Thanks for the tip on the mixer, it gets great reviews for low dough.
Regarding the Black Magic card and difficulty with S-VHS, this is from
Amazon:
"4.0 out of 5 stars Good for most video, February 22, 2011
By JF - See all my reviews
Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro HDMI Editing Card with PCI Express
I use the Black Magic Design Intensity Pro to capture analog footage, mostly component video. That and composite work very well and I am please with the results. The included S-Video adapter gave diagonal "scan" lines waving across the footage. It was not terrible but definitely noticeable. However, I do not use S-Video much (or at all anymore to be honest) so for my purposes it is very good."
I'd like to use the S-VHS input, have you heard of this problem elsewhere?
Is there a better option than the Black Magic?
Regarding the codec, if I master to blu-ray I use H.264 encoding, and if I master for DVD I use MPEG-2, is that right?
You mention using a high bitrate for the transfer, what bitrate would you recommend?
My Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 comes bundled with Adobe Encore for authoring.
How necessary is a TBC? Assuming that the VHS tracks properly, can the Adobe software provide equivalent adjustments to color and contrast in post-processing?
Thanks for the help, great site!
Carl