Freil Thrift on Piano; from a 30-year old video Using AV2HDMI!

    I've been tearing my shed apart trying to find old recordings of my uncle Freil playing piano.  This VHS tape is over 30 years old, so it's not perfect, but it really means a lot to hear him play again!  I've found several others, but this is exceptional.  Nearly 25 minutes of video with Freil playing, and there are quite a few songs I don't have recorded anywhere else.  The video quality is rough, the tape is stretched, and the VCR's auto-tracking couldn't compensate enough.  But this may be the only surviving copy, and I'm grateful it works at all.

    The search for more recordings is just about over.  I've gone through nearly every box that could possibly hold any more.  Haven't found the Hi-8 tape I was actually hunting... but did turn up some audio cassettes and vhs tapes. Even got my hands on a couple of record albums he played on.  

    This videotape was recorded somewhere between 1990 and 1991.  Maybe on multiple days.  It wasn't made by me, and I have no recollection of how it came to be in my storage.  It's an awesome video.  The quality's not great... probably a copy, but more importantly, the tape is about 33 years old at this time.  VHS wasn't meant to last this long, way back then nobody knew for sure how long it would hold up.  It certainly hasn't been kept in optimal conditions.  Most of those years were in a box in a shed.

    As a result, the quality would be unacceptable, had it not been for the unique and irreplaceable nature of the subject.  For a few weeks, I couldn't even test it out.  The old digitizer (EZCap) that worked years ago no longer works.   The computer identifies it as attached hardware, but I couldn't find any software able to use it.

 

    In a previous post, I mentioned a YouTube guide by Jumble that explained an inexpensive setup to digitize videotape. It involved an RCA to HDMI converter called MINI AV2HDMI, and a small video capture device that converts HDMI to USB.  Everything else I already had, or was available for free (the OBS "Open Broadcast Software".)  OBS is way over my head, but Jumble explained the basic setup in his video.  Once it was all connected, it still didn't work, but a quick Google search fixed that.  Hint - check your windows privacy settings.  I had all related settings for Windows Webcam turned off.  As simply as turning on permissions, and it was recording video.

    Beyond that, the resulting video files had an odd echo effect.  The audio was being mixed back into itself.  I turned off the desktop/mic volume in OBS, and it worked perfectly.  Or, at least as good as the videotape itself was.  Repairing the damage of years was beyond me.

    The result is a fabulous memory of some of my favorites.  I hope you can forgive the inconsistent video quality and enjoy the music!

    IMPORTANT NOTE!!!

OBS worked great... once.  I didn't use it again for a few weeks, and the next time I tried to use it, there was NO AUDIO.  After days of googling, struggling to learn, trying different things, I went looking for other solutions. Here's the step by step process that finally worked: VLC Media Player Transfer to VHS    

 

New Old Sennheiser RS 120 Wireless Headphone

     Got a little off track here, but the most amazing thing happened today, and needed to be shared.  I'm ... sort of... hard of hearing.  Hearing aids are beyond the family budget, so it's a matter doing the best you can with what you've got.  I tell my friends and coworkers, there's a 3-repeat limit.  I'll ask you to repeat something twice.  If it's still just garbled static, I pretend I heard and move on.  Yes, it causes problems, but asking for repeats gets old, and 3 times is my limit.

    With that in mind, I've struggled with my Hammer 88 and the audio volume on Ableton.  If it's  loud enough for me to hear, it pegs way over 0 decibels.  Lot of red zone, overpowers the speakers, sounds like static when I play it back as WAV.  You'll see on older posts, I've gone through a few hoops trying to find work-arounds.  The best solution so far was to play very loud while recording, save it as an Ableton set.  Then swap to a quieter instrument for export.  Usually MiniGrand x64 #16, Loud, then #01 Real Piano, for the softer tones.

    Also, last night I started using normalize when exporting audio.  It seems to do just as good a job, without jumping through the hoops.  That might sound simple, but I bought the M-Audio Hammer 88 just to have a digital piano. I play a song, record it live, and output Midi/Wav to share my music online.  The Hammer came with Ableton Live Lite 10.  That's sort of like asking for a match and getting a doomsday bomb.  Way over my head, and overpowered for my purposes.  So stuff like using normalize when exporting?  I don't know enough to even understand what question to ask, until something triggers an inspiration.  Then it's like Christmas!

    But... it came FREE with the keyboard.  I like free, and was willing to learn as needed to achieve the goal.  The Hammer 88 was about half the price of my broken Yamaha DG-640 Digital Grand.  Loved that Yamaha but it wore out, and repairing it was expensive. With no guarantees it would keep working.  So here I am, with the Hammer, learning how to do things as they come up.  At times I'd whine about "just wanting to play my piano..."  Ignore the whining.  I do the same thing about blogging.  There's a lot to learn about the modern blogging landscape.  (Like "consent cookies...")  At my age, learning isn't as easy as it used to be.

    Anyway - back to the hearing problem.  My old headphones were cheap, but nice enough.  But they're so old, the leatherette is falling off every time I pick them up.  And it doesn't just fall to the floor in pieces.  When I try to pick them up, they crumble into dust that leaves a mark like fireplace soot.  I have another old pair, still in the blister pack.  (Yes, it's another $20 headphone.)  Used them yesterday, and it was okay.  Just as good as the old ones, but without the disintegrating leatherette.  Monique saw me messing with them, and tinkering with ways to increase audio.  She's also seen me get the wires tangled, forget I was wearing them and walk away from the computer, and generally being a klutz.  She also remembered another pair of headphones.

    More than a decade ago, for a birthday gift, I gave her a wireless headphone set.  She liked watching tv while using the treadmill, and had expressed a desire for something wireless to listen on.  In those days, we were ridiculously extravagant, and the credit cards were like our own private printing press.  So I found some that had nice reviews.  Not sure if memory serves, but I THINK they were around $180.  They never worked quite right for her, maybe there was too much interference in that room, but they were put away and forgotten.  Monique found them again recently while doing a major cleanup in our storage room.  (Translation: eBay selling, model-building, upright freezer, and junk room.)

    She brought them out last night, tested them on her computer, then offered them to me.  The advantages were tremendous, but I live a cluttered life.  After years of building my "mission control" area, I couldn't figure out a place to put the base.  Seriously, no place left that wasn't stacked to the max.  I said "No thank you" regretfully.  This morning, I revised some priorities, got rid of a couple of things I don't really use any more, and... "appropriated" the headphones back.

    Here's the exciting part- after recharging them, and fine-tuning the channel, I tentatively played a song on the Hammer.  AND HEARD IT AS CLEAR AS A BELL!  Not only that, but there's a volume control on one side.  It was set somewhere in the middle.  When I cranked it up, it was actually much too loud.  Finally, finally, finally, I can hear what I'm playing, the way it should be heard, and not have to jump through hoops to correct the final output.  

    I also tested a YouTube video, and understood what they were saying... without subtitles!!  This decade-old Sennheiser RS 120 Wireless is not even available on Amazon any more.  They have an upgraded model now, and it's something like half the price I paid for these.  Don't care.  This is beyond amazing.  These are just fine, thank you very much.  Don't need an upgrade.  Did I mention I like FREE?  Maybe it wasn't free, but after so many years forgotten in a box, and "re-finding" it at a time I really needed the boost, it felt like a free gift.

    More than a gift, it was encouragement at a time I've been struggling.  I have a new song I want to record, and after two months of practicing, have only had 3 perfect practices.  None of them on video, of course.  It's been discouraging, to put it mildly. Being able to hear myself play is revitalizing.  It's brought joy back to my playing, and restored my hopes of being able to record this song soon.  

NOTE: I deliberately didn't add links to Amazon. I'm not trying to sell anything here.  You want to look for yourself, you'll have to Google it on your own.  I found mine on Amazon, but am sure you can find hundreds of retailers selling much the same thing.  I just wanted to express my happiness in being able to hear the music while playing.  :^)

Goodbye World Goodbye: Getting VHS Video Transferred to the Computer

    Last night's post was all about the end result.  Getting to play a duet with my uncle, and sharing it with the world.  Today's going to be the "prequel."  The story of how it got from a 2-decade-old videotape, to the state it's in now, and how I hope to get the real video uploaded eventually.

    To begin with... that photo was taken in 1962.  Freil was the youngest of my aunts and uncles, the baby of the family.  I was two at the time.  Mom's always said Nanny (her Mom) didn't get to see me until I was two, because of Dad's Navy career.  Nanny said I was walking already the first time she saw me.  So, just guessing, this photo might have been during that first visit.

    Fast forward to 1996, there was a family reunion.  We have a huge family, reunions were a big thing.  Freil was there, and of course everybody begged him to play.  I got a pretty long video of him playing.  At one point, he tried to 'escape', and asked me to play.  I've never been as good, but what I know, I learned by watching and listening to him.  Instead of letting us switch, someone asked us to play a song together, and Goodbye World Goodbye was the result.  It was one of those perfect moments, where everything goes absolutely right.  

    The rest of the video was mainly reunion events.  Later, I edited the raw footage, using his music as background track for the scenes.  By the early 2000's I'd sold or worn out most of my equipment, including the Hi-8 Camera.  The original tape is (I hope) somewhere in a box in our shed.  About 2016, Mom brought out one of the edited vhs reunion tapes.  It would have been a third-generation copy- raw Hi-8 to SVHS Master Edit, to regular VHS done using a 6-deck setup for small production duplication.  Better than home quality, way below broadcast quality.  And regardless, it's not optimal to have a final product at 3 generations. Back in the days of analog video, each generation lost significant quality.  

EZCap Video Grabber... not as good as it used to be 

  I bought a cheap transfer device from Amazon - EZCap Video Grabber.  It wasn't great, but it got the job done.  I borrowed Mom's VHS tape, and used an old VCR we still had.  It didn't come with software, but provided a link to free software.  It was already old when I ordered it, but with some tinkering and some online guides, I got it to work on Windows 10, on a computer I no longer have.     
    Now, that one video is on a file on my computer.  It's a poor scan, made from a 3rd-generation copied vhs tape. The video quality is not good enough to rescue, and the footage of Freil was mostly edited out anyway.  All I could save was audio of some of his playing, and that was muddied by background crowd noises.  That was the intent way back then... to use his piano playing as background audio for the reunion.  The conversations, the meal, the prayers, the announcements... I never thought it would be used to rescue Freil's music from.

    I'd forgotten the file existed.  Even that computer is gone, but I always save the internal hard drives from my old computers and add them to the new one.  Recently I was trying to make the EZCap work again.  Some programs acknowledged it's existence (VLC), but none of the ones I tried were compatible with it, including the original software.  It was while trying to run the old software, I found that old family reunion video.  Pure luck and coincidence, but I'll take it.  Sometimes you have to work with what you've got.

Serendipity plus hard work

    Even though the quality was bad, the audio was recognizable.  Hoping for an easy solution, I tried loading the file on Audacity, but Audacity can't load video files.  I tried using HitFilm Express (a free video editor) to separate the audio, but couldn't find an option to save the audio without the video.  There's a lot of results when you google the question, but I wound up using VLC, a free video player with a lot of options.  THIS SITE has a slightly outdated guide, but it was close enough to get me there.
    By the way, Audacity is free too... and a fantastic audio editor.

    With a 33-minute mp3 audio file, I used Audacity to convert it to a WAV file.  WAV is uncompressed, and will always play the audio at a consistent bitrate.  Mp3 is compressed, making it hard to match video clips with perfect timing.  When the whole video is just a single photo it doesn't really matter, but old habits die hard.
    From the Wav file, I edited it down to "Goodbye World Goodbye", equalized the audio trying to highlight the piano and de-emphasize the crowd noises, and exported it as a 32-bit Wav.

    Then back to HitFilm.  Create a project, import the Wav file, drag it into the timeline.  Import the photo, drag into the timeline, stretch the photo duration until it's equal to the audio track.  (It will snap in place when it gets close enough to the audio duration.)  Export the video to hard drive, upload to Youtube, and done.

    I'm still searching for the original raw footage of Freil playing on Hi-8 tape.  Once it's found, I'll have to obtain a Hi-8 player.  My plan is to buy an old one for $200-$250 from eBay, use it for any Hi-8 tapes I have (Not just Freil's, but any I may still find in all those old boxes.)  Then re-sell it on eBay.  It may not break even but at least I won't be out a couple of hundred dollars!

EZCap is outdated, but there's a better way to transfer video to computer

    Though I was able to transfer video using EZCap in the past, I can't recommend it.  It was a pain to get working all those years ago, and now it's not working for me at all.
    The best way I've found to transfer that footage into computer (meaning "effective, yet cheap") costs about $50 from things easily found on Amazon, plus some free software, all of it compatible with an ordinary computer running current Windows.  You'll notice I'm fond of free.  In this case, the list of items, along with a video explaining how to do it, was created by a YouTuber named "JUMBLE."

    There's not much sense in me duplicating his work.  And I don't want to divert his Amazon links for the items you'll need, that's very likely a source of income for him.  So, go watch his short, interesting, and truly informative video, "VCR to Computer - How to connect, watch and record old VHS tapes."  It's well worth the few minutes.  He doesn't add "fluff" to his videos.  It's all solid info.  He provides links to all the hardware, making it very easy to follow his instructions.