[myself248]

For film transfer, you should at least be setting manual exposure control on the camera. But realistically, matching the film frame-advance rate precisely to the camera shutter rate will be all sorts of tricky, and you should either have proper synchronization, or do it a frame at a time and then capture the audio separately.

For any video format, you're spot-on -- using S-Video instead of composite does wonders for the quality, although if it was recorded from a composite source, you won't squeeze blood from a stone. There are plenty of capture cards with Y/C inputs, and modern PCs are fast enough to keep up with even the pathetically buffer-starved models.