Get a DVD recorder and transfer them to that. Forget about Vegas. I've advised dozens of people about this and they all have grand plans going into the project but quickly loose steam after they realize it will take months to do all the capturing, editing, etc. Just put the tape in a DVD recorder/VHS player machine, insert a blank disc, and press play.

johnmeyer has a good point.

But, if you decide to go with capturing... Get a really good VCR for playback. I tried the internal tv/video card (ATI) on my PC and even bought a Intensity Pro trying to get a good analog transfer. What worked best of all was to use my old Sony digital8 camcorder as a passthru to convert to firewire and capture in Vegas. Simply plug your S-Video output from the VCR into the camcorder S-video input, firewire from camcorder to PC, audio can go direct to sound card on PC.

Video quality was much better than any other method I tried.

Agree completely with "Keep it simple and clean". You will find that you can cut a large amount of non-essential (and bad video) subject matter to make it more interesting for viewers. (30 sec of baby walking instead of 3 min!)

I did it recently for a friend.... lot of work!

Thanks for the suggestions, all. I captured via a Canopus ADVC 110, which went very smoothly. Unfortunately, I don't have a vcr with SVideo, but the results have been good. On a few of the tapes, I experimented with contrast, which sharpened it nicely.

The main reason I want to edit is to cut out sections which aren't good, and perhaps do a few mild transitions.

If anyone has tips on filters, etc to help, I'd appreciate that, too.

Thanks again!

If you are going to proceed by capturing into your computer and editing with Vegas, I have done hundreds and hundreds of hours of VHS to DVD. bsuratt has already given you excellent advice. Here are a few more, although some may overlap with what he has already said.

1. Make sure you enable the "Edit" switch on your VHS tape deck. It is sometimes called a "Dub" switch. If your tape deck doesn't have such a thing, try to upgrade to one that does. This switch turns OFF the "enhancement" circuitry which is supposed to make the picture look "better" (lot of quotes here) by adding a ghosting line around light/dark transitions. Unfortunately, this actually degrades the image, and results in a capture that has lost some details.

2. As already mentioned, use the S-video connector.

3. Your Canopus capture unit has, I think, a TBC feature. If it can be enabled or disabled, make sure it is enabled.

4. VHS tape has all sorts of nasty artifacts such as low-level "snow," bleeding of the color red (especially on EP 6-hour tapes), and various other bad stuff. You can get dramatically reduce the red bleed using the secondary color corrector. Just select a red object and then decrease the chroma level. For the snow noise, you can use Mike Crash's filter or Neat Video, although the latter is REALLY slow. If you use either of these, don't use too much. VHS also has chroma noise and there is a wonderful filter that absolutely nails this, without causing any appreciable artifacts. It is by Giles Mouchard and is available for both VirtualDub and AVISynth. However, unlike the previous two filters, I don't know if it is available for use directly within Vegas.

5. You are going to be cutting LOTS of footage. I developed three scripts that I use when I need to cut dozens of hours of footage, basically just editing out the dead footage. You can download them here:

Cuts-only Scripts

I don't have time for all the other things. Search under my user name in this forum and use the search term "VHS". I think you will find several dozen posts over the past few years. In those other posts, I provide other hints and techniques, although some of them are WAY too esoteric to be of any use when doing dozens of tapes. In one of them I even described how to capture the same tape several times and then average the results. It really works and provides fantastic results, but it takes all day to do even a small portion of one tape.

Regarding Johnmeyer's first post -- yes, this is the way to go, both from a time and quality standpoint.

I once spent days trying to enhance a captured VHS recording that suffered from low light graininess and SLP recording speed. I tried everything in Vegas and anything I could frameserve it to. The results were less than acceptable.

The result of copying to DVD on a Panasonic combo recorder with built-in VNR, although not wonderful, still beat anything I could do and was remarkably better than the original VHS tape

Thanks, John and others! I'll check for the TBC feature. Great suggestions for the red bleed, etc. I think I'm very ready.

I also have some Digital 8 tapes (I used a Sony digital 8 camcorder until its firewire port died, then used that as an excuse to buy an HV30), which I'd already captured via firewire. My family and my brother's family were just thrilled at the convenience of dvd over vhs. I simply added some titles in spots, cut out meaningless clips, and three in a few appropriate transitions.

But I really like the ideas about snow and red bleeding.

But I really like the ideas about snow and red bleedingHere's an old thread where I describe how to reduce red bleeding using the secondary color corrector:

VHS Red Color Bleed

Just set it up as a preset and apply.

Here's a link to one of many posts I've made about how to reduce chroma noise:

Chroma Noise Reduction

As I note, I haven't figured out how to do this within Vegas.

The areas of red bleed, chroma noise and color "drift" were specifically the areas I found were best handled by the camcorder feed thru method. Apparently the camcorder AD converter was superior at handling these areas.

I used some color correction in Vegas to get a true white balance on the VHS. For digital8 tapes no filtering was necessary.

If you have some video that is noisy or grainy don't forget about the plugin NeatVideo. It is pretty amazing for cleaning up and giving new life to old video.

Erik

Wow, guys, you are truly awesome! I very much appreciate you sharing all this experience and information with me. My family's not as picky as I am, but I figure, if I'm going to do this, I may as well do the best I can within time constraints.

On the one video I've converted so far, I added a few things - some music in key points, and even a few appropriate overlays - and everyone enjoyed it.

But I do agree, simple is better. My wife mainly wants to see family, not a bunch of special effects. :-)

One more thing, don't make the same mistake a lot of people do when they go to make the DVDs from VHS material. I don't know how many times I've read on some forum, "I used a low MPEG2 bitrate because this was just noisy VHS stuff and it didn't need a high bitrate." This is exactly the opposite of what's true. The more noise or motion that is contained in the material, the HIGHER the bitrate necessary to encode it.

I definitely agree, John. I'm limiting my movies to one hour. I do have a few football games I recorded in 1990 (last time my school did well), and I bought some DL dvds for getting those onto dvd. But my home movies, I limit to one hour and try to use a higher bit rate.

Just thinking out loud....

What about endoding to Half D-1 (352x480) which should let you use half the bitrate since you are encoding to half the pixel count? But I guess that would only be effective if you could do your A/D conversion straight to Half D-1, otherwise you would be upscaling on conversion and then downscaling on encoding and then upscaling again on viewing.

Why futz around, capturing VHS is real time AND there'll come a time when you'll find it impossible to get a player and / or the tapes will have fallen to pieces.
I give clients a good copy on DVD for them to play and split the DV files into 20 minute chunks and burn that as data files onto good quality DVDs for posterity.

Some of the things people do in this business boggle my brain. Yesterday a client needed a copy of his movie, shot on S16 on a DVD. He is getting the master telecined and he was going to get the post house to burn straight to DVD, that was it, no thought about future needs.

Bob.

Dog...use whatever transition effects that you like. This isn't the next Batman movie. People love the "sleazy" transitions. How many times you gonna watch this stuff anyway! Have fun, add stuff like music, sound effects, visual effects, whatever it takes to make those old movies entertaining!!! AND cut out the really boring stuff.