Dropped frames

[Paul LS]

As I mentioned I had the exact same, a solid second or two of freeze. Hopefully a different VCR may help but in the end the only way I solved it was with the TBC. Only other thing to do is as I said over on the Adobe forum, if you have a VCR/DVD combo transfer the video to the DVD and then capture the DVD over the Pyro. VCR/DVD combos are not susceptible to the dropped frames like analog bridge capture.

[justmytype]

I guess I'll try my dad's VCR and if that doesn't work I'll buy a DVD/VCR recorder. How does the quality of DVD/VCR conversion compare to converting just from a VCR? Any good DVD/VCR recorder suggestions? Thanks!

[Paul LS]

I have an old "original" Liteon DVD recorder than I just hook up to my VCR. The quality of the image on the DVD is surprisingly good and the conversion with the Pyro does not degrade it. As your original source material is VHS tapes the conversion to DVD to DV-AVI should not impact the quality too much. The thing that impact the quality the greatest is the VCR that you are using. Obviously going straight to DV-AVI would be better, but if you need the TBC you are looking at ~$200.

[DLRobison]

I have converted ~350 hours of film/VHS/Hi-8/D-8 to DVD. My ADS Pyro (p/n API-557) worked flawlessly for the D-8 and Hi-8 (when played in the D-8 camcorder). I was unable to get a good transfer of VHS via the ADS Pyro. The video came in, as did the audio, but they were not synchronized. I was converting old home video (up tp 26 years old) so I figured the tape was getting bad, but the transfer still failed very quickly (within 3 minutes) even with a commercial tape. I tried using different VHS players and different dip switch settings on the Pyro without success. I would have liked to have tried pass-through so I could have continued to use firewire, but my camcorder didn't have it. I considered buying a TBC, but they were too expensive and I wasn't sure one would really help. Eventually I gave up on the ADS Pyro for VHS and bought a Toshiba D-VR660 (~US$200) that has VHS and DVD recording/dubbing capabilities. It worked great (except for the early on failure that required a warranty repair). Most VHS tapes dubbed very easily, and it was relatively easy to split long VHS tapes onto multiple DVDs. I had a few VHS tapes that the Toshiba wouldn't play correctly, but I connected another VHS player to the Toshiba and did the transfer that way. All dubbing was done to DVD+RW media. I then used Premiere Elements 3 to convert the video files to AVI so all my video could be kept in that format. I converted about 100 hours of VHS using the Toshiba, which now serves as a family DVR because I got the version with a tuner.

[Chuck Engels]

Thanks for that report DL, good stuff to know when the Pyro can't handle the task.
Fortunately I haven't had any problems capturing any of my old VHS tapes