VHS in 2023

I thought it was important for my most recent video "Carla Copface" to have an authentic VHS look. I've tried various filters before and did not particularly like them, they all felt vaguely "retro" but didn't do a great job actually mimicking the specific qualities of the format.

So, I decided to create my own VHS transfer setup, because there's nothing more authentic than the real thing. In case anyone out there is interested in achieving the same effect, here's how I did it!

To begin, the video itself was created with a 4:3 aspect ratio, then stretched to 16:9 when exporting (this stretching is required to counteract similar but opposite stretching that occurs later.) The video was then played on my laptop, through a virtual second monitor via the laptop's HDMI port. Connected to that HDMI port is an "HDMI to AV" converter I got for $13 on Amazon. This converter takes the 16:9 video and audio from the computer and outputs it as 4:3 composite video and audio over yellow white & red RCA cables.

Those RCA cables plug into the back of my Toshiba DVR620, which is a combination VCR / DVD player. I picked this specific player because it's one of the last VCRs manufactured (the back of mine says it was manufactured in 2013!) This means the VCR recording and playback heads aren't too old, and as a bonus it's one of the few VCRs that has HDMI output.

I tried a number of VHS tapes, looking for one that would give me the best possible picture with the least unwanted artifacts. Intense VHS degradation could be an interesting choice for another project, but for Carla Copface any significant tracking issues or distortion would interfere with the joke timing.

In the end, the best video came from my Sony MQST-120 SVHS tapes. SVHS was a later, higher-quality magnetic tape format. My VCR is not an SVHS player, but SVHS tapes can be used as regular VHS tapes and the quality of the tape itself tends to be higher. Interestingly, the tapes with the worst performance in terms of video quality tended to have the fewest audio issues, so for the final export of Carla Copface I combined video and audio from different tapes.

After the video was recorded to tape, the HDMI output of the Toshiba DVR620 made capturing that tape simple. I ran the HDMI to an Elgato HD60 X (with an HDCP stripper in between to bypass the Toshiba's HDMI copy protection), and captured the Elgato HD60 X footage with OBS. The OBS capture isn't perfect, as OBS tends to drop occasional frames, but the source material was 15fps, the captured footage was 60fps, and the final output was 30fps, so the drops weren't a particularly pressing issue. In the future, or for other projects, I will definitely be looking into alternatives for capture.

One final thing to mention about all this: visual and sound design. VHS is 352x240 resolution, and even those meager pixels tend to bleed into each-other. All of the art needed to be created with that in mind - bold contrast and clear shapes work better than subtle shading and fine details. As for sound, the captured audio from my VCR tops out around 12khz (the Toshiba supports Hi-Fi audio but does not seem to record in it), so I needed to mix with that limitation in mind. I also used a number of sound effects from 90s libraries, as more modern recordings would sound out of place.

That's my setup! If you have any questions let me know, I'll be happy to answer them. I think there's a special quality to VHS that makes it an interesting choice for certain projects. I've seen it used recently for horror and surrealism due to its spooky fuzziness, but I think it can also be used to add grounding to low-budget comedies. Cut-outs of cartoon characters bouncing around can feel larger at 352x240 on physical magnetic tape than they do in crystal-clear digital 4K.