So I want to capture my wedding video so I can do some editing and create a nice finished product (so when my wife wants to watch it, we can watch a 10-minute wrap-up instead of an hour and a half of snorrreee… WHAT, WHAT… oh, sorry, I feel asleep).
To capture the video, I have two options: 1) a USB video grabber (composite out on the VCR to USB) or 2) my Hauppauge video capture card (composite out on the VCR to composite-in on the capture card). You would think that the composite to composite would work best since there is no conversion, but if you did, you thought wrong. After hours of trying to get the video capture to work better through the video capture card, I just came to the conclusion that the USB video grabber works best.
The biggest problem I had with the capture card was capturing audio. I tried using four different video capture software programs but the only way to capture the audio was through either the line-in or the microphone jacks but no option to use the white and red composite jacks on the capture card. If there is no software that captures audio through these jacks, then what purpose do they serve? My best guess is that I just need to keep looking for software that does. Fortunately, I have a composite audio to 1/8″ audio plug so I could still do the capture but the quality of the audio isn’t very good.
In conclusion, in every test I did, the video capture through the USB video grabber worked best - for both video and audio capture.