From VHS to Capture Card to Capturing Software

[TV107]

I've been entasked with the job of transferring old and important family VHS tapes from the 80s and early 90s to digital.

A few years back I got the ConvertX PX-TV402U which hardware endoces in MP4 and DIVX
I'm a little bit familiar with VirtualDub and Avisynth using the PX-TV402U on some random videos that I didn't care too much about quality (just removing noise with cropping tool)

However, I want to make these tapes as good as they possibly be

I would appreciate suggestions and comments on the following.
1. I'm told I need a top-of-the-line SVHS player like a JVC HR-S9911U because it has a s-video out and DigiPure Technology?

2. I'm told I need to capture lossless so I need to get a 1TB hard drive and encode in Huffyuv or Lagarith? Is that true?

3. What is the best SVHS capture card available with hardware encoding for these lossless forms because the ConvertX isnt good enough? Hauppage? Pinnacle? What brand and model number? I don't necessarily need the NTSC or ATSC functions or do HD tv capture but I assume the card will have those functions.

4. I assume VirtualDob or VirtualDobMod is the best capturing program on the market? Are there others?

5. What is the best compression settings? DIVX XVID or ?? and what about cleaning up the audio? Splitting it and using something like Adobe Audition? Would it resync well?

6. Any other steps I'm missing here?

[yoda313]

1. - Yes if you want top notch quality. But you would probably be ok with you what you currently have. Do some test captures with your current equipment to see if you really need to upgrade or not - though a tbc wouldn't hurt - a TIME BASE CORRECTOR.

2 - Probably. That allows you to get the most from the analog source. Though an alternative is to capture through something that has analog passthrough and a firewire connection - like a dv camera - then capture to the DV AVI codec which needs 13 gb/hour

3 - Hauppauge is good. Pinnacle will work also. It depends on how much you want to spend.

4 - Virtualdub is good for a lot of things. Pay versions include products from ULEAD and PINNACLE as well as others. - Also note that a capture card will have its own capture program you can try out as well.

5 - Don't use DIVX or XVID for archiving old videos. It's fine for sending it over the internet or what not. But don't compress it to save on storage space. Encode it to dvd spec MPEG 2 and author it on dvds and use a good bitrate to preserve it.

5a - Other software like freeware audacity has some audio cleaning functions as well. However you might want to check video editing applications that tout audio clean up as well. Then while editing the audio would be cleaned as well not needing a remux later.

6 - Buy good dvd media. Don't go cheap here. And make backups. Probably a sizeable external harddrive might be a good idea. That way you could save your original captured files so you can always go back to your master capture file for later reediting.

6a - Don't throw away the tapes either. Unless you have a severe storage crunch issue save at least the most important tapes for later. As with anything its always best to go back to the original source to recapture. Although you should definitely keep a backup of your original captured file if you lose the storage drive and don't have the tape anymore you won't be able to go back to a better quality source - only your authored dvd.

If you have more questions please let us know. These are only some answers from one point of view on the whole digital conversion process.