Maybe.

That's my point. I suppose that a person asking for a capture, and with no experience in "restoration", will watch the lossless file on his PC (rare) or a compressed file on his TV / Whatever Player. In the first case he needs the head switching noise to be removed as part of the"capture service", in the second the service will provide a mp4 file, or something like that, and the removal of the head switching noise is mandatory in the generation of the final output format.

But I do not have expertize in this field. The only experience I have with external services is the capture of Betacam tapes that we (as fan club) received from a TV, and we were not able to capture because lack of player. The final format deliverd to us was a clean mp4.

Nope. That's part of the same "case", there's not a 1st/2nd distinction there.

As you should know, there are reasons to not mask raw/lossless footage. And that's what you get with a baseline service. It's the best quality from the tape. If you want to convert a "watch copy", then that's separate. It may be a nominal fee, but it's extra steps.

What you refers to was largely the "lazy generation" of video conversion customers. They screwed their videos up over a decade go, cramming it through a lousy DVD recorder, or paying some slop shop operation that did the same thing. The current customers are actually a bit more savvy, due to age (many are surprisingly young now), or due to not liking the quality available at that time. Many more are simply redoing botched projects from 10-20 years ago.

Lots of amateur and low-end services give you compressed H.264 (as MP4). But those services are finding themselves squeezed out of the business, much like the DVD recorder kiddies in the 2010s. (The desperation of LegacyBox commercials amuses me the most. They laid off a huge % of their company earlier this year. Their Glassdoor and Indeed ratings/comments are telling to how these garbage shops operate.)

I understand your point. It is on the "watch copy" that we have different points of view. For me, including in the capture service, there should be a "watchable copy" (and a raw capture is not), otherwise the full service is incomplete for a person not used to restoration, or simply not used to create a final format. OTHH, for an experienced user asking just for the Analog to Digital conversion, the raw capture alone is all he needs.

I fully trust that you are transparent on these aspects with your customers, and there is no ambiguity. If it's clear since the beginning that the "watch copy" has an extra cost, everything is fine.

Most of the cheap services do capture straight to h.264 mkv or mp4 de-interlaced on the fly, They don't crop it off, they don't mask it, and most consumers are not aware of those borders, they just think it's part of the video or because some modern TV's still have the overscan over HDMI.

I don't do this at a commercial level as I have other hobbies and responsibilities but when the customer is made aware of it most of the time they want it to be cropped off and upscaled to 1080p despite explaining the consequences to them. Usually the agreed upon price includes everything, from capture to final file format. I've had once one asked me for the lossless files along the processed files and he supplied me with two 2TB hard drives, this was locally.

Yes, thanks for sharing your experience.