If you happen to have one of these sitting around, I believe it has a AV-In->DV out function which will digitize the video input on it and stream it over firewire output. It may be more stable than the DV output from the VCR, though it's still DV with it's drawbacks.

Many of the "high-end", i.e AJA, Matrox, blackmagic devices do have macos support (AJA even has a prores-over-firewire thingy) and capture to prores, though those typically need some sort of TBC to not drop frames.

Some USB dongles work on mac with VideoGlide (and possibly ffmpeg), though that may limit you to crappy quality cards and not full resolution with the wrong card, and will again need a TBC.

As mentioned, passing the (analog) video through a DVR and capturing from either the analog outputs or HDMI (with something to strip copy protection) may do the trick to avoid drops, depending on the DVR and how good the video signal on the tapes are.

Bootcamp is not realy an emulator, it is essentially just installing windows to a mac with drivers and adding it to the mac bootloader so it can boot. As noted you may be limited to Windows10 or linux though.

It's possible to run avisynth (except stuff using GPUS), and virtualdub in a virtual machine like virtualbox. From what others have stated here, capturing in a VM does not work particularly well though.

I couldn't get avisynth to work properly with wine on macos last time I tested, it works fine in wine (other than GPU stuff) on linux though. Haven't tested with virtualdub in wine on macos, other than for capturing it works fine in wine on linux.

Vapoursynth and avidemux do run on macos so those are alternatives. Many of the big plugins like QTGMC are ported to vapoursynth, though it doesn't carry audio so can't really trim inside scripts if you want to preserve audio/video timing. On windows and linux it can also even load avisynth plugins somehow, though I don't think that would work on macos if avisynth doesn't work properly in wine.

Probably the stereotypical look of "archived" film as seen on a lot of news and documentary shows that have plenty of scratches, dust, hair in the film gate, and jitter. It adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the result that artsy-craftsies may like as a current fad because it looks old and recovered but not doctored or restored.

After all, if old news film or video looks to good one might argue it looks faked. Also, it takes time and money to restore video, the boss may be too cheap to want to do it because he doesn't see sufficient cash return on the effort.

Good luck with the project.

Since your boss insists on using a firewire there is an option to capture lossless using a firewire and a Mac running final cut pro 4 or later. The capture device can be had for $40 or less on ebay.
It has been discussed in this thread:
https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/...ireWire-%21%21