Okay, odd technical setup question: say I needed to dub commercial-quality recordings onto VHS, on a regular basis (say, a few dozen a week, all of different subjects, not giant production runs of one movie), from a digital source. Is there any faster way to do it than a real time duplication, without having to use a full, commercial-scale high-speed duplication machine like a Sony Sprinter?
I’m guessing “no”—as this would be at best a strange, niche need for an eyebrow-raisingly obsolete format. But I thought I should ask to be certain.
Well, if you duplicated the digital source and had your hands on a dozen VHS recorders, you could do them in parallel in real time instead of sequentially.
Much easier to purchase a DVD duplicator, say 1:4 or 1:6 and make DVD’s. They do high speed duplication so you can make quite a few duplicates quickly and they are pretty cheap.
There used to be commercial VHS machines which could record faster than real time, IIRC. Not sure what they used to cost, I guess the question is - what’s your time worth?
If I had to do this, absent commercial fast recording equipment, I’d line up a row of VHS decks that respond to the same remote, and start recording the pack of them at once from the same feed. Worst case, you have a static introduction slide screen that gets recorded at first - and once you’ve started recording on all the decks individually, you start up the video feed. A few extra seconds on some tapes would not be a big deal. Just make sure there’s some black screen for a while at the end of the video giving you time to stop recording, so you don’t end up recording your Windows desktop at the end.
This. Old VHS recorders must be a dime a dozen. The biggest challenge would be converting the signal to the best video format (S-Video?) and splitting the analog signal to multiple VCRs.