Adobe's deinterlacer is not bad, but it can be better. If you want the best deinterlace possible, I recomend QTGMC or equivalent.
It is an old, noisy way to combine all singals. Clean with alcohal on the heads, run dummy tape cleaner.
If you can find one used in TV stations, they are professional quality. Use a 4 head S-VHS with component output and Time base correction to reduce fringing and poor color. Its the 4:2:0 interframe codecs with low bitrate that cause the most damage. motionjpeg works great for this and doesn't take up too much bandwidth. Specialized equipment only need to be able to capture 4:2:2 or even 4:4:4 in intraframe mode. If the discussion starter MUST do this conversion him/herself using the aforementioned Elgato device, then I would recommend keeping the 640 x 480 resolution, Pixel ratio set to "Square Pixel (1.0)," Field Order set to "None (Progressive scan)," and then exporting the edited result to 320 x 240 resolution (using a 1.0 pixel ratio) or 352 x 240 (using the "NTSC DV (0.9091)" pixel ratio). This specialized equipment will be much more expensive than even the most expensive of Macs and servers.
Properly converting VHS to digital will require specialized equipment that's way beyond the scope of PC do-it-yourselfers. All analog video is interlaced - but cheaper capture devices like the Elgato shoot themselves in the foot by always deinterlacing interlaced footage before they even send it to the PC. What's worse, the Elgato cannot really keep interlacing. Thus, image quality loss when converting from analog VHS to digital is unavoidable due to the resampling of pixel content no matter what. The vertical resolution is fixed at 480 pixels. With an aspect ratio of 4:3 NTSC, that would translate to an effective total horizontal resolution of only about 350 to 360 pixels. You see, the effective horizontal resolution of most VHS footage is only about 270 pixels per picture height.
Because they are all great, they are presented in no particular order.Actually, most VHS footage is already extremely low quality to begin with. That means that each of them is going to do a fantastic job with conversions to DVD. The machines below are all good enough to make it on our list. Since they all work similarly, the best way, ultimately, is the way that you are most comfortable with. Once you have an idea of the process, you can decide which of the machines below is best for how you prefer to do things.
Looking over this list of VHS-to-DVD converters and VHD to digital converters should give you a good overview of how to transfer VHS to digital. Picking the Right VHS-to-DVD Converter Machine Otherwise, you can find the recommended products using a search engine. If you want to support our portal, you can use the links. When you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, we receive commissions. So if you've been wondering how to convert VHS to digital, read on!ĭisclaimer: We use affiliate links to the products mentioned on this page. The list below will give you some brief reviews of the best equipment for this job. Before you head on down to the local Walmart and pick one up, it's good to do some research on which products are worth the money first. Thankfully, this is a common need and there are a number of VHS-to-DVD converter machines on the market. If you have old analog VHS tapes that you'd like to convert to digital, then you need some kind of hardware to get them from the tape and into your computer or onto a DVD.