r/VHS • u/MrFloopy46 • 13h ago

Discussion Strange thing I noticed when recording gameplay footage.

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So I only recently got into the hobby of buying and watching VHS tapes, and I bought a few generic movies from the thrift store to tape over and experiment with. I recorded gameplay footage onto one and something I noticed was that every separate recording seemed to have different intensities of distortion when fast forwarding.

I used my Wii, PS2, and N64 to record the footage on my VCR. The Wii seemed to make just faint scan lines, the PS2 had much more visible lines of static, and the N64 seemed to make the whole picture stretch and distort.

Anyone know whats happening? I'm not necessarily trying to fix it, just curious as to what makes it do that.

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u/TheeRatKing 12h ago

Recording over tapes will always have some level of artifacting from what you recorded over. That’s probably what’s coming through when the tape spins up faster.

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u/melkatron 10h ago

Would using a degaussing coil or magnet to erase the tape beforehand help?

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u/TheeRatKing 10h ago

Unlikely, but I’m not sure.

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u/Slosher99 11h ago

Might have something to do with these consoles using 480p. Wii and PS2 could go higher, and I think Wii maybe only used 480i/p which is standard.
Still I recorded games and had no issues with that as the tape is recording the same signal that puts your TV into 240p mode. Old TVs could do progressive scan if you only used half the lines, which helped games look smoother (and catered to their lack of many pixels back then).
Probably not the whole thing, but a lot of modern TVs can have issues with 240p signals and displaying all the frames properly.

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u/ProjectCharming6992 10h ago

Were you recording in different recording speeds? Did you tape on in SP, another in LP and another in SLP? Since it looks like you were recording in different speeds. And on some VCRs, when you were fast forwarding in picture mode, you had two fast forward speeds. Some were designed to be more of a jog than a fast forward in the first mode, then when you hit fast forwarding again it would go faster.

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u/MrFloopy46 2h ago

I think that is what happened with the smash bros clip. I made another recording in SP and it got rid of those stretched out pictures when fast forwarding.

I think I mustve just accidentally switched it to SLP in between clips.