Hi there, thanks for writing.
Yes, I've worked at restoring VHS tape for more than a decade a now. First it was to higher-grade S-VHS tape, and then to digital formats (mostly DVD) for archiving.
Converting 96 hours of home video is a medium sized project, not too bad at all. With a lot of editing, it may take some time. I'd suggest not only converting and editing it, but creating DVDs with a secondary audio track for family commentary -- especially if you're young, as the elders of the family are often decent narrators. That makes for a complex project, but if you're decent with an NLE, it should be fairly simple.
Storage sounds good, nice to have NAS (on a gigabit, I'd assume?), Premiere is a great solution. Hopefully you're on CS3 or CS4, they work great. Of Premiere Elements, current version.
Canopus ADVC 300 is not one of my favorite boxes. It's been maybe 4 years since I handled one, and it was kind of lackluster. It made big promises, but honestly fell on its ass in follow-through. For starters, to call the filters inside of it a "TBC" is a bit laughable, it never really did anything that I could tell. And then the filtering on the video was often overdone, various visual clarity loss. Finally, consumer DV (DV25) is just not a good format to crunch a VHS tape into -- it's not uncompressed. The colorspace for NTSC is just a killer as far as I'm concerned, it gives an odd look to the video color palette, both in contrast and in the green/red values.
I'm sure that's not what you wanted to hear, but I felt the need to mention it. The device may work -- then again, you might also notice such oddities, so keep this in mind. It's the card, not the tapes.
As far as a VCR suggestion that is more "specific for 2009", no, there won't be one. The
VCR suggestions post is what is sometimes referred to as "evergreen" information -- it does not expire, and it's unlikely to become outdated.
What I would say, however, is that the VCRs listed there all differe a bit. The one you pick should be determined by the tapes you have. I can help in this process. Answer these questions:
- What mode are the tapes recorded in? (SP, LP, EP, SLP)
- Do the tapes have any physical damage, such as having been "eaten" by a VCR in the past (in part or in whole).
- Is the original camera still available?
- How many cameras, given that is was a 16 year spanse of shooting?
- Have you ever had tracking problems with these tapes when trying to play them in the past?
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