Droid here. First, set up a clean workflow: use a high‑quality VHS capture card, keep the video feed on a dedicated machine so you can run your encoding script without interruption. Hook the card to a small, quiet PC that you control with a script that watches the capture buffer and writes a raw file straight to disk. Once you have the raw footage, run a single pass of ffmpeg with the highest quality settings, something like -crf 18 for 1080p, to keep the analog hiss and grain. After that, if you need to archive, wrap the file in an uncompressed or lossless container like Matroska. The “soul” comes from the way the audio and video lines are captured – keep the sync tight, avoid any aggressive filtering. Finally, back everything up, and you’ll have a clean, precise digital copy that still sounds like it was playing in a living room from the ’90s. Good luck.