Looking for advice to better my capturing method

[jjjamiem]

Hello all.

After reading around some, I was hoping if anyone would be able to tell me which parts of my capturing method I could change to upgrade the quality of the entire process.

What I currently do now is capture segments from old vhs tapes. Each clip is usually only 1-2 minutes long, although every once in a while I have a good 5 minute chunk. Some of these tapes are old, some are many generations down the line too (although generally they're 2-5).

I realize that horrible video will probably never be "fixed", but some of these clips seem like they can be upped some.

What I currently have now:
- JVC VCR from about 7 years ago, wasn't special then, isn't now.
- DAC-100

I then use Vegas 4 to render the clip into MPG-2 format. (Going to buy a new machine soon, probably move up to Vegas 5, looking to see what I can do to make these render faster)

While some clips are just bad, the worst ones are the ones that play fine on tv, yet skip a ton when I capture them. I was wondering - what would be the number one thing I could change to fix this? Upgrade my VCR? Get a better capture device? The ADVC-300 looks good, but I don't know if the claims they show on their website can help my tapes or be that much better than the DAC-100. Or maybe a TBC like the TBC-1000 from Datavideo?

I read about some of these things here, but I'm not sure what would make the biggest impact on my clips.

I'd love to also not do these a clip at a time (just capture the whole damn thing and then section it off), but because of editing and quality, it's just not possible now (nor do I know if it ever will be); but I guess that's not the first step I'm looking to make right now anyway, just want to improve the quality of things I have. However - that does lead me to this question - could I just convert these clips to dvd and then clean them up afterwards using some sort of software?

[Krispy Kritter]

First, garbage in = garbage out. The output will never look better than the input.

Second, capturing video onto the computer requires a decent amount of processing power. While the capturing is done in real time, and rendering or conversion time is based on hardware speed (cpu speed mostly).

What are your current hardware specs?

[lordsmurf]

Better VCR and better TBC would surely help.