL while pretty bad for NTSC as an intermediate (capture) format.

[@Capturing-Memories]

@@video99couk Yes I’m aware that DV PAL is 4:2:0 not 4:1:1. Though PAL has 1/4 the chroma resolution vertically and NTSC has 1/2 chroma resolution vertically of total scan lines. But that wasn’t my point, my tapes were PAL.

[@rennostirenny]

Great video, again, thnx. I have a Sony DCR-TRV120 and I'm wondering, if I do analog capture through it, will it benefit the built-in TBC (don't remember, if it even had that)?

[@video99couk]

Yes it will use the TBC. But if you have a Firewire output already, I would just use it.

[@elmofeneken4364]

Very informative on the Digital 8 Sony. Very helpful on my Sony. I've got to add you to my list of other repair persons, You Tube icons like 12 Volt Vids, Mr. Carlson's Lab etc. What's that music, "Let It Run" you play as your video theme music? Can't seem to locate it here in the states. I'll be watching more now that I found you.

[@video99couk]

"Let It Run" was on a Betamax PCM digital audio tape which I had run to audio files for a customer. We came to an arrangement and he let me have that segment for my KZbin channel. It's an unreleased recording, and so unique to my channel.

[@FlipvanSchalkwyk-e8z]

These models are easy to disassemble...a head drum replacement you can do in about 45 minutes...these head drums are prone to damage very easily. Used heads from dig only camcorders to repair these multy format camcoders.

[@video99couk]

I always wondered if you could use D8-only heads on an analogue capable player. I don't find them very easy to disassemble myself.

[@FlipvanSchalkwyk-e8z]

Yes you can...but there are 2 types of head drums used on both type of camcorders...the narrow ribbon cable from the head drum on the one type goes to the left and the other to the right. If the ribbon cables are in the same direction...it does work.

[@tremorist]

Digital8 was aimed at Hi8 users to allow for a soft transition to digital recording. For S-VHS-C users it did not make much sense to upgrade to Digital8, MiniDV was the way.

[@Capturing-Memories]

I switched the audio language to French and you sounded hilarious, Is this something done by YT or you added the audio tracks yourself?

[@video99couk]

Must be a KZbin thing.

[@TTVEaGMXde]

In Germany it sounds more like teleshopping. How the idiots at YT even came up with the idea of ​​translating when Google Translate doesn't work is a mystery to me.

[@lorenzo.c]

Would it make any difference using a deck like the Sony GV-D200E (Video8, Hi8, Digital8, no camera) instead of an HandyCam like the TRV240E? How do they compare? With regard to the noise/distortion along the edges of the frame: any recommendation on which sequence of deinterlacing, cropping leads to the best results? My guess is deinterlace then cropping. PS: I installed Windows Movie Maker 6.0 in a Windows 10 machine to import the video over firewire.

[@video99couk]

Decks like the GV-D200E are essentially camcorders without the CCD and optics. The results will be identical. I usually provide DV-AVI files still interlaced and leave editing to the customer. But MPEG4 files are de-interlaced by Freemake Video Converter (paid version) which does a lovely job.

[@mostlyfinnishlifeeventsand5112]

BTW, WinDV is lightweight (no install needed, a very small self-standing EXE file) and works absolutely great. I use it for grabbing from my Canopus 110 and TRV 355E all the time in a Windows 11 24H2 partition of my 2012 15" Unibody Macbook Pro. (I don't grab from under MacOS as, then, the Canopus + FCPX combo for some reason starts brand new clip upon encountering dropped frames; this causes missing frames, unlike when capturing in Windows with WinDV using exactly the same setup.)

[@lorenzo.c]

@@video99couk Thanks. I looked for free deinterlacing options and went for Avisynth and QTGMC, a completely 64-bit workflow. Results seems fine but I haven't compared with other methods. I edit the lossless H265 files from the de-interlacing step. Note: installing every needed piece of software was a pain and Andrew Swan's blog (and video tutorial) was a lifesaver.

[@lorenzo.c]

@@mostlyfinnishlifeeventsand5112 Thanks. I'll have a go at WinDV with the next batch of tapes. WMM 6.0 did not stop me from importing but has an horrible interface and reports an update error (to be clicked away) every time it's launched 😖

[@lorenzo.c]

On a related topic... does an ancient Sony CCD-V100E have any use nowadays? Is it just for... collectors?

[@Encelados90]

Can you maybe find some time to test whether capturing via DV-AVI and lossless (S-Video-out -> high quality digitization components) might make a visible and technically measurable difference?

[@video99couk]

There's no such thing as lossless capture from an analogue source.

[@Encelados90]

@video99couk By "lossless" I was referring to the encoding methods. You can capture in a lossless format, which will save the data stream as it is fed into the digitizer by the analogue source. Basically, you're replacing the internal D8 digitizer with an external one and saving that stream directly instead of compressing it with a lossy DV codec... Also, let's not forget about 4:1:1 NTSC DV. I highly doubt that this could in any way outperform a thoroughly done quality lossless analogue capture.

[@mostlyfinnishlifeeventsand5112]

@ "There's no such thing as lossless capture from an analogue source." - the 4:1:1 color resolution of NTSC DV is pretty big an issue; this is why for example Lordsmurf doesn't at all recommend NTSC DV at all (unlike PAL).

[@frankowalker4662]

With any luck, the head tips have glued themselves in place. (here's hoping)

[@video99couk]

Thanks for watching to end!

[@frankowalker4662]

@@video99couk I always watch the end bit. You never know what you might learn. 👍