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Foxvideo Productions



Having spent the best part of 40 years looking through a viewfinder of a stills or video camera, sitting in front of a computer editing photos or videos, producing websites and managing content and social media accounts for organisations or individuals, it’s a very strange feeling to now say “I’m retired".

Despite no longer taking on commercial paid work, it’s virtually impossible to suddenly stop what you’ve been doing for the best part of your working life so, for the past few years I’ve been taking on work on a ‘pro-bono’ basis for church, charity or voluntary organisations. I hope that my experience, skills and equipment can now be put to good use by those who perhaps, don’t have the budget or funding to produce what they want or need for their media requirements.

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Going 'Old Skool'

written by: Dave Farrants
VHS to Digital setup
I’ve stopped browsing the pro video and audio pages of eBay daily, but I do pop in every other week or so to see what’s around. 2 weeks ago I spotted a Blackmagic Decklink2 PCIe video capture card with a starting price of £10, in it’s day this was a top of the range capture card that sold for around £450+, I won the auction for £19.50.
Decklink2 card

My MacPro was originally a 4.1 running OS X 10.8, I’ve flashed it to a 5.1 and it’s now running OS X 10.14 (Mojave), I was hoping to use the Decklink with it, but none of the drivers seemed to work so I put the card away to one side, after all it only cost me less than £20.

3 days later a friend turned up with 13 3 hour VHS tapes from the late ‘80’s and early 1990’s to digitise. The Decklink card would be idea for this as I could setup a dedicated capture system and leave it running - I just needed a MacPro to run the card.

Looking on Facebook Marketplace I spotted a pair of MacPro’s running 10.8, one was a Dual 2.8, the other a Dual 3.2 - I offered the guy £150 for the pair and was soon on the way to Bristol to collect them.

Back home, they both fired up, I cloned the hard drives to SSD, fitted the Decklink2 card in the Dual 3.2, added a 2Gb drive for the captured video files, and after loading the drivers from Blackmagic, Media Express capture was working with a VHS feed from a VHS deck.

The next day I tried to setup a dedicated capture station, feeding the 30 year old VHS tapes in via composite gave me a badly broken picture with a loss of picture sync, it needed a TBC (time base corrector) to solve the problem. After trying several possible solutions, including an old Panasonic MX50 from the garage, I then tried Y,R,B using a JVC BR-HD50 deck via pass-through, this solved the problem and I’m now on tape 4 of 13, just 9 more to go.
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