A technical video question ...

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

Osi. The old JVC SR-VS30 would do it with firewire easy enough. For what its worth I'm transferring some shots of my late 70's gigs filmed on vhs to S8 quite enjoying it.
Back on topic sorry.

Another indeed important factor - a good player for the source material. Using crappy vcr means crappy source in the first place to work with. It'll be next to impossible to get any good result after that.

But counter-intuitively, high end vcr is NOT always the definite answer.

I do have the previous model JVC vcr (vs10 or 20, forgot the exact model no.) that would get excellent output 95% of tapes. But for the last batch of the tapes I captured the signal seems so weak that JVC decided to output blue screen for most of the time. I had no choice but to try with other machines. To my surprise the old Panasonic (NV-F70, quite a decent ones) despite wobble/shaky pics sometimes, still give some recognizable output - and get the job done.

In the end it would be better to have a few (or as much as you can) vcrs varying from midrange to hi-end ones, just in case.