Can any of the new "soap" features in latest ATI MMC perform any time base correction?? This is used to steady the jumpy video signal from old VHS tapes.

All I can get Video Soap to do is Clean up the Noise in the Image, Like from Bad TV Broadacsts and Artifacts from Old VHS Tapes,and I"m Pretty sure that a Time Based Corrector has Little to Do with the Quality of the Video signal comeing from a VCR, My understanding of a Time Based Corrector is to Make sure that the Video and audio are Playing on the Same Time clock , When VHS Tapes get old the Tape gets stretched which Makes the Movie play slower than it should and can Play at different speeds at different parts of the Movie, and a Time Based corrector is supposed to Fix this..I think some High Quality S-VHS Players have this Feature built in...I think what you Might be looking for would be something like a Video Stableizer, they Boost and Clean Up the signal of whatever is Being Run through it, They are also good at Defeating Macrovision..I used to Have one For Makeing VHS to VHS Copies of Movies and they really helped clean up the Signal....

Hi, I just did a Bit of checking and Time based Correctors Do what you say they do and they do what I say they do, They are very cool gadgets for Stableizeing and Cleaning up a Signal and Keeping the Audio and Video in sync and on a constant Time clock, I have seen them from $200 to over $1500, But I don"t think the Video soap does what a TBC Can do accept clean up Noise...Cheers

Ati Soap cannot do anything related to timebase correction. TBC work before the capturing step. I have a timebase corrector and sometime it helps... but sometimes the result is worse than the original.
Timebase correctors are known by home users mostly for Macrovision removal (if the device itself is not... biased).

Brambus

TBC's are actually geared towards tape based machines. The first ones were built for the big old 1" reel to reel machines and they were built to compensate for mechanical differences between individual machines. Before that, if a tape was recorded on one machine it had to be played on the same machine, then after that they started shipping the tapes with the same head (entire drum) that was used to record it (too hard to correct dyhedral error with a drum that big). They also reinsert sync and allow you to adjust your deck for editing, (H-sync, chroma, SCH phase, Y/C dlay, etc.) It is also necessary if you are doing analog A/B editing. This is where the macrovision protection comes in, bad sync pulse, it just reinserts a new one. I think that what you are talking about is actually more of a frame sync. Now that is a nice piece of equipment.

A TBC is pretty much just a video buffer, it takes the video in at the rate the deck plays it at (close to 29.97 fps) then it just feeds it to the output at a very steady 29.97 fps, thus correcting mechanical errors and the time base. If it is a good one, it can also do drop out compensation and it can also take a reference signal and lock up to that. There is lot that it can do, but if the video is too jumpy and is basically garbage it is going to have trouble, especially an external one. An internal TBC has some feedback circuits to adjust the servos for tape speed, head drum phase and head switching. If it is external, it is really limited to what it can compensate.

Can you tell I am bored yet?

As for videosoap, I haven't gotten to try it yet, just built my new machine last night and got MMC 8.5 installed on it. Seems like it is geared towards cleaning the video before it hits the encoder. Makes sense, all of those little pixels with noise going to an MPEG encoder will be interpreted as difference information or motion. Less bits are available for the "true" video information so not only is the noise there in your cature, the rest of the picture is going to suffer since there are less bytes for the frame. Could be really good for off-air cature or old noisey tapes. I like the idea alot.

Actually I am wrong, it is not framerate, it is line rate (@ 15750Hz) and usually has a buffer saving the previous line to insert if there is drop out detected. It has been a few years since I really worked on a VTR. Which is why I am here all the time, everything is nonlinear and I got to learn somewhere