With unlimited budget, best capture equipment?
 

Not sure if there's a thread on this, but wanted opinions on specific equipment. No budget limit. What do you think?

I presume you're talking VHS. This is my setup:
- Panasonic NV-FS200 (or equivalent Blaupunkt); also have a good JVC VHS deck to compare which one works best for your own tapes/tastes. Also make sure that the deck has been professionally serviced/cleaned.
- Quality Monoprice s-video/audio cables (amazon);
- GrassValley Edius NX express (pci-e) - able to capture lossless, plus has audio/video lock=no sync issues. This might be better than the ATI rage theater chip recommended on this forum. I've read a German review of capture devices which gave Edius NX the top place. It used to cost a fortune ($1k or something); now you can get it for a hundred or so on eBay if you're lucky.
- Software - Edius NX for capture + Canopus procoder for compression into mpeg2 (8000kbps bitrate).
I think this is the absolute best you can do.

Oh and add a good external TBC :) I personally use Electronic Design TBC enhancer (used to cost 1,500 Deutschmarks back in the day)

Unlimited budget? At risk of being a smart asp, hire it out to the verified professionals who do this for a serious living (and charge serious money in the process), and go fishing, golfing, hunting, read a good book, or what ever else set you free.

For encoding, buy the full up encoders, no the stripped down versions; e.g., Carbon Coder vs. Procoder, etc.

But since that does not forget an audio delay of 120 ms.
The TBC Enhancer of Electronic Design is useful in color shift, horizontally and vertically, correction.

Here pictures from my magazine

Rhozet Carbon Coder there in a new form,

http://www.harmonicinc.com/product/promedia-carbon

ProCoder V2 or V3 as a standalone is okay, here is still on all PCs.
Unfortunately, can not call directly into Edius is the.
Much of Procoder is in the new versions of Edius [6:08 + 7:50 + 8:10]
been adopted.
But not the processing of Avisynth scripts and not the batch mode.

So do you use Electronic Design TBC yourself, or do you thing there are better TBCs out there?

^ This is an excellent answer. :congrats:

MainConcept (now Rovi) is better.

Most of your money will be spent on non-computer hardware.

But you have to understand that there's no one workflow that will work with all formats. So, unfortunately, this question cannot be answered. (It appears to be academic anyway, and not created with a specific task in mind.)

My expertise is in helical scan analog formats: VHS-based, Video8-based, and to a lesser degree, U-matic and Beta based. But even then, those workflows also vary highly. You don't need or want the same equipment to process homemade VHS as you do broadcaster BetacamSP.

So ... what, specifically, are you trying to do? :question:

MainConcept (now Rovi) is better.

Offers more options and is more modern.
Procoder is old, last revised in the year of 2009.
But mpeg2 interlaced in Mastering mode is still the best with the Procoder.
For Avisynth scripts we still take the Procoder here.
Too bad that it is no longer being developed.

How about Sorenson Squeeze 10?

But since I have very little experience.
I have only one brain.
I got low with the Avid Media Composer Version 8

Nope. Squeeze has always been a step or two behind MainConcept for quality.

Honestly, even FFMPEG and x264 is pretty good these days. It's not quite as noise-free as MainConcept is, but it's much faster. The only issue is finding a stable interface. Even FFPEG and x264 isn't the most stable without a GUI. Avidemux is, so far, the best option for one-at-a-time encoding jobs.

At worst, give it a small bitrate bump, and the quality issues are negligible.

For Flash On2 VP6, which nobody should be using anyway, Squeeze was ghastly. Compared to Adobe, the Squeeze encodes were unusable!

I do still like Procoder -- and 1.5 at mastering was MUCH better than Procoder 2.x -- but never use it. It's still installed on my main system, and has been since about 2003.

Squeeze has improved.