Old VHS and Dropped Frames

[midas28]

I use Pinnacle DC10 PCI card to capture and Studio 8 under Windows XP, Pentium 4, 2.4 GHZ. I use a separate 80 gig drive, 7200 8mb buffer to capture only. MY OS drive is a 7200 40gb drive

I have some old VHS. They were some old shows that I dubbed onto one tape to take out the commercialls, etc. I know they don't look that good, but I want to keep them.
I never get dropped frames when capturing straight from TV or a video I just taped, but when try capturing those old videos I drop frames like mad (in the 1,000's) The DC10 software has an option that you can check to check or not check the video signal. If you uncheck it, you can cap these fine. But when I went up to XP from ME, the DC10 software is not compatible. You have to use the driver provided in Studio 8. (you then lose this option) I thought about going back, but I like the fact that I can capture in one large file under NTFS (in XP) and I always had to join the files in ME. I have looked at all the guides from dropped frames and I seem to have everything covered.

I thought of some things I might want to try, but I would like some experienced opinions

1-Get a new capture card, that handles these things better-any opinions?

2-Get a really good VCR-Will this even help?

3-The pain in the butt-Can I keep my capturing drive NTFS and remformat my OS drive with ME and relaod the old software.
Will I still be able to cap in files over 4 GB?

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

[gshelley61]

You will probably need a TBC (Time Base Corrector) to succesfully capture old VHS without dropping frames and losing audio/video sync. Some high-end VCR's have this feature (sometimes along with DNR video noise reduction, too).

lordsmurf has written extensive guides on this subject:

http://www.digitalfaq.com

[nelson133]

The Canopus ADVC 100 box will transfer even old video tapes to you hard drive in dv format without dropped frames. Nyah Levi

[pyrohydra]

A DV device is to dropped frames as grass seed is to rotting cabbage.