Great capture from any source except older camcorder... why?

[impmon2]

I was loaned a Sony Handycam TR517 with the request that I dump all video from Hi8 to DVD. For some reason both VirtuaDub and VirtualVCR drops 50% of the frames. In VuturalVCR, all the dropped frames are in Frame2 box which kinds of lead me to think it's not handling interlaced video properly or something. I never had this bad when I capture from VCR's (from a decent VCR with 4 video heads to a cheap $20 Walmart junk) and even from video game consoles.

I have tried feeding the camera through a VCR to my PC but I still get the same dropped frames. If I record the camera onto the VCR and then play it back, I get no dropped frame but the picture quality is greatly reduced.

The old camera has only AV out, no USB or firewire so that is out. I don't have any other device that can playback Hi8. I do have a DV camera but it only plays Digital8 and shows blank if I try the analog tape. Being the cheap person I am, the DV camera I have does not have on the fly AV to firewire conversion, it has to be recorded to the tape then played back. figure almost 100 hours extra for the extra step as there's almost 100 hours of tape to capture. Plus almost 100 hours to convert them to DVD format and some odd minutes authoring chapters and finally up to 15 minutes per DVD to burn, about 50 DVDs total

PS yes I'm getting paid for this project so when it's done and my expenses are covered, I'm going to try and get a new DV camera with on the fly AV to firewire support.

System spec:
2.8GHz P4
1.5GB DDR366
ATi TV Wonder Ve
4 HDs totaling 800GB
+/- DVD burner (4x max)

Capturing video to Huffyuv format first with uncompressed mono audio.

[impmon2]

Just a little update: when I changed the capture fps to 15, I don't get dropped frames. But the playback looks like it's from 8mm video and I wanted to use 30 fps for better result.