To save time, he sent the tapes to a professional.
I don't understand why you wouldn't record the audio and video stream differently - with an SVHS player, you could output s-video and capture that at better quality and then audio separately from the RCA lines. And then use virtualdubmod to time it properly, then curate.
But then again, if it randomly got out of sync in recording, that could be annoying so maybe I don't fully understand the issue.
Yes, it's clear that using a broken capture device or a system that doesn't properly sync the timestamps between video and audio captures (ie: driver issue) is the core issue.
Just choosing a different capture device or finding one with less broken driver support would have been workable.
From what I understand of VCRs the S-Video output is only active for S-VHS tapes. Unless their recorder used those tapes it wouldn’t have been an advantage - or even work at all.
What he did do was use the 3 FBAS connectors for Stereo Audio and Composite video. Still subtle issues can crop up because analogue video is hard.
S-Video output on SVHC players is active for both VHS and S-VHS tapes. VHS (normal) signal is not exactly the same as composite, the Y and C signals are encoded differently, meaning there _can_ be a benefit from only decoding VHS and not re-encoding into composite.
I don't understand why you wouldn't record the audio and video stream differently - with an SVHS player, you could output s-video and capture that at better quality and then audio separately from the RCA lines. And then use virtualdubmod to time it properly, then curate.
But then again, if it randomly got out of sync in recording, that could be annoying so maybe I don't fully understand the issue.