Best Way to Capture VHS

[ipodman715]

I have a home VHS video that is from 1989.

I have a DVD recorder that has VHS built in. I can transfer the VHS to DVD on high quality.

I'm just wondering what's the best way to capture the VHS. Would the DVD method be ok, or would hooking it up to the PC the best?

Thanks.

[thecoalman]

I'm just wondering what's the best way to capture the VHS. Would the DVD method be ok, or would hooking it up to the PC the best?

The answer is "depends" . If you just want to capture it and be done with it that will work, with a decent DVD recorder you can have very good results. On the other hand capturing using AVI in a lighlty or lossless format leaves the door open for conversion to other formats and filtering. You can still do that with MPEG but but you pretty much negate the benefit of MPEG capture which is speed because it's already DVD compliant and will get better reults using AVI.

Basically it comes down to what you intend to do with it after you capture it. If you're just going to be making some minor cuts and edits, maybe add a few transitions and author a disc get a software package that works well with MPEG and you're all set.

http://www.nepadigital.com/articles/analog-capture.php

[foxbox]

I have a similar question.

It is my intention to transfer my large VHS collection to DVD, one film per disc.

My requirements are no less than the best possible quality I can achieve by using my PC to do this.

Studying results through my DVD recorder, I can see problems right away: the 'digitisation' process makes for blocky, artifacted results, and issues like 'video roll' are converted into stuttering jumps instead.

I should point out that some of my collection of rare films are 2nd or 3rd generation, and other problems in the DVD recorder method are poor colour transfer (heavy bleeding in some cases) and a constantly jumping picture (from a tape which can be heard to be unstable, but does not 'jump' like this in its analogue format).

So... what should be the best way to hook up my VHS to PC, and which software to use for optimum transfer so the results look as close as possible to the analogue originals?

Maybe then the old VHS tapes can be ditched!

Thanks for any help

[thecoalman]

Studying results through my DVD recorder, I can see problems right away: the 'digitisation' process makes for blocky, artifacted results,

Whatsetting are you using on the recorder, which recorder? Those are moacroblocks and can result from too low a bitrate or a poor encoder.

and issues like 'video roll' are converted into stuttering jumps instead.

That has to be fixed before it gets to the recorder, a TBC may help.

and a constantly jumping picture (from a tape which can be heard to be unstable, but does not 'jump' like this in its analogue format).

Again a TBC might help, that might even be the result of the macrovision detection kicking in if it looks good on the TV.

Check out the sample clip about a third of the way down: http://www.nepadigital.com/mv/index.php