Capturing HDMI without Thunderbolt Hardware

Greetings, first time poster here and I would like some guidance on the best way to capture my Hi-8 analog player output. I am in the process of digitizing my families HI-8 videos. I have a Sony EV-C100 HI-8 player with a S-Video output. I hope to get the best possible quality that I can before importing into Premier Pro or equivalent. It appears that my player does not have a built in TBC. Also, no Thunderbolt connection on my computer. What are my options with a budget of $1500?

What you really mean is: no Firewire i guess ? otherwise you could use a Digital8 camera and transfer the Hi8 by Firewire into the PC effortless….
No TBC in the camera…. you could use a DVD-recorder as passthrough, instead of a TBC… real pro TBC's are rare and expensive, when only using once… any plans for a capture device ? do you already have some equipment ? capturing analog video with a computer or any laptop is a tricky bussines.
once you have a stable analog signal, i would advise to convert s-video or component to SDI or HDMI and use a SDI/HDMI recorder like the Video Assist from BMD, to record, it also depends on your budget, or eaz of use,
China converters will mess up your aspect ratio to 16:9 either stretched, or 4:3 within pillar bars, there are some exeptions in those China converters i discovered, so ask me if you want to go down that path…
Try to stay away from using composte video, use minimal s-video.
dvd-recorders can be found at thrift stores, keep in mind that sometimes high quality outputs are sometimes used only for to output the optical drive, with certain combo devices….

so (your)budget wise, you could manage this, and have good quality.
advantage of using the Video Assist, is , that you can record in ProRes, ProRes422LT should be enough, you do need to de-interlace if you want to playback on regular LCD/OLED tv/monitor, software wise you can also do playback de-interlacing, setting VLC to de-interlace, only the Studio version of Davinci Resolve can do de-interlacing, or you should de-interlace with other software.

For passthrough dvd-recorder/combo recorder look for Panasonic ones, some JVC vcr's claim to have TBC, but is often just not enough, some Panasonic models are realy good, like My DMR-ES35V, I'm in the former PAL region but i discovered recently in a YT video that the US version also does has the "VHS fresh" feature, it digitizes the analog signal and converts back to analog, but has a rocksteady signal.

Btw. having a Digital8 player and installing a Firewire PCI card into the computer would also stay within your budget, no need for TBC because the Digital8 interface povides in that.