[dugost]

Years ago I bought an ADS Tech Pyro A/V Link converter box to transfer my VHS to DVD via Firewire. It turned out to be a big waste of money. Commercial VHS usually captured fine but home movies didn't have a consistent or strong enough signal, resulting in a lot of dropped frames, segments and audio. I was told to try running it through a time-base corrector first (never did do that) but thought perhaps my G4 Mac at the time just couldn't handle the throughput. I'm on an 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac now and it can't capture it any better.

I've since transferred most of my VHS to DVD with a DVD set top recorder. The captures worked perfectly but I want to edit some of this video and don't want to go through the messy capture and conversion process from MPEG-2 to a format for iMovie or Final Cut Express.

Has anyone here transferred VHS home movies to DVD/computer using either Roxio Easy VHS to DVD for Mac or Elgato Video Capture? I’m interested to know what real world experience people have had. Reviews online aren’t telling me a whole lot other than their ease of use. I want to know if the lower to average video quality of home movies transfers well through either of these devices. I don’t want to drop the bucks to find out they drop the frames.

I also want to capture this to my Mac for editing, not strictly direct to DVD burning.

Thanks.

[mland0821]

I started a couple years ago, trial and error and evolution, with a set top DVR, but also didn't just want DVDs, I wanted to edit in iMovie. I borrowed a friends Pinnacle to transfer and it worked well, but it runs $100 and I didn't have a lot of tapes and it wasn't worth that much to me. I ordered the iGrabber from Meritline.com for $20 or so, on sale. It works but the software was very awkward to get up and running, but I eventually figured it out. (They're is also a cheaper product-EZGrabber, for PCs that I wasn't able to get to work with the Mac.)
WIth Pinnacle & iGrabber, you are able to choose to have it shared with iTunes, so you can watch it immediately on Appletv via wifi, which can be convenient, until you get around to editing. The quality seemed pretty good with both, however, I haven't gotten around to doing much editing either.
I hope this helps you out.

[hab]

This may not be much help but I have the El Gato EyeTV (100 long ago and now the 250) and years ago converted commercial VHS to DVD and/or mp4 files. It was seamless. The quality excellent. The editing features dead simple. The point is that they have had the software for this type of thing for many years. The EyeTV just works and the software is consistently highly rated.

[dugost]

Thanks for the tips, mland and hab. I'll check out Pinnacle and El Gato EyeTV.