My wife and I have about 40 hours’ worth of home video (VHS and 8MM) that we’ve generated over the years. All stuff that’s worthless to anyone else but priceless to us (our kids at 2 and 4 playing on the backyard swingset, for example).
Some of that video is 16 years old, and undoubtedly nearing the end of its lifespan. We’ve decided to get it off of its current analog media and onto DVD before it deteriorates any further.
We’ve checked with a few local camera shops, and they all will handle this task for us - for $50 a tape. That comes out to roughly $1000 for the full conversion. Additional DVDs (we are thinking of making backup copies for the grandmas, for instance) would be roughly $25 per tape/DVD - $500 per set.
It occurs to me that $1000 will purchase a lot of electronic equipment these days. What exactly would we need (beyond a VHS player and accompanying TV set, which we already have) to perform the transcription to DVD on our own?
(If it helps, our current computer is getting pretty old and is about ready to be replaced anyway. If all it would take is a bit of additional equipment on a new computer then we have that much more encouragement to purchase an a new computer).
I’m sure that you can hand them in so they can be transfered, but I am not sure who does this.
The other option is to get an ‘All In Wonder’ type of graphics card (That has TV-In capabilities), hook the camcorder to that card and digitise them into the computer. You would then need to get a DVD burner and encode the digitized version of your home movies to the DVD disk.
You get a dvd recorder. I tried the AIW computer idea, but its too time consuming for you.
So, a dvd recorder is cool. They write it to a dvd-r (some models). Costco has one for about $550.00 Yeah, thats what they cost. buydig.com has them for cheaper but costco has a more liberal return policy.
Frankly at this time, it’s better to just copy to another vhs cassette & wait for the price of recorders to drop. Dvds aren’t much better than vhs in the long run really. I was reading what Cecil has to say about that. The idea is how long into the future can you count on dvd players?
Both Phillips and Pioneer make consumer-grade DVD burners (no computer, just plug in an a/v source, a blank disc, and go.
They (last I heard were still arguing over exact format) - do some research, decide what sounds good:
Video capture to computer, then burn to DVD
Phillips stand-alone DVD burner
Pioneer stand-alone DVD burner
The critical piece here is the 8mm video - get that off that format while your playback unit still works.
If you really want to dup this stuff, ignore the following - the dup costs will eat you alive:
look in your yellow pages under ‘video transfer’ - there may be a whole lot of leeway in prices when you deal with the real shop, and are talking about 40 hrs. Or not - even pro-grade equipment works at 1x speed for transfers from tape.
(yes, I know about high-speed tape duplicators, but they are not germaine to this situation.)
If you have a reasonably fast computer, all you need is a $50 TV card (most have RCA jacks to input the signal from your VCR. Buy something like this to input the audio) and a $230 DVD-R drive.
It will require a bit of research into video capture and DVD authoring to pull it off, plus 2-10 times the length of the video for encoding time, depending on the speed of your computer, which encoder you’re using, whether you use MPEG-1 or MPEG-2, and a few other factors.
If you’re super-cheap, you can just buy the TV card, encode the videos, and burn them onto VCDs or SVCDs, which are regular CDs that you can burn with any CD burner, but will work in your DVD player. The downside, of course, is that they offer far less space than DVDs. You can fit 80 minutes on a standard VCD, and about half that on a higher quality SVCD.
I used the computer thingy with VHS (Hi8 was much better looking in dvd capture) but a dvd didn’t look much better than a vcd. So I just captured to vcd format. then I noticed that I could put a huge amount of hours of vcd onto a dvd. I did that by just using the vcd mpg capture files & dragging them to a dvd writer program. Used a little sharpening & its looks great, but I play at smaller than full screen.
Can you describe what a VCD looks like when it’s played? Some descriptions I’ve seen seem to imply that the picture size is smaller than the TV screen. Also what is the quality of the picture? I need to save some home movies and I was thinking about saving them to vcd until dvd writers come down in price.
The picture on a VCD takes up the full screen on a regular TV (unless you royally screwed up when encoding it).
The quality of the picture is widely variable, depending on your source, quality of components, which encoder you’re using, and which settings you’re using in that encoder. At best, you’ll have to try really hard to distinguish between a VCD and a VHS tape. At worst, it’ll be a blocky mess. If you don’t want to learn all the ins and outs of video encoding, download TMPGenc, load the VCD profile, and leave the rest of the settings alone. You should have an acceptable result.
Whatever you do, though, never ever use the encoder built in to the Nero CD burning program. It’s crap. A great burning program, but a terrible encoder.
" Whatever you do, though, never ever use the encoder built in to the Nero CD burning program. It’s crap. A great burning program, but a terrible encoder."
Works fine for me…
Nero Vision is their new software for capturing. Give it a try. Free, at nero.com if you own nero.
"The picture on a VCD takes up the full screen on a regular TV (unless you royally screwed up when encoding it). "
Sometimes “royally screwed up” looks better. You never know until you give it a shot.
As it turns out, a friend whom I described our situation to has offered to loan us his DVD recorder long enough for a trial run (and maybe long enough to make an initial copy of the VHS/8MM tapes).
What I meant was not that it didn’t work, but that the quality is shit, compared to every other encoder and it takes a hell of a lot longer to encode. Go to pretty much any video encoding forum on the web, tell them you use Nero to encode, and watch them laugh so hard that they forgot what your question was.
Are you serious? Most videos are made for a screen with an aspect ratio the size of a TV. If you squash all the video into the center of the screen, Uncle Jim’s face is going to look a helluva lot wider than it does in real life.
Yeah, I don’t mean widescreen–which might do what you say & that happened to me once. I think I did it at half dvd resolution once & it looked pretty decent.