Just curious to hear folks thoughts.

I usually upscale my LD and VHS to 1080p before capturing them. But is that necessarily the right thing to do?

Would it be better to remain true to the source and capture at 240p, 480p, 576p, 720p etc of whatever you are capturingand just upscale for playback?

Also, does anyone know much about Kramer processors?

Capturing from Laserdiscs takes some compromise as there isn’t a perfect setup. All capture cards in existence lack the good y/c separation which is essential for good Laserdisc video. There is really one or two Laserdisc players with good s-video output (y/c already separated). You will need an interface to take care of this step externally. Out of all the devices I have tested Lumagen Radiance 2144 and Crystalio II came close to perfection (in the order best to very good). These video processors don’t output video at 480i which is the native output format of Laserdiscs (or closest). They will output 480p or above which means they do de-interlacing also (one extra step from the purest form). Most video video processors if not all convert the rec.601 color space (SD color gamut) to rec.709 (HD color gamut) before any output. This will cause issues with the capture gear because it will expect rec.601 when fed 480p. To avoid color issues, I would chose to output in HD resolutions of 720p or 1080p. Now the capture card will apply the correct color decoder of rec.709.

So you can use the composite output of your laserdisc player then you are in the mercy of your capture cards inferior y/c separation or you can use an external box. But due to the way these devices were design, you will need to do multiple steps before you feed your signal to your capture device. In my opinion a good y/c separation is more important than great deinterlacing or scaling you could in PC. Both Crystalio II and Lumagen Radiance won’t be far behind of any PC processing (but PC can still do better with multiple passes).

I would recommend 720p60 for video based material and 1080p24 for film based material. At these resolutions there is not much point in post processing.

Get a copy of video essentials if you havent already and run the snell and Wilcox test to see how much detail you are extracting. It was very revealing when I first got my copy. It allowed me to further tweak the settings in my tv and the c2 to get the best picture. If you dont have it running when youre making adjustments then you're just guessing.