Greeting from a newbie to the forum

[b1lanc]

Hello all,
Been reading this forum for years and it helped me set my old Philips to play both NTSC and PAL DVDs. Thanks all. Now, I'm looking to replace the Philips. I would like to do a couple of things with the new unit(s):
1) Play VHS tapes (I have a large amount of VHS and 8mm family cassettes which are starting to deteriorate). I have no current VHS player or 8mm player (old video camera is jammed but I'll probably have it fixed if I can find someone local to do it).
2) Record onto DVD with the capability of editing some parts out.
3) Continue to play my NTSC/PAL DVDs so I'd like the player portion to support both like
4) Since my old projection TV is starting to show all green tinted pictures, I'm going to be migrating to an HDTV at some point in the near future.

That's my wish list. I've tried the Corel suite on my 3.4gig Pentium and despite making the changes to the HW profile recommended by the Video Studio forum, I have not found a reliable means of converting the analog signals from my old VHS player/recorder (which is no longer with us anyway) to a dvd quality without the sound and picture having gaps or out of sync.

Any recommendations would really be appreciated.
Thx,
B1lanc

[PuzZLeR]

Welcome to the Forums ,

Since you have a large amount of VHS tapes, you may as well invest in some equipment since you'll be using it. As well, I believe that this is the best time as any to go through this project - tapes are crumbling, good quality, and working, VCRs may not be available much longer and technology has reached the Law of Diminished returns as it won't get much better for this soon-to-be outdated task.

Do it now.

Get a good VHS player. Most recommended seems to be JVC. You can search for models.
Get a TBC - lots of info on it here.
Best capture product it seems is the Canopus ADVC110. It captures to a high quality DV format.

You will be hard-pressed to find anything better than DV at 480/576i to capture VHS. You will not need much better.

DV is ~13GB/Hr of video, but it's highly editable and can easily be encoded to MPEG-2 for DvD. VideoStudio can edit DV just fine.

But export your projects with SmartRender and encode with a separate stand-alone MPEG-2 encoder, not VideoStudio. You'll get better results.

The best MPEG-2 encoders available, according to this forum, are CCE and H Enc. The latter is free.

You may want to pick up some AviSynth as well - you may need filters for deblocking, sharpening, smoothing, denoising VHS captures for your final encode.

Hopefully I gave you a good starting point. Maybe others here will improve upon it.

[Novice2010]

I have a similar issue with lots of old VHS video tapes, so thanks for sharing the ideas here