Re: no color in capture

dadiOH wrote:
Ken Maltby wrote:
"John Williamson" <johnwilliamson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:780n9bF1jugnuU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
dadiOH wrote:
I have need of digitizing a couple of VHS tapes and to that end I
bought and
installed an inexpensive Hauppage Impact VCB capture card.

I have no problem getting and recording a signal from the tape
player, the
problem is that it is in black & white. The tapes play in color on
a TV. The Hauppage software does have an area for setting color
characteristics -
brightness, contrast, saturation, etc. - and they do change the
contrast and
brightness but nothing has any effect on the lack of color.


Can anyone suggest a solution? Info re cause would be nice too :)


The first thing I'd check is that the playback and capture devices
are set to the same colour standard. Capturing a PAL signal using
NTSC settings or vice versa will give exactly the symptoms you
describe. The manual will tell you how.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.
Another common cause for loss of color is a poor s-video/
Y/C connection. Either a bad cable or just loose fittings.

Luck;
Ken

Thanks for your reply. After some reading, I am reasonably sure the problem lies in the cableing. And my general lack of knowledge. May I impose on you and ask how I should hook stuff up?

The VCR has three female RCA jacks: 1-video (yellow) and 2- audio (red and white).

The capture card has an s-video jack and an accessory cable with s-video on one end and 3-female RCA jacks on the other. The jacks are red, green and blue.

The capture card also has 3-female RCA jacks for composite input. All are yellow, none are labled. There is no audio input; presumably, I'll have to run the VCR audio outputs to the computer line in jack and record them separately?

The close to worthless "manual" doesn't indicate what hooks to what on the pigtail -s-video or on the 3 composite input jacks.

Any help/info/elaboration you can offer will be much appreciated.

If you're trying to use the S-VHS adaptor cable with the yellow output socket, that's your problem. The S-VHS adaptor is only for use with component video, and the standard for the yellow socket is to output composite video. If the VCR has a SCART socket on it, it *may* be possible to connect the S-VHS lead to a SCART adaptor, but not many VCRs have component video available at this point. If your VCR has a S-VHS output, then just connect the S-VHS sockets together using the appropriate lead.

Connect any good quality RCA-RCA lead to any of the yellow sockets on the card and to the yellow socket on the player, and the convention is that on the audio connection, red is the right hand channel. Again, you'll either be using RCA inputs on your sound card, or a stereo minijack, in which case you'll need a cable with 2xRCA plugs on one end and a stereo minijack on the other.

If you're getting video of any sort at this point, and sound, this part is wired correctly.

The website says that all the yellow jacks on the card are inputs for composite video, which is what comes out of the VCR yellow socket, so you can use any of them.

The Card is capable of capturing both NTSC and PAL, but needs to be told which to look for by using the driver software, it won't do it automatically. Depending on where your card came from, the input is set to either NTSC or PAL as standard, and cards bought on e-bay are usually set up for NTSC by default on first installation.

To summarise, connect yellow to yellow, red to red, white to white (Or, rarely, white to black). Ignore the red, blue and green unless you've got a S-VHS recorder.


Hope this helps.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.
.

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