VHS capture - Your Opinion?

[vidso]

This questions might be like beating a dead horse, but I'm new to all this and videohelp.com I want to convert some of my VHS-C and hi8 tapes and store them as AVI files on a hard drive.

The equipment I currently have access to is:

Sony SLV-N70 hi-fi VCR

Canopus AVCD-300

WinDV capture software

A powerful enough computer with a 1TB drive

A Sony TRV-120 camcorder

From testing I've found the Sony VCR a little annoying in that when I press play it superimposes the 'play symbol' (you know the triangle pointing to the right) onto the screen which of course then ends up being captured by the WinDV. Also, it has auto tracking which works well, except when the tape first starts to play and when the tape had stopped recording then started again. So a suggestion on a better VCR would be nice.

From my untrained eye the Canopus avdc-300 with the default setting it seems to work good enough for what I want, but any setting suggestions for Canopus settings would be helpful.

As for capture software...? I just want AVI's that I can edit, burn to DVD, or just simply play. I might be able to get my hands on Adobe Premiere. Also, I’ve read NeatVideo is a good plugin, but do I really need that. The quality I’m looking for is just equal to the VHS or a little better.

All in all what would you do with in my situation I'd really appreciate your input.

[lordsmurf]

Here: Better VCRs for capturing VHS tapes

Canopus ADVC-300 = turn off noise reduction, it's too aggressive, butchers video quality

It's a DV box. Use WinDV.

You can probably skip NeatVideo.

[vidso]

Thanks for the input lordsmurf. The more I read the forums the more I learn and the more interested I become in all this.

As for a VCR I think I'm going to try to find a Panasonic AG-1980 or AG5710. I have some concerns about buying a VCR that is so old, but these things are pretty resilient aren't they....?

After some reading I think I'd like to try the uncompressed huffyuv avi format. which brings me to a few questions for analog capture.

What direction is recommended?
The ATI 600 USB or ATI all-in-wonder agp or the hauppauge WinTV card?

Regarding DV capture:

I tried both WinDV and MooGear Video. I found that MooGear Video created a file twice as big as WinDV did for the same length of video. As I understand it this due to the codec used to compress the DV. Is there really anything to gain from using a program that creates a larger AVI file? Is there a program that allows you to choose which codec is used to encode the DV to AVI? I read that Cedocida is a good codec to use...

[lordsmurf]

HuffYUV is lossless, not uncompressed. It's about 3x as big as DV, and also uses an AVI file.
I'd look at the ATI 600 cards, yes. http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2F...reative=390957

If you like reading, there's quite a bit more here: http://www.digitalFAQ.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/dvd-project-help-9.html
Look in workflows, capturing/recording and filtering forums for many related topics and conversations that might help you quite a bit in your journey of high quality conversions.

Good luck.