Having digitised a few VHS tapes, the (personal) time consumer was verifying whether the capture was successful and of acceptable quality. Is anyone aware of a way to automate the quality control?
Just take a look at the first minute and the last minute. If they're OK, it's pretty assured the rest is.
For damaged cassettes, you can move the tape from one cassette to another. If the tape is broken, packing tape will get it spliced well enough. If the leader or trailer is bad, you can cut it off and reattach the end to the spool. If the recording is lousy, cleaning the VCR heads with alcohol usually will fix it.
AI! But seriously, there's probably no substitute for having a human watch the entire capture to ensure it came out right. "Acceptable quality" is subjective. To really be sure it came out right, you'd have to watch it side-by-side with the original, to tell whether glitches in the capture are in the original, or a result of a faulty capture.
It may be overkill, but it's an archive. Overkill is permissible.
Remember, there's no going back to do it again -- once the video is digitized, the tapes will go away forever.
That said, I think a bitrate of about 0.78GB/hr may be better. It may still be overkill, but will let a T120 tape recorded in SLP mode (6 hours) to fit into one single-layer M-Disc DVD-R, which may make sense for some media.
But whatever the case, bits are cheap these days. Data storage is definitely the least expensive part of any operation like this and it tends to get cheaper over time.
The most expensive part of things like this is the time it takes to make it happen, and bitrate (whether high or low) doesn't have a substantial impact on that time.
Doing one tape a night, it'll take 6 years of calendar time. 3 years if you buy a dedicated computer to do it, at two tapes a day.
The good news is that's calendar time, not your time, which is pressing "record" on your computer and "play" on the VHS machine.