Best VHS/Betamax to Premiere Pro Capture on Mac?
 

Hi,
I want to digitize some VHS tapes while they still work in the best possible way. Here is what I have available to me to capture with at the moment-
VHS player- Toshiba DVR620 DVD/VHS Recorder, Black
Betamax player- SuperBeta HiFi SL-HF400
Capture devices- Canon HV20 camcorder, Sony DV Cam DSR11 deck
Computer- iMac 2014, MacBook pro 2019
Program- Adobe Premiere Pro
I am currently capturing my friend's betamax tapes with the HF400 running into the DSR11 via firewire to thunderbolt to my iMac. One tape captured mostly fine, the other tape had constant dropouts which would create new clips in Premiere Pro. My questions are-
1. How can I solve the dropout issue in Premiere? Will this same issue occur when I hook up my VHS deck?
2. Beyond a high quality file backup, I'd like to make a physical backup as well. Would DV tape work? I have read about color loss issues- is there a deck where this would not be an issue?
3. Do I need a TBC with the DSR-11?
4. Is there a better and easier capture device to use than going via DV and firewire?
Thanks!

Depends how much you consider spending on the setup.

With what you have now, sending the output from the betamax via the toshiba may help with drops and instability. It's one of the Funai -made dvd-recorder models so the video decoder chips in it are pretty decent at stabilizing the incoming video and should you a stable output signal for the dv device to capture. I suspect that's why you're getting issues. (I think this is active on VHS playback on this model too but not certain.) They are however known to be cause excessive flickering in some cases. If it's too flickery you could look into getting a Panasonic DMR-ES10, ES15 DVD-recorder (or various others depending on if you are in PAL or NTSC terrirory.) You use them in a similar way by sending the video through the input and capture live from the output (not actually recording to them). They're mostly talked about for stabilizing VHS, though I know at least for PAL they work well on betamax too, which is nice since there are hardly any betamax VCRs with TBC/stabilization in them. (Know less about NTSC for this use case but I suspect it could work well here too, not sure what people here tend to use for betamax.)

The VHS part of the toshiba is very cheaply made though, it's from the the very end of VHS VCR production, so you may want to consider looking for a better VHS deck. What to get depends on how much you feel like spending. The betamax VCR is a very nice model though.

If going the firewire route, you could also see whether the AV-in to DV out on the HV20 gives any better results if it supports it as it's a fair bit newer than the DSR11. There are some capture card options that do work on mac though, if you want to avoid the DV compression impacting quality, but others here know way more about those.

As for physical copies, would maybe go with DVDs, or backup HDD if you want to retain maximum quality, rather than DV tapes. I guess DV tapes could work but it seems a bit impractical. Especially for longer tapes as DV tapes are typically 60 minutes in SP node, and yeah it's not lossless as it's compressed, and for NTSC there can be a bit of loss of color resolution.

Safe bet that Toshiba DVR620 works the same as DVR630 for internal playback, i.e. "Dubbing" mode is required for signal correction. I don't know whether this is the case with passthrough for these Funai combos, though.

We use "technically" the best PAL Betamax decks and they still have manual tracking, let alone any sort of TBC. We have a pair of HF-SL950s and whilst they're beautiful machines I would suggest they're best left to curio as they need constant attention to perform their best, they're also the only machines with a SCART output in PAL land.

The draw loading is cool as frig though, and I do like to see them in use!

I'm getting sidetracked, the output signal quality from Betamax is as near-as-makes-no-difference to VHS (and V2000) for that matter in my experience and we've had no issues pairing them with any given quality TBC. It's all just semi-decent domestic videotape after all.

For NTSC, no idea, await an NTSC bod to reply!