Thanks for the tips. I will check out the dot crawl issues. Also, I see that I really ruined it with color correction. Im used to using avid for color correction but it seems it doesn't support huffyuv so I tried premiere. I thought it looked bad but i doubted myself as I thought it was setting it correctly when I sampled white, bright, and dark. I will look for a tutorial on it though since it supports huffyuv it'll be my go to for correction and because I like the layout (similar to avid mc). I will be pretty disappointed if I need a new tbc because of dot crawl though....

I don't think it's "dot crawl" as we're familiar with it. It's some sort of moving electrical interference pattern that comes and goes.

Frames 0-6: strong
Frames 7-88: weak
Frames 89-end: strong

Meanwhile, a faint ghost of an image moves horizontally from right to left throughout the clip. The home movie clip has the same issue.

Difficult to say about the ghosting, as every JVC I owned had that problem and its worse with dnr and the digital cleaner turned on -- although in the earliest posts it's apparently a lab production problem. Those patterns of dot crawl and what I once hard an engineer call "FM hash" (fine grain cross-hatching, not heavy enough to call it herringbone) came from some bad production AVT's and is seen in a recent thread here with the ATI 9000.

The ghosting I'm talking about looks almost like some other image superimposed (like analog TV channel interference), not the usual DNR temporal ghosting of after-images from previous frames.

Oh. That I haven't noticed, but I'll take another look.

so the cross hatching as I think you are referring to seems to only be there with Virtualdub set to "1 ATI Rage Theater Video Capture (DirectShow)" and is not there when "0 Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32) (VFW)" is selected. Of course the source is still s-video. Not sure what that actually changes, or why I have the issue just on the [correct] selection. Is there an issue if I use VFW from now on? As for the horizontal ghosting, I am seeing it as well, and am going to troubleshoot with some new cables. However, I do not see it when the AVT is displaying the color bars, so perhaps it is the JVC. I will be sure to let everyone know what I find.

edit: oh, and the cross hatching IS present on the color bars when selecting DirectShow S-video. They are not there with Composite (directshow or VFW), and are not there with S-video VFW. Card issue or software/driver?

"Microsoft WDM Image Capture (Win32) (VFW)" is the capture driver you should be using with VDub.

Ghosting is likely from the JVC, although as I said earlier, that first British movie you were working with is a disaster whether or not it's played on your JVC.

So use the WDM VFW drivers and s-video. Check to be sure that those drivers allow capture to 720x480 or 640x480.

frustrating, turns out I was wrong. The cross-hatching is back once the res is set to 640/720x480. It just was not visible at 320x240. Still no sign of it over composite at the same resolutions, so maybe a bad cable, though I may be being optimistic. I will know soon. Thanks for all the help.

Get a non-retail tape, one you recorded yourself, and make a short capture without the AVT. Try it with composite, then with s-video.