I'm a filmmaker who has a pile of projects on NTSC VHS's that I want to preserve into big (interlace-kept) avi's in high quality. I've been reading on this and other forums for years about doing such things; have bought the equipment and been doing learning tests off and on for awhile now. Gosh, there are so many things to learn about and keep track of with this! Anyway, my first question that I haven't found an answer to in my knowledge-aquiring/trial-and-erroring/googling...
When I do multiple captures of the same scene, the field order seems to be random initiated (<- my guess anyway). To explain: in viewing the resulting supposed almost identical captures in VirtualDub, half of my captures of the scene will have cut x be a clean "progressive" style cut from one shot to the other while the other half of the captures of the same scene will have that same cut interlaced. (I also notice that one style is always a scanline lower than the other.) I basically understand what is happening I think. At each starting of the capturing, the capture card is kicking in on either the top field or the bottom at its start, resulting in two different looking types of captures in the end, right? But I ask...
a) Is one of the two results more "correct" than the other? (I would assume that the one shifted down a scanline might be the "wrong" one if there is such a thing)
b) Is there a way to have all the captures turn out the same in this regard, a setting in VDub or something? (I am wanting to do to multiple captures and carry out the "averaging" technique with Avisynth, but as it is I have to throw out half my captures because averaging both of these together will create a mess as I want to keep things interlaced).
Sorry if these turn out to be rather basic questions, but I promise I've been trying to seek the answers on my own and they've just eluded me so far. Thanks for listening.
Rough capturing approach specs:
Hardware - AMD Athlon 2100+, PDI Deluxe card, JVC 9911U S-VHS
Software - VirtualDub or IuVCR for capturing, HuffYUV codec, Avisynth 2.5 (for averaging after capturing)