How to digitise old NTSC home videos for highest quality (with PAL player)? 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.
For VHS, the signal will be kept highest quality if you connect via s-video, so yes, you should use an s-video cable if your VCR has an s-video output.

Depending on how good your VCR is, you may get a significant improvement from a better deck.  Quality of the read heads on various VCRs can vary a fair bit and while the majority of the difference was in recording quality, there were difference in playback quality as well.  That said, finding a good VHS deck in good condition is probably difficult these days.

I'm not sure about the color correction, most likely it is something specific to your capture device.

The signal is most certainly interlaced.  Both NTSC and PAL were interlaced formats.  NTSC video should be 29.97 frames per second.  That is the NTSC standard.  The resolution should ideally be 720 by 480 using oval pixels with a .9 pixel compression.

You didn't ask about it specifically, but using a DV codec should give the maximum quality though it will also be quite large.  Once you have a DV codec capture of the VHS tape, then using a traditional 2 pass transcode to either h.264 (viewing on computer or blu-ray) or MPEG-2 (DVD) should work well.