I've looked for a VHS-to-digital converter, but couldn't find any. The only seeming solution is getting a TV tuner card, plugging an old VHS player to it, and actually playing the VHS on it, and using TV Tuner software to record it.
There are old player models with both a vhs and a dvd writer in one box, that copy from vhs to dvd. That's a digitizer in a box.
And most dvd-recorders have better comb filters and time base correction than most other things that have composite inputs, and especially the ones with a vhs player built in. They know they have to clean up a vhs's signal.
So if you're going to use home equipment, that is an easy way to get better than average input stage for analog video and vhs in particular which needs tbc as well as merely adc.
Capture cards actually usually have pretty crap composite input, even ones that don't even have any other input!
But if I cared about the capture at all I'd use a professional media service.
Capturing anything analog, especially for a one-last-time-then-live-with-the-result-for-the-rest-of-time... is ALL about the quality of the initial analog read, and that is the kind of thing where it gets better the more you spend, and tv stations and professional shops have $50,000 machines and the people to operate them that you just are not going to match.
But it can't just be anyone with an ad in the phone book that says we convert vhs tapes. Many of those are nothing but a dude no better equipped in either hardware or wetware than yourself.
I don't know that there are any VHS devices that go straight to digital... Mostly it does come down to capture cards... if you can, use an SVHS Stereo of higher quality for the player, and svhs input... you'll get slightly higher quality.
Though it's been well over a decade since I've touched/used anything like this. I do have a friend that does some conversions as a business... he uses pro grade svhs player and it's slightly better quality, but far from ideal.
Similar for old super-8 videos, mostly comes down to playing and recording via webcam in a controlled environment. If you go completely black, the recording washes out, so want some light in the playback/recording, and then runs through some filters.
For film transfer, you should at least be setting manual exposure control on the camera. But realistically, matching the film frame-advance rate precisely to the camera shutter rate will be all sorts of tricky, and you should either have proper synchronization, or do it a frame at a time and then capture the audio separately.
For any video format, you're spot-on -- using S-Video instead of composite does wonders for the quality, although if it was recorded from a composite source, you won't squeeze blood from a stone. There are plenty of capture cards with Y/C inputs, and modern PCs are fast enough to keep up with even the pathetically buffer-starved models.
I've looked for a VHS-to-digital converter, but couldn't find any. The only seeming solution is getting a TV tuner card, plugging an old VHS player to it, and actually playing the VHS on it, and using TV Tuner software to record it.