Best way to get high quality video from miniDV and VHS to DVD (1 Viewer)

[MikeZz1]

What is the best way to get high quality video from miniDV tapes made on a Panasonic PV-GS120 and VHS SP tapes on a Windows 10 PC?

My old Windows XP PC had a Firewire connection. I had used a DVI to Firewire cable and the Panasonic supplied software or built in Windows media creator to import .AVI files for use with Adobe Premier Elements or supplied software to make DVDs of our home movies. My supplied Panasonic software is not for Windows 10 and new pc has no firewire. I just upgraded the latest Adobe Premier Elements 22 but not sure that can help with the import.

I do have a Toshiba VHS/DVD Combo Recorder/Player that can take S-Video IN and make a DVD. I'm not sure if this camcorder is 480 of 720 but I'd like to keep the same quality it records in which used to be good. Combo unit can make direct DVDs but the menus it creates mostly won't play on a standard DVD player. I could import to DVDs in Premiere Elements to trim and add menus and chapters but i read that this would save to MPEG2 twice lowering quality.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[Peter Apruzzese]

Can your new PC accept cards? See on Amazon

I used a similar one in an office PC last year to access some data on old Mac drives which only had FireWire.

 

[MikeZz1]

I believe I have an open pcie x1 slot. I'm assuming Premiere Elements can directly capture .avi files from the camcorder thru Firewire? Not sure which program Windows XP had something that captured from the camcorder but I remember it saved as .avi files. Avi would be the best quality? Somewhere I read that miniDV is stored as digital and capturing just transfers to pc without re-compressing but i'm not sure.

For my VHS tapes, would making a DVD on the combo recorder and then adding it to a Premier project loose quality or would I be better off recording the VHS from the S-Video output to the camcorder to transfer to the PC as above?

Thanks for the help.

 

[Peter Apruzzese]

I don’t know re: Premiere as we were simply copying off video and graphics files that were stored on those drives. Assuming you can ingest into Premiere, I would take that approach instead of the tape to DVD process. DVDs are lossy, so it’s best to start with uncompressed files. I do believe miniDV should transfer without compression, but I’ve never used it I don’t know which input format might be best for you, this article has some good explanations: https://www.videomaker.com/article/c10/15362-video-formats-explained/