Saving Ricky 1 - A Deep Dive into VHS Preservation 

I'm actually the one who originally ripped Ricky 1 onto the internet years ago. The upload at 2:48 is actually my rip but it's a reupload. I originally uploaded the movie in several parts because it was early RU-vid and I was incredibly stupid. Internet Archive also wasn't a big thing. I wanted to figure out how torrenting works so I could put the entire movie online in one part but I was just 13 and got scared at the idea of doing so. My uploads were originally in 480p so I guess the quality degraded because of whatever RU-vid converter this guy used. I'm happy to see this movie finally online in the best possible quality, I always felt bad the only way to watch this movie was my bad quality PAL VHS rip, haha.

This is the first time that youtube actually recommends a good video with very low views. Seriously, you deserve more views for preserving this relatively obscure movie

I think this is one of the first youtube videos explaining vhs-decode based vhs ripping.

This video does to comedy what Ricky 1 does to low-quality VHS preservation.

Gotta find the original camera negative to scan next.

Thank you for your preservation effort. Now Ricky fans can catch up with the whole series before Ricky 2 drops January 2025

4:55 Placing Ricky 1 on top of the bible tells you how much of a super fan cadbrad is

I wanna say: I’m Puertorican and I happen to have a copy of what is easily one of the most beloved Puertorican movies of all time, and only made available on VHS (which I happen to own a copy in perfect condition). I’ve wanted to restore and preserve this movie because it means so much to me as a Puertorican and it’s one I wanna keep alive for generations. Thanks to your I now know the tools and methods I need to make my dream restoration job a reality. 😊

20 minutes of hardcore analogue video autism with Bug Fables music in the background. Thank you so much, also thanks for Ricky 1

Love this energy. As the slow death of the 3D Blu-ray format progresses, I've been trying to locate and dump all the commercially-pressed discs and sync up english subs/audio to enable international viewing. It's great to know people are preserving VHS

I friggin adore this video dude. Well done!

Thank God there's no Ricky 2

i love ricky 1, i would give anything to see a copy of it in real life

It's quite amusing that people on the internet are so far ahead of conventional archivists in implementing these technologies. I'm going to conduct some tests and present this to my colleagues. Thank you for your video.

Actually interesting VHS preservation advice, thanks.

As a VHS collector, I own Ricky 1 and love it very much, thanks to the AVGN lol. Definitely would have never heard of it otherwise!

Very good video! I found it interesting how you talked about preserving your family tapes. I think that's a point of preservation/lost media that people don't usually think about. I think it's important and I did it recently. The way I view it is that it's important because these tapes give insight on how regular everyday life was in the past in a way a movie couldn't. Hopefully more people digitize them since we have a large lense into the past that's slowly fogging up as tape after tape succumb to the damage that time brings to the format.

I watched this from start to finish! As a VHS archivist, I enjoyed the heck out of this! I only have a Dazzle DVC100 (trust me it's a lot better than an EasyCap) but I'd love to dive into the rabbit hole of VHS-Decode one of these days! There are some obscure VHS tapes that I grew up with in my childhood that haven't been released to DVD so I will definitely keep this in mind! Oh yeah and digitizing home movies using this will save my life (no pun intended)!

wait this isn't my regularly scheduled housetrapped content

1. Holy cow! I recently fell into the rabbit hole of digitizing older VHS only releases and while I knew of the whole Domesday and VHS decode thing I thought it would be too expensive for me. But with the CX card it is well within my budget. This saves me a lot of trouble i have right now with de-interlacing. Great video - terrible movie :D 2. I wouldn't disregard the PAL tapes in general. As long as the tape is sourced from a film master (which it is for close to everything shot on film) you get a higher resolution which SHOULD result in better quality. And de-interlacing is a bit simpler because every frame of video is a frame of film. The speed can be corrected in Premiere Pro when you use that anyway. And (as far as I know) your VCR doesn't even have to be PAL compatible since you decode the pure RF signal.

FWIW, my workflow 20 years ago for this task was Same JVC SVHS deck you used .. I think I had the 7700 model without TBC ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon Capture over S-Video using VirtualDub to a lossless HuffYUV intermediate ... I think it was an AVI container at the time. You are right that those ATI boards were absolutely wonderful for working in analog media. I used to program 2 hours of stuff for my anime club and I had the AiW Pro - 128, Radeon .. all of them. They had some quality of life details I loved for my anime club was that I could output analog video to VHS without displaying it on the PC screen .. anything that went through the MPEG decoder was shuffled off to video as an outboard display. (I tried staying with it on the ATSC transition // watcing digital TV, but kind of lost interest in watching broadcast TV altogether at that point).

The bootleg DVD even gets the tagline wrong on the cover.

Im glad you were able to navigate the BUGs to bring us this FABLE. As someone who's also interested in digital preservation i never knew anything about how they saved laserdisc and VHS

I actually thought about making a sequel to Ricky 1. It was gonna be about Ricky's grandson getting into a boxing match at his high school. One day, I'll try to make Ricky 2 💪

after over 15 years I decided to finally give this movie a shot and watch it and I ended up stumbling on this video, so now I have to actually watch it

I think that might be my TBC-1000 in your eBay screenshots! lol anyway, this was an excellent video. Thank you for showing me another way!

Not gonna sit here and pretend that I understood any part of the technical breakdown of the digitizing process of the VHS, but bravo! Good on ya for preserving this iconic sack of crap! Great vid 👏

Awesome video! I'll have to check out your others. I have a domesday duplicator to dabble with but found it a bit cumbersome for general use mainly due to file sizes and having to add back audio later. I think preserving rare commercial releases is an excellent application for it though! I plan to check out the capture you made. At some point I plan to do some testing comparing a 10bit 4:2:2 pro-res capture directly using something like the AJA KiPro and 10 bit full frame TBC. The part we really don't know the bit depth for is the internal line TBC in those VCRs, so that could be a limiting factor that the Domesday would not have - that and you are relying quite a bit on the full functionality of the VCR. You'd think the 15 hours of processing should blow realtime capture out of the water, but I am curious by how much. Would be interesting to see more comparisons of the regular capture you did vs the domesday one.

Ricky 1...oh god God their was no Ricky 2.

What about trying to find the original 16mm film negatives and scan it to 4K?

Thank you so much for your hard work!

I didn't know there was such a thing as "raw data" with an analog format😮

I feel like I'm hanging for dear life on the edge of the VHS digitization rabbit hole. One little push and I'll fall very, very deep. Edit: I just bought a domesday duplicator

Hmm. I use a fancy S-Video VCR with TBC, but with an Elgato device. It is the 3rd capture device I have tried, and is the best out of the three so far (the other two being StarTech and ION Video 2 PC Mk II). ...and yes, using OBS, with the settings that are recommended everywhere, except I also use the high bitrate encoder, because I can see the macroblocking with the regular setting. The result is pretty good, but now I am intrigued to try this. The thing is, unfortunately my family copied Video8 to VHS tapes, in LP mode. I'm curious if extra quality or video information can be extracted using this elaborate method.

Something that i haven't seen compared, is the units that convert tapes to DVD. Doesn't that also just capture the digital video signal at the highest quality? I'd love to hear your insight!

There is new AI software from companies like Eleven Labs that can clean up the audio much better than any of the tools you used. However, this only works for pure voice tracks because the AI will remove audio (such as music) that's playing in the background. I've used AI noise removal software for live seminars of professional speakers that I recorded on S-VHS in the 1990s and the resulting audio is fantastic.

I haven’t seen the whole thing… but surely the PAL version would be preferable to the NTSC one? The NTSC one will have gone through 3:2 pull-down before being recorded to tape, so getting back the original 24 frames will require taking fields from different frames and combining them together. If you were to record the PAL one, each frame of the film will be recorded over exactly two fields and played 4% fast, so you just need to record it, combine the frames together, and slow it down slightly to get a 24fps master. EDIT: As someone else pointed out, the PAL tape would also be slightly higher resolution, providing it comes from the film master and isn’t standards-converted.

For the record, you can get a Leitch DPS series TBC for way less than $2,000.

I appreciate your effort so much! As someone who loves this kind of stuff, I can already tell that you know what you're talking about!

640 pixels hurt the quality, It is better to resize to 1440x1080 right after de-interlacing and convert to rec.709.

The question is after inverse telecine you are left with 23,976 fps version, are tou correcting ot to 24 fps? I should probably rip the PAL VHS tape on my setup, slow it down to 24 fps and compare to your version. If it was shot on film, then the better PAL resolution should be a better preservation.

ngl that dvd cover looks way better then the vhs one

Thanks for uploading this! Didn't know that you can archive a VHS tape digitally without the use of a analog capture card!

I can't wait for Ricky 2

This is more of an effort for media preservation, then whatever any major company is doing right now and it’s for Ricky 1. As for the movie itself honestly, I think some of the jokes could have worked such as the women of all ages bit, and then it shows a woman from the Stone Age like that, got sort of a chuckle out of me or so because the concept of the joke could work, but the problem is the execution, same with the bobbing and weaving joke like yeah, that joke could’ve landed, but Bill is such a deranged creature that it doesn’t

Media preservation is so fucked, a museum or something can get the budget to buy a fancy machine to digitize shit with. But spending the mountain of money on "rare" listings on Ebay is just not feasible.

Your videos are great dude

I began my capture journey two decades ago, so I have a JVC SVHS deck, a full-frame TBC and a Black Magic capture card. I always capture to lossless. Since I started early when things were cheaper I've put perhaps $500 in total on this hobby. I'm unsure if vhs decode would improve the quality to the extent that I want to make the investment in time and money. Need to think about that.

Great video! I look forward to the day that this method fully replaces the super expensive 'conventional right way' workflows

257 gigs for the lds file alone. That is some dedication for RIcky.

This was really interesting. I love tales of media preservation. Thanks for doing this, even if the film is lousy. :)

Hey, just stumbled across this video and while I don't want to be _that guy_, are you able to make the audio from your capture in a lossless format? Great work for a movie that nobody else really cares about, I definitely know people with this exact sort of passion that would do something similar for other things nobody probably remembers or cares much about.

Do you know if pin three on CN 270 is ground? In the video @ 10:42 you show pin 2 (+) & 4 (-) for RF and @ 11:24 you show pin 1 (+) & 4 (-) for Hi-Fi. You show pin four being used in both taps. If I wanted to run bnc's for RF & Hi-Fi, would I share pin four's ground, or can I use pin three for one of the taps ground?

At 15:15 you can see clipping in the shadows. There’s actually clipping in a lot of it. I am doing a conventional capture and my proc amp in my TBC adjust the colors before they are digitized to prevent clipping. Once your capture card captures them you can’t get that color information back in software.

Also, should vhs be deinterlaced to 60fps?

This is actually a very interesting process. Have you ever considered doing this to any other movies?

for maximum quality (assuming both were created from the film directly): rip both the NTSC VHS and the PAL VHS, IVTC the NTSC VHS, slow down the PAL VHS, so both are 24 fps, then composite them together for MAXIMUM QUALITY

Thanks for doing all this!

great video! thanks for reminding me about ricky 1

the soundtrack of this movie is pretty great tho. aaand its really impossible to find either..... if someone can find those tracks in HQ, i would be very grateful

16:08 is the wire there intentionally or was it poorly set up?

This is pretty amazing. I don't have the HD space nor the patience to do this but it really doesn't get any better than this does it? I'll keep using my external TBC and capture straight to MP4 (8000kb/s to be fair). The 640x480 hit me in the feels though. I've been doing 720x480 with rectangular, but second guessing myself every time. Ultimately I'm happy with my captures, def better than the easycap lol.

How do I find the RF test point on my VCR?

If you wanted, could you remove one of the factory RF plugs from the rear and run your RF test point into a newly added BNC connector?

In all honesty a svhs player with an upscaler and a hdmi capture card is accpectable for most people. I also hear people talk about the Domesday Duplicator and I will always be confused, its like magic.

Wow! I would love to know all that details about capturing as 20$ + shipping is not bad and I have few rare things to archive...

12:10 and THATS why i'm sticking with my traditional capture setup (vcr with line tbc + frame tbc). there's no way in hell i'm waiting that long for 2 hour tapes, let alone 6-8 hour tapes. quality is good, but i don't think it's worth it due to the complicated install + slow processing speed. excellent video on the topic though!

I disagree. I think bebes kids episode was very funny and holds up to this day. I probably wouldnt have seen this video if i hadnt rewatched that yesterday lol

Ha I totally made a jank VHS video like you described at 6:40 with obs. To be fair though, I made it for a high school project and it was about getting chewy vhs effects on digital video with an actual vcr.

ricky 1 fandom, grab your fursuits

Next step is to find the film it was shot on and remaster it!

CadBrad once tried to play this movie in a discord call with me. I left after 5 minutes

nice job, imagine doing this and then finding someone that rips the original 35mm or whatever 😂

I was with ya until you declared yourself to be #squarepixelmasterrace . . . so close.

This whole thing didn’t really show anything really good about VHS-Decode. The video you used was in the original cellophane prerecorded media. You probably aren’t going to have the same kind of Timebase errors with that as you would home shot VHS footage. The TBC functionality isn’t a factor in this test. Then in a conventional setup you would put a proc amp after your TBC and before your capture card and that would make your colors legal so they could be captured. You can’t put a proc amp before your TBC because it bakes in timing errors and/or causes new timing errors. This capture could be better and it just doesn’t prove anything about de-code.

first

Why is there thousands of pages of documentation, if all you have to do is to connect a capture device to a VCR and hit record on a github software? LOL