VHS to digital, broadcast quality for documentary?
 

First let me say, I'm thankful that a forum like this exists. I've been browsing it for the past few days and I come to you on my humble knees as a poor naive peasant. Please forgive my ignorance.

About me.

I'm a filmmaker and TV Producer who works on documentary films. For the past two years, I've been working on my own independent documentary. It will be my first feature doc as a Director. I've self-funded this endeavor and will continue so til funds roll in from grants or investors.

My problem.

This film will rely heavily on archival footage from the late 90's era. I've amassed VHS tapes, VHS-C and Hi8 tapes ready for transfer. It's time for me to start digitizing these tapes into lossless uncompressed files that I can later hand off to an editor.

While in production, I've been shooting my interviews, b-roll and other footage using an FS5 mark 2, capturing with Final Cut Pro X and saving onto multiple drives. Storage is not an issue.

This film will eventually make it's way to digital platforms such as Netflix and will likely have a limited indie theatre run.

Keeping this in mind, what is the best possible workflow that I could have for this?

I want to give my editor flexibility, room for color correction, ect with these digitized files.

Has anyone here worked in the broadcast/TV space?

Thank you!

VVF

Some posts git overlooked last year, in the early days of the pandemic -- and that really sucks, because you're the kind of person that I enjoy conversing with (documentary filmmaker). You have special considerations for your workflow, and it's something I specialize in. I've worked with many documentary filmmakers over the years.

When you have mixed-content sources, you ingest at native resolutions, interlace, etc. And then it's all merged in post, and using non-NLE for best results. (FCP is terrible at deinterlace and scaling SD, for example. Something like Hybrid for Mac is better, using Vapoursynth for QTGMC and the scaling.)

The ingest hardware matters, too -- TBCs in use (both line and frame).

Where are you now on your projects? :)