Commercial capture setup for VHS tape transfer?
 

While awaiting the arrival of a pseudo TBC thingey (a Panasonic) to complete my testing of my home setup, I want to look into commercial places that capture VHS tapes (PAL and NTSC), preferably in Australia, but overseas might be okay.

Any suggestions? I'd want two test captures first, from PAL and NTSC, to compare with the 50 home captures already done. Then the other dozen or so tapes, depending on the test result. Output will need to come to me as ProRes 422HQ. One company has responded with this list of equipment:

Capture device: Bluefish444 Epoch SuperNova CG
TBC: Leitch DPS-575 or X75
Software: TBCBluefish 444 IngestStore
PAL: JVC BRS-822E
NTSC: Samsung SV-5000W Multistandard VCR

With an absolute guarantee that there are no dropped frames or sync issues, assuming good quality tapes – which mine are.

QUES: Can such a guarantee be given?

It looks promising, apart from the Samsung 5000. If I'm wanting top quality transfers, does the Samsung 5000 remove this company from my list? I'm also not keen on paying $40 for a USB stick because "due to security and safety reasons" they won't plug in my SSD.

QUES: Is $60 a capture (for 90-seconds or for a full tape) a typical cost? [Australian dollars]

HD card, and all HD cards tend to "also do" SD quite poorly.

Meh.

Garbage. Any random VCR tends to have better PAL and NTSC. The SECAM is passable, but that's because SECAM players are all fairly craptastic.

Known problems.

Not with that stuff in use. In general, difficult to do, have 0 drops. There's often a few, somewhere, and it may require recapture based on factors. That DPS-575 is pretty much guaranteed to allow (or even cause) some drops. Those ancient rack-mount "pizza box" TBCs are not meant for consumer analog videotape sources. They're just not.

I'm not impressed at all.

Only if you're getting quality, and nothing here screams quality. Wrong items, mediocre items. Not impressed. It almost seems scrounged, and not put together with care. Just random stuff that was available, add a fancy card because they were gullible, and there you go. I've seen this too many times. In fact, blowing $2k on that capture card was probably the dumbest thing ever, especially given that the NTSC VCR is garbage. I sometimes wonder WTF these people are doing. :screwy:

Not this one, but the BR-S525DXU model player has dynamic tracking, I always wanted to see how it works on problematic tapes, Basically it moves the heads sideways to stay within the helical video tracks, Candidate tapes are stretched, shrunk or recorded on slightly misaligned VCRs. The down side, these pro JVC S-VHS decks play SP tapes only.

With the right setup, there shouldn't be significant dropped frames if the tape is in good shape. Not sure anyone can promise "zero" though. I think it's sort of hard to tell if there were frame drops during a capture after the fact unless there are a lot of drops right in a row or if audio gets out of sync.

I have all the recommended equipment to do NTSC stuff, but no VCRs that will play PAL tapes, otherwise I'd offer to do your full capture project for much less than $60 a tape. If you wanted me to do just the NTSC tapes, I could do just those as I'm sure many others here would offer to do the same.