VHS to DVD: Best Quality?

OK.. let me take a stab at this since I do this quite often for a minimal fee for people.

This is what I do usually and hopefully this will cover some of your questions.

First, you need to start with a decent VCR that will play your VHS. Obviously, you can't control the condition of the VHS tapes but you can try and keep your VCR head clean and I'm assuming you'll be using a 4 head and Hi-Fi VCR.

I usually hook my VCR to my Camcorder which has a passthrough so I can download to my PC via Firewire. I don't record that to MiniDV as that is usually not necessary in my case. My PC is good enough to handle the capture as AVI using Vegas Video (you can use Premiere or the likes) without any dropped frames. There is no gain or loss in quality from directly feeding the signal as pass through via your Camcorder and then Firewire versus recording it as MiniDV first then feed it directly to your PC. At least not that I know of.

I like to capture that as AVI first which is very very close to the lossless uncompressed AVI. So from there, I do all my edits and whatnot then I save that as AVI again and use Procoder (you can use any encoding software but I highly recommend anything that has a 2-pass VBR encoding option) and run that as a 2-pass VBR. Unless the video is relatively short, I usually just do Constant Bit Rate of 8 Mbps since space is not an issue.

Just a few side notes, any real time capture though a H/W, unless is a very high end Avid or Canopus, the quality won't be as good if you use Variable Bit Rate encoding. The reason is that if you use a H/W capture device and you use VBR, there are a lot of quick scene changes from slow action to fast action that the H/W capture card can't forsee and adjust the right bitrate. I'm quite sure that the time it takes for the capture card to adjust this bitrate is extremely quick, I perceive it as still less perfect than if I were to run the AVI through a software encoder that can do a two pass so that the first pass will scan through and detect any scene changes that requires bitrate adjustment and then the second pass to actually do the encoding. Having said that, not every software encoder provides the same result. There are tons of s/w encoders and you need to try them out. Prior to Procoder, I used MainConcept which is bundled with Vegas Video and that did a very good job but Procoder really blows everything away. I do a lot of import car videos and a good encoding is an absolute must as cars move around extremely fast.

I primarily use the Microsoft DV codec and I really can't see any major difference. My videos are extremely sharp and crisp, which may not exactly be a good thing. Most people want the look and feel of actual film so a lot of times I go down to 24 fps and back to 30 as my final render.

If you are doing a lot of tapes and don't want too much hassle of moving footage back and forth (VCR - Camcorder - PC - DVD) then go get yourself a standalone DVD recorder. The same H/W encoder concerns mentioned above applies to these recorders as well.

Hope this helps...