I suspect you won’t want to compress them at all – because the old VHS machines had pretty savage agc on the recorders, so squashing it a bit more might make it worse. Expect to have to do so cropping and stretching as so many old VHS tapes have the picture disturbance at the bottom where the head switching timing is a bit off – and a slight zoom in might be needed. If they need to look the same, then it will be a bit of tweaking and adjustment, with some sound level adjustments between clips if recorded on different machines. One thing that might throw you is if the replay VHS has FM sound and some of the tapes are older and have longitudinal sound tracks – which are much worse quality wise with a quite low top limit and often plenty of wow and flutter. I’ve never had much luck cleaning those up at all.
