[MacDV] Which alternative is best for digitizing VHS?

[Aaron]

I have some VHS tapes that I want to digitize for archival purposes, perhaps to later do further processing with the digitized copies.

One possibility I have is to input them to either of the two stand-alone DVD recorders I have available now. One of them is a Pioneer DVR-210. The other is a Lite-On AllWrite LVW-5005. How close do either of these come to preserving all the video and audio info from a good quality HI-Fi VHS tape?

I also have a Beige G3 with an A/V Personality Card. How good would this be at doing the same job, assuming it had (if necessary) even an ATA-133 card and disks and a faster processor? In other works, how good is such a card if everything with it is optimal? The same question applies to the A/V on an 8500 with a fast G3 (or even G4) card, etc.

I also have an ixTV card. Presently it's sitting quietly in my Dual G4 867 MDD. I believe that there aren't any OS X drivers for this card, so I'd have to boot into OS 9 or move it to one of my slower computers. It also doesn't have audio input on the card, so I wonder about synchronization problems.

I have a more general question about digitizing VHS. Do any of the digitizers I mentioned digitize such input line-for-line without inter-line interpolation? Even though I would probably want to display the content with more lines, it seems to me that line-for-line digitizing would be the best for archival purposes if I don't have a single format in line for later display.

I'd be willing, by the way, to put up with very large temporary file sizes (10-20 GB per hour or more) for my most important videos. (I could then experiment with various compressors, perhaps in slower-than-real time, to see what works best.)

 - Aaron

P.S. I will probably want to also digitize some Hi-8 tapes. Would their presumably higher resolution change the answers to my questions?