VHS to digital capture / conversion - help refine my transfer flow?

MiketheMechanic

Hi all. With some extra time at home due to COVID, I'm tackling a project that has been outstanding for 15 years.


I have over 50 VHS tapes to transfer to digital before the tapes are lost to time.


The recordings are 99% PAL and a mixture of camcorder home movies on VHS-C and recordings on VHS from TV from the late 80s and early 90s.




I want to transfer them to digital and keep the highest possible quality.


I'm not bothered about burning each tape to DVD or Blu-Ray, I just want to save in a solid reliable video format on a Hard Drive.


Most likely these will be shared YouTube, or viewed on an computer or on TV via a memory stick at a later stage.


For really special home movies, I may do some editing in the future. So I want a solid digital capture to work with.



I attempted to start this project around 3 years ago and experimented with the following setups.



1. A good quality Panasonic 4-head VCR. Does a reasonably good job playing the tapes cleanly when viewed on a monitor.


I am taking the output from this VCR via a S-video cable and red and white RCA phono for audio to the next stage.




2a. Capture Device: A TOTMC USB 2.0 Video capture device dongle. This is an EasyCAP type device - cheap and cheerful.


It is running ArcSoft ShowBiz 3.5.15 software on Win 10 on my PC.


Pros:


You can get up and running quickly. Press play on the VCR, and hit Capture on the ArcSoftware, then when finished, publish to MPEG2 format video.


Cons:


1. Quality isn't great - seems to be a lot of loss and noise in the conversion, even applying the various filters.


2. The software is ancient and a bit clunky. Is there a better software package that works with these EasyCAP type of dongles?


3. MPEG2 isn't ideal - would prefer AVI or uncompressed video format options.



I also tried a different capture method.


2b: Capture Device: A Sony RDR-HX525 DVD Recorder with HDD.


I feed the output of the VCR into the recorder and record to the HDD.


Then burn from the HDD to a DVD-R to get a digital video file.


Pros:


Better quality than the EasyCAP method - still hope there's a better quality method though.


Cons:


1. Slow and time consuming. Essentially an extra step in the process in burning and finalizing the DVD-R from the internal HDD.


Then ripping the digital .vob file from the DVD back to the PC.


I tried to extract the files directly from the HDD on the recorder by removing it from the recorder, but the HDD was not in a format I could read on a PC.



Are there better methods of capture?


I have read about people using Mini DV Camcorders, with AV in passing through to Firewire and on to a PC.


Is this a better method? If so, what models of Mini DV Camcorders have a good ADC converter? And what software is needed on the PC?


Are other DVD Recorders better at the ADC conversion and more user friendly than the Sony unit I have?



I have also read about Canopus ADVC units? Are they recommended - if so, which one?


Finally, I could buy a Video Capture Card for my PC - is this a better method - if so, which one?


Thanks in advance


MtM

ED E

You're right about wanting RAW video out like an AVI stream, then you compress it nicely with HEVC if you want.

Elgato are one of the market leaders and make very solid kit, I'd probably start with them.
https://www.elgato.com/en/video-capture

It outputs H264 which is ok.

Video format PC Software: H.264 at 1.4 MBit/se

Audio: AAC, 48kHZ, 128 kBit/sec

Johnboy1951

AVI is a container format, and a very limited on at that, IIRC.

Some other container format might be more useful - such as .MKV ... which will facilitate various encoding formates of the video.