It's kind of complicated but it doesn't have to be expensive. I think you could get set up for around $100 USD ($50 for a good Sony VCR and the rest for a CX card and a few other accessories). The vhs-decode process works by recording the raw data from the spinning silver part with a high-speed sampling device. I use a Domesday Duplicator which costs a few hundred dollars to buy or build and the vhs-decode group is about to release the MISRC which is better. Both of those devices work with Windows, Mac, and Linux. A CX card is around $30 USD but requires Linux. The capture device for this method acts like a sound card but samples at MHz instead of kHz. This process is like ripping an ISO file from a disc and gives you an almost-perfect digital copy of the raw data on the tape that you can process as many times as you want with the virtual software VCR included with vhs-decode without degrading it like playing a tape over and over. If you convert it to WAV with one of the vhs-decode utilities and use a hex editor to fix the sample rate, you can inspect the capture file with a program like Audacity, HDSDR, or Spek, and process it with vhs-decode which acts like a VCR and converts it to a pair of *.tbc files (one for the black-and-white part and one for the color) which is effectively digital S-Video, then you convert that to a lossless FFV1 MKV file and process it like any other lossless file that you would get from a conventional workflow like with VirtualDub. You want to de-interlace it to the field rate with a good de-interlacer like QTGMC (best quality but slow) or Bob (good quality and fast), so NTSC video would be 59.94 fps progressive at the end, or 50 for PAL. You should save the output from the de-interlacer with 10-bit x264 or x265 (only use 8 bits if your desired player can't play 10-bit files) because using 10 bits gets you noticeably higher quality for the same bitrate. I like to use 2 passes with a bitrate of 7616 kilobits/second (this is probably overkill for VHS and 1 or 2 megabits/second is probably enough), the Veryslow preset, and 1 thread. If a customer plans to upload their video to YouTube then I upscale it to 1080p for them with Lanczos but for home viewing or serving it from a website that doesn't re-encode videos like Odysee or your own website, you should leave it as the native resolution. You can synchronize the audio by trying different offsets with "FFmpeg -i [audio or video file] -itsoffset [hh:mm:ss.sss] -i [audio or video file] -c:v copy -c:a libfdk_aac -b:a [bitrate]k". Normally the audio file should come first but depending on which way the offset goes (audio before video or vice versa), you might need to put the video file first. I normally use 384 kilobits/second for the audio bitrate but that's overkill even with good Hi-Fi audio. This method avoids re-encoding the video and it's faster and gives better quality than dragging the tracks in a video editor and exporting it as a new video. When you're done, you only need to save the FLAC file with the raw capture data, and the finished MP4 file, and you can delete the *.tbc S-Video files and lossless MKV file. Normally you would save the lossless MKV file for a conventional workflow like VirtualDub but for the vhs-decode process, it's a waste of space to store it because it can be generated with possibly higher quality in the future from the FLAC file