Okay I have been reading a lot about transferring VHS tapes to DVD. These are home movies and not copyrighted. I have read elsewhere that transferring using firewire gives best quality. What I want to do is to transfer the files to my PC for some simple editing and then burn to DVD. I have a video capture device (Pinnacle 510-USB) but haven't been happy with the quality at all. I don't have a DV Mini camcorder and so can't transfer that way. I have borrowed a friend's VHS to DVD recorder and have transferred a short movie on it but the quality isn't that great either. What is the best way (best quality) to get a VHS tape onto the PC so that some minor editing can be done without losing quality and then burn to DVD? Thanks for any help.
i know you said you don't have a miniDV camera, but if you have a buddy that has one that you can borrow, that will give you the best quality and the easiest way. you can use a miniDV camera as a bridge. the camera has video/audio outputs on it, but in bridge mode you can actually hook audio/video from a VCR into the camera, and then hook the camera up to your computer via firewire, and then your computer can ingest the footage as high quality AVI DV format. the format uses a lot of space though (~1GB per 5 minutes) so you can then edit your video using something like Premiere and export to a DVD. I've never really like the analog capture cards for computer. They can be very temperamental, and as you found out the quality is pretty crappy. if you can get your hands on a camera thats the best way to go.
