Apple Thunderbolt to FireWire Adapter

My thoughts are that the VHS is a little unstable whereas the Digital-8 copy corrects this.

At least you can capture from the D-8 tape.

Placing a TBC (timebase corrector) between the VHS deck and D-8 camera analogue inputs may help in a direct pass through approach.

Al

I have run into this problem many times when dealing with old VHS tape and the solution is almost always to add a time base corrector. You would run the composite video out from the VHS into the TBC then out to the the hi8 camera or a digital converter - which then goes via FireWire blah, blah, blah into your computer. This usually works well.  If you have access to a TBC, give this a shot. 

Right. Thanks. It's a Digital 8 camera.

Honestly I'm surprised this works at all with FCP in pass through. You might try using the QuickTime player and see if that works better.

AFAIR my old JVC SVHS has TBC.

Anyway, when I digitized old VHS, I 1st recorded to D8 tape (to have a digital tape to archive -- but those tapes have been untouched for 20 years) with unnEUtered Sony TRV320E, then fed that to iMovie 1-6 and then exported to .dv archives (those archives I have used) in max 9 min 27 sec chunks (i.e. <2G that was the upper file size in older iMovie). I did also capture a few short tapes with analog-to-DV passthrough straight to iMovie.

Compared to the regular JVC VHS, the SVHS quality was very much the same and AFAIR the mono audio had a little more noise.

A few bad D8 tapes did have dropouts and iMovie had to be forced to ignore timecode breaks to try to salvage some of the footage.

I still have the DV gear (1998 PowerMac 8600/200 with a DV card with System 9 and 2004 PowerBook G4 with OS X 10.5.8 and prefer to use that for nowadays very occasional VHS or DV work although Mac mini 2018 with Mojave also seems to work with iMovie HD 6 and some FW-Thunderbolt adapters.

May I ask exactly what camera you're using?