VHS or VHS-S for capture

[UKPAISLEY2]

I need to put around 300 VHS tapes onto CD, I have a 32mb ATI capture card, all my attempts at capture so far or ok, but I get stuck with sound sync problems even though no frames dropped. I need a new video recorder and thought about paying more to get VHS-S. This will allow me to hook up to a VHS-S output and maybe capture will be better. I know the original tapes are only VHS, nut will the frame signals be cleaner.

Is it worth getting VHS-S or just a plain old Nicam Vcr.

[Will Hay]

Is it worth getting VHS-S or just a plain old Nicam Vcr.

Hello from Yorkshire!
I too had this dilema.
I did decide to go with S-VHS - haven't tried it yet but for what it's worth, rather than spend a load on a vhs player I picked up a brand new ATI Radeon 64mb DDR ViVo from ebay for £25 and it's stunning!
I do have a couple of extra hard drives (maxtor 80gb D740X) on a RAID 0 card which is a massive help for video capture, and I changed my motherboard as the Via chipset found on a lot of motherboards is horrendours for capture (pci sharing/latency problems).
I picked a budget vhs recorder, sub £100, was already to buy and stumbled across a review quite by accident, apparently it was a terrible machine and the S-VHS signal was no improvement so beware.
I suppose what I'm saying is the quality of your signal imput is one of the last things you should be worrying about
Will
--
Duron 800 (Athlon 2000XP 06.01.2003!)
Elite K7S5A motherbaord
512mb PC100
ATI Radeon 64mb DDR ViVo
IBM Deskstar 30GB Primary HDD
2 x Maxtor D740X HDD's on RAID 0
Soundblaster Live 1024
Lite-on CDRW Drive
Pioneer DVD-Rom Drive
Panasonic DVD-R Drive
EA900 ADSL Modem

[hwoodwar]

UKPAISLEY2:

I capture from a standard VHS recorder to a PC very frequently. With my recorder (Sony SLV-N60) I get very good results. At one point I did try my JVC HR-S3800U (does both S-VHS and has S-Video output) and S-Video output and "I" could not see any difference using the same tape and techniques. You specifically mentioned "VHS-S" presumably you mean "S-VHS" and the manual for my JVC says that to take advantage of the higher quality of "S-VHS" that the video has to be recorded on an "S-VHS" blank tape in an S-VHS recorder. I doubt this will help you in your present situation, since I seriously doubt that your 300 tapes were recorded "on "S-VHS" blank tapes in an S-VHS recorder."

Additionally my own opinion is, that like many things there are high quality devices and low quality devices. Even with the proper research and buying a "highly rated" S-Video or S-VHS recorder, there is always the chance that you may get a the "one in a thousand" that is "bad".

[UKPAISLEY2]

Thanks for the answers, yep, I meant s-vhs, just a little tired when writing the message. I have a new vcr borrowed at the moment just going to try this ine and up the processor to 2 gig.

many thanks

[Barnabas]

I need to put around 300 VHS tapes onto CD, I have a 32mb ATI capture card, all my attempts at capture so far or ok, but I get stuck with sound sync problems even though no frames dropped. I need a new video recorder and thought about paying more to get VHS-S. This will allow me to hook up to a VHS-S output and maybe capture will be better. I know the original tapes are only VHS, nut will the frame signals be cleaner.

Is it worth getting VHS-S or just a plain old Nicam Vcr.

You won't see much of a difference between S-Video and composite video from your VHS tapes. Your sound sync problem is probably due to the fact you are capturing with MMC. Try VirtualDub and capture to AVI and then encode to mpeg and you will not have sync problems.

[furball6969]

Yes, capturing to AVI codecs on the ATI card has never been real great for me, whic is why I never do it. But capture to Mpeg 1/2 is awesome. I've never had a sync problem.

It could also be the program he's using to create VCD's with. (most likely)

If the tapes were recorded in S-VHS then there will be a very definite difference in video quality over a plain composite output VCR.