Help with Dropped Frames from OLD Video

[fleasome]

Help!

I have a series of Martial Arts video tapes that I'm trying to convert over and burn to DVD. These tapes are about 10-12 years old. They were originally video taped on the old 1/2 inch format (forgot what it was called) then dubbed to one master vhs. Then multiple copies were made off the 2nd generation tape. I have had no problems at all converting all of them over with very few dropped frame rates with my Pyro A/V Link. However, the 9th tape is giving me nightmares. It was literally dropping about 1/2 the frames. I went out to Radio Shack (forgive me) and bought an RCA video amplifier. This decreased the number of dropped frames, however the end product was still choppy with a bunch of frames dropped. I then tried, out of ignorance, to copy the old tape to a new tape using the booster thinking this might help. Well, I know I lost another generation but it did actually improve my capture. I'm down to loosing about 25% of my frames from the original 50%.

Is there anything at all I can do to get this even better?

These old tapes are very important to me historically, as well as in my training. I purposely only viewed these originals a couple of times when I first got them so I wouldn't ruin them. Now they are getting old and not holding up well. I really want to preserve them digitally. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[bottle-necked]

I've been fighting with an old tape about all day and I can relate to what you're saying.

Here's my suggestions:

Try different tape players...
Try running the video through different devices (camera, player, TV, etc)
Get a TBC (Time Base Corrector).
Capture in MPEG2 instead of AVI.

I know the MPEG2 suggestion you might find strange but after several attempts at my project today the best I got was with MPEG2 capture.

Best of luck.

[fleasome]

I am doing it in MPEG2 so I guess I'll have to try a TBC. I'll research that next I guess. Don't know what it is.