How to digitise old NTSC home videos for highest quality (with PAL player)?

Question

I have some old VHS home videos that I'd like to digitise to preserve them, and I'm looking for the "best" way to do that with my setup. The videos were recorded around 1990, in the USA. I'd say they are in NTSC format, but I've also heard that VHS don't have NTSC or PAL, so I'm not sure. They play on my PAL VHS device, even in color. I am guessing that it converts the video to PAL60 for playback. The colors are slightly dull, but I don't know whether this is a feature of the camera, the old tapes, or any conversion. Another issue is that there is a bit of clipping in very bright/dark areas, but I think nothing can be done about that.What I have right now is the following: German (PAL) VHS with the old tapes, connected via SCART->white-red-yellow cables to generic USB digitalization device, connected to the computer.A couple of questions:- The documentation of the USB device says that a S-Video cable will improve the quality, should I use one?- Would I get a big improvement from using a different VHS player? NTSC devices are hard to come by here and probably pretty expensive. I found that sometimes the USB device or its driver corrects the colors (that I assume suffer from the NTSC/PAL thing), but I'm not sure whats going on there.- While I'm at it: the signal seems interlaced. I was planning on recording it via VirtualDub, and then possibly deinterlacing it. A test worked pretty well, and removed any jaggy artifacts. I can generate 60Hz, but I've read that I should either not deinterlace it or convert it to 30 Hz.

Answer 1

You will not get better quality using a different connection. Vhs video like all other types of video has a specific number of lines. here are the specs for PAL. If the video is recorded in SP (best vhs)mode rather than SLP(compressed mode) you will get your best quality. Also video tape will lose quality over years due to drop out from the tape particles degrading over the years.

You would be better off sending or taking it to a company that does vhs tape transfer to dvd or thumb/hard drive and will cost less than trying to use an old vhs player that might eat and destroy the tape.