Any experience with turning VHS tapes into DVD's

[DISNEY FIX]

I am going to get all my taped stuff onto DVD but how? Buy a peice of hardware and do it myself or send them out to be done by Costco or Target????? What have you guys done? In a perfect world I would love to put them on my computer and store them in my backup drive. what about the HD mini tapes can those be put into HD disks. Help, this is getting more complex the more I look into it.

 

[disneynutz]

You might have better luck getting an answer by posting your questions here: http://www.disboards.com/forumdisplay.php?f=97

Bill

 

[DISNEY FIX]

I did a search in that forum and didn't come up with much. I figure one of us DVC nuts has to have shot a million hours of tape and had gone through this already. Thanks for the heads up though.

 

[tjkraz]

I don't know what places charge to convert tapes but it's pretty easy to do yourself these days. Just need the hardware to do it.

If your perfect world is digital storage, I'd suggest just going that route.

I have a Mac with the Elgato EyeTV box. The main use is to watch and record TV on the computer but it has connectors for attaching a VCR. With the EyeTV software, I record several TV programs in HDTV quality. Takes a couple minutes to edit them to remove commercials. Then they are added to my iTunes library where I can watch them on the computer, copy to iPhone / iPad and even watch on the Apple TV.

Recording from a VCR is pretty much the same. Connect the VCR and start the EyeTV recording. When done the content is readily available on the computer / iPhone / iPad / Apple TV. I converted hours of old home videos from VHS and camcorder to digital over the span of a couple days.

For a Windows PC, check out some of the encoders from Hauppauge.

Both companies offer many different product with different feature sets. For simplicity you probably want one that will connect via USB. One thing to look for is whether the tuner has SOFTWARE or HARDWARE encoding. The ones that only do software encoding will be cheaper but you need a pretty modern computer in order to get good quality. Software encoders will draw on the computer's resources (CPU, memory) when creating the digital file. Hardware encoders cost more but they do most of the work rather than relying on the computer to which it's attached.

It really isn't a difficult process once you have the equipment. If you put the videos in digital format you can then archive them to DVD or subscribe to an online backup service like Carbonite or iDrive. Then you never have to worry about losing your cherished videos due to fire, obsolete medium (VHS), hard drive failure, etc.

 

[WilsonFlyer]

I'm pretty much a videophile and am pretty much an expert on everything HD and video.

Having said that, I pretty much concur with everything Tim said above, but I would like to add this. There really is no good consumer methodology for high-speed dubbing from VHS to DVD. why does that matter? It matters because everything must be done in real time. If you have a VHS that's an hour, you can pretty much reserve a minimum of an hour and a half to get it over to DVD and that's after you learn the workflow. The tools are good, especially the Hauppauge stuff which I have used for 20 years, but the process is just real time by its very nature. There's just no real way around it. Most people get really frustrated quickly when they get everything home and put it all together only to realize this after the fact. At least you've been told now and know this going in.

Please be aware of this too. I've heard so many people rave about how good the quality of thier VHS library was and how great it's going to look once they get it on DVD. Wrong! It's going to look like crap. Why? Because by today's technology and today's video display standards, it was crap to begin with. Not your videos, but the equipment and technology with which it was produced. It's just the nature of what it was, especially if you recorded it in some EP mode to get more time on less tape. GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. Just preparing you.

Know that you're not going to convert those Disney VHS tapes to DVD. It's beyond the scope of this course to go into but unless you're willing to drop a significant quantity of quarters and become quite an expert at something called Macrovision and it's removal, you can forget anything commercially mastered. It's all protected and the analog protection technologies were actually better than today's digital protections, believe it or not. Home movies? Yes. Commercially purchased content? Throw them away, buy a replacement DVD or keep your VHS player and pray it doesn't break. Those are your only choices.

I'm not even sure they're still making them, but I have several VHS/DVD recorder combo units made by Panasonic in years past. The great thing about them was you just put a blank DVD in it and pressed "Dub" and walked away, generally speaking. It did all the work. They were great for what they were and some even had tuners and HDs in them for recording analog and digital/ATSC OTA content. I still have one of the newer ones in my living room rack "just in case." Take a look at eBay. There used to be a woman up there selling refurbs (I bought two or three from her over the years.) and they were like new.

A great resource is www.avsforums.com. I've been over there since 1998 and it is the source for ALL things video and HDTV on the internet. Might be good to drop by over there and spend some time just reading if you have a lot of these to do and really are willing to invest some time and money in retaining your library. There are a hundred ways to do what you're trying to do, and some are better, some are faster, and some are spendier than others. It might be worthy of further research. YMMV.

Let me know if you have any questions. I'd be happy to help any way I can.

BTW, in response to your question about stores doing the conversions for you, these services used to be VERY spendy. Admittedly, I haven't priced any of them lately but my guess would be that if you have anything over a few tapes, you're going to find you could have bought the equipment to do it yourself and saved a LOT of money. However, as always, there's no such thing as a free lunch. ;-) What you will give up is a lot of time. We all have to put a monetary value on that and weigh out the options, don't we? Every single day.

 

[WilsonFlyer]

BTW, are we talking about Digital VHS? If we are, that's a whole different ballgame. I just assumed you were talking about VHS derivations for the most part. If that assumption was incorrect, please tell me what the EXACT sources are and let me see if I Can help.

 

[kbeam]

I'm doing mine now. I'm copying both full size VHS tapes and the little ones (not 8mm). I'm using this and it's a piece of cake. It comes with the software and the little box that holds the cables. Just hooks right up to the pc. Of course, you'll need a DVD writer, too.

http://www.amazon.com/Honestech-VHS...T30O/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1327430596&sr=8-1

 

[DISNEY FIX]

Thanks guys this will be a work in progress. What I have is a Sony HDR-HC3 wich uses mini HD tapes. I just bought a Sony DVDirect. Plug the 2 together and put in a DVD disk and is recording now. I have 15 days to return it if I don't like it.
I would prefer to make HD DVD's I don't think I can going from the i-link cable. Is that correct?
I also thought about putting or copying some of this stuff onto SD cards? Good ....Bad any input...
I have 25 Mini tapes that would of make it expensive to send out and still couldn't get it produced in HD.

 

[WilsonFlyer]

I'm pretty sure that camera is digital natively. Probably .mp4s or something similar. The software that came with the camera should allow you to offload from those tapes to files directly to your PC.

This is a piece of cake if that's true. It's still real-time because tape by nature is linear, but the good news is that you can do the transfers lossless. Trying to do this via any kind of capture device is just crazy as you would lose all kinds of quality in the transfers and you would STILL have to re-master them to DVD.

What you bought should be fine but is just a more expensive solution, IMO.

Get the files off and get Adobe Premier Elements (and a fairly fast PC) and do some reading. If the software that came with your camera doesn't have download capabilities directly from the tapes, there's a 99% chance Premiere Elements will do it FOR YOU. You can then burn DVD's (or even HD AVCHD DVDs playable on Bluray players) from this camera that are equal to the original tapes.

 

[tjkraz]

After giving this a little more thought, one more suggestion: Personally I would view getting the content into digital format as your primary objective and reauthorizing for DVD as a secondary objective.

DVD burners have advanced quite a bit over the years but there is still margin for error. You could run into unforeseen glitches during either the authoring process (preparing video for the DVD) or when burning the physical DVD. And unless you plan to watch every minute of the DVDs to confirm their quality after completion, it could be years before you discover any problems.

And that's not even taking into consideration the possibility of DVDs degrading years down the road, being lost, being destroyed in a fire or some other mishap, etc. Heck, even sunlight shining in your windows onto the surface of a DVD-R could--over time--render them unplayable.

If the video content is already in a digital format...great. Get those files onto your computer and do everything in your power to protect them. Best solution is on-line backup, IMO. For $40-50 per year you can subscribe to a service like Carbonite or iDrive which will securely store those files--and any other personal content (correspondence, tax returns, Quicken files, etc.)--for years to come.

Then you will always have the original files available to burn to DVD, Bluray or whatever other format is yet to come.

I have about 30 gigabytes of home videos spanning 10+ years in digital format. The video was originally taken with 3-4 different camcorders and converted to MP4. The videos include my wife discovering that she was pregnant, kids' birthdays, school programs, vacations, family members who passed-away years ago, and so on. No way I would rely on a single plastic DVD-R to protect that content. $50 per year for a backup service will add up over time but it's worth it given the value involved. This stuff is priceless.

 

[DISNEY FIX]

I'm pretty sure that camera is digital natively. Probably .mp4s or something similar. The software that came with the camera should allow you to offload from those tapes to files directly to your PC.

This is a piece of cake if that's true. It's still real-time because tape by nature is linear, but the good news is that you can do the transfers lossless. Trying to do this via any kind of capture device is just crazy as you would lose all kinds of quality in the transfers and you would STILL have to re-master them to DVD.

What you bought should be fine but is just a more expensive solution, IMO.

Get the files off and get Adobe Premier Elements (and a fairly fast PC) and do some reading. If the software that came with your camera doesn't have download capabilities directly from the tapes, there's a 99% chance Premiere Elements will do it FOR YOU. You can then burn DVD's (or even HD AVCHD DVDs playable on Bluray players) from this camera that are equal to the original tapes.

Ok, What method of getting the files to my computer do you recommend trying. I don't see a way of doing it directly from the recorder......the untrained brain.

 

[WilsonFlyer]

That camera probably has a firewire port. If it's indeed digital mini from that generation, that's almost a guarantee. You'll obviously need a firewire port (supported by the software you choose to use) in the PC or Mac you're going to use for the transfer. That's your common denominator. If the software that came with the camera doesn't have a transfer option, I would be very surprised, especially form Sony (I'm admittedly a Canon bigot, but I've owned and own Sony's too.). Even if it doesn't, there certainly ought to be a download from Sony that does.

Not to sound short with you, but all the rest of the answers are right there in the paragraph you quoted in your question. It's not necessarily hard, but there's no magic bullet either. If that's what you're looking, you'll have to send them off to some third party who doesn't care, and then worry about how to maintain the delicate media they send back to you over the years.

 

[WilsonFlyer]

I just did some quick research (Google is my friend.) and apparently Sony didn't ship any software with that camera. I'm not even sure it has a firewire port. I'm still researching that. Firewire on the PC can be much trickier than on the Mac. Premier Elements supports downloading from any firewire equipped camera so long as your PC recognizes the firewire port.

There are also services that convert these mini DV (not "HD" but DIGITAL VIDEO) tapes to FILES on DVDs for you as opposed to "Video DVDs." Ultimately, this is your goal. As someone else stated above, once you have the FILES, you can do anything with them. Maybe that's the best alternative since you haven't been doing it all along and it pretty much sounds like a one-shot deal. It will be spendy though. It just depends on what it's worth to you and how much content you have to convert.

Edit: That camera has iLink. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394

 

[DISNEY FIX]

Even I can see, maybe not understand yet, the wealth of knowledge in the above posts. For that I thank you guys! I do have homework and learning ahead of me to figure it out.
My computer does not have a firewire port. Wich would be the common denominator. What are my options?

 

[WilsonFlyer]

It depends on whether you have a desktop or a laptop.

Here are some options: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=510&name=Firewire Adapters

Your local BestBuy should also have solutions on the rack/shelves.

Again, and I need to stress this, you're on some somewhat shaky ground, and I'm afraid I may have understated that to you. Firewire was/is an Apple standard because in those days, a Mac is where you went to do non-linear editing as the PC just wasn't strong enough to do it. For that reason, firewire was never really strong on the PC platform and never really became a common port like it was on the Mac. The other strike you have against you is that Sony chose to implement their own version of IEEE 1394 Firewire in that camera called iLink, probably because of the early generation of that camera. From what I can read, it supposedly follows the standard so there shouldn't be any problems, but you never know until you try.

You're going to need Premiere Elements (You can download a FULLY FUNCTIONAL version at www.adobe.com that's good for 30 days.), a firewire card/adapter, a firewire cable ($$$ if purchased locally), and a little bit of luck to get it all to work, but it should. Patience can pay off for the cable if you're willing to wait. They are spendy at places like BestBuy (as are ALL cabling at BB because that's where they make their money!) but if you're willing to wait a few days and order one, they are dirt cheap at places like www.monoprice.com .

The good news is that it is still agreed in my industry (security, networking, and computer systems control) that tape is STILL the best long-term archive media. It has proven itself over time. The problem is that your camera has NOT, and finding mini DV cameras in the future (already really) is just going to get harder and harder, especially if something happens to your camera, so you really need to at least get it over in a standard file format (as you have already realized). While mini DV is a standard, the implementations are not. Sonys won't play Canon tapes and so on and so on. Some older Sonys won't play newer Sony tapes either. What I'm trying to stress is that even though you already have it on a pretty reliable medium, you don't have a sure-fire way to know you can play them in 10 years and you certainly don't have a way to copy tape-to-tape to backup the singles you have now anyway. Drives eat tapes and we all know that, and the mini DV wrap sequence is very complicated. It has many potential points of failure just by its very design.

You're on the right track and headed the right way. Let us know what you do as a next step.

 

[WilsonFlyer]

Here's an example of a company that does it all for you turn-key.

http://www.southtree.com/Tapes-To-DVD?gclid=COvQ3PuG660CFULe4AodFnok7A

I'm NOT endorsing them. They were just my first Google hit. I know nothing about them, but it gives you an idea of what's out there.

You would probably be most interested in what they offer called "Data" or "Experience." You can certainly convert video DVDs (their "Standard" service) back to digital files so that is an option too but there's work involved when yo get the media back from them that way.

I haven't price-shopped this but my bet would be that they are pretty much in line price-wise with others offering similar services. As you can see, this can get pretty spendy in a hurry if you have any kind of quantity of tapes you need done. As I have said before though, you have to put a price on YOUR time and hardware/software investment and if you only have a few tapes, this may be a better quick and dirty solution.

 

[WilsonFlyer]

BTW and just so you know, once you have the files (I know that's a big step!), most people now don't even bother making video DVDs or AVCHD DVDs. Unless you need to take it over to your BIL's house to view, options like Western Digital's WDTV Live Hub are a much better option.

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=570#tab20

This saves a HUGE step and a lot of time if you don't particularly need a DVD to play in a player right now. The other great thing is once you have the files on something like the WDTV Live Hub, they're backed up! Albeit it's not offsite (another story) but at least it's backed up as far as a hardware failure goes. I'd still look into the cloud option talked about above. That's the way to go for 100% safety.

 

[DISNEY FIX]

Thanks for taking the time to enlighten me. Hopefully others can get something out of this as well. You are right this recorder may be more work than it is worth. I can shoot hours of HD on my Samsung GalaxyS2 phone. It may have just killed the video recorder..headache:

 

[DISNEY FIX]

It depends on whether you have a desktop or a laptop.

Here are some options: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=510&name=Firewire Adapters

Your local BestBuy should also have solutions on the rack/shelves.

Again, and I need to stress this, you're on some somewhat shaky ground, and I'm afraid I may have understated that to you. Firewire was/is an Apple standard because in those days, a Mac is where you went to do non-linear editing as the PC just wasn't strong enough to do it. For that reason, firewire was never really strong on the PC platform and never really became a common port like it was on the Mac. The other strike you have against you is that Sony chose to implement their own version of IEEE 1394 Firewire in that camera called iLink, probably because of the early generation of that camera. From what I can read, it supposedly follows the standard so there shouldn't be any problems, but you never know until you try.

You're going to need Premiere Elements (You can download a FULLY FUNCTIONAL version at www.adobe.com that's good for 30 days.), a firewire card/adapter, a firewire cable ($$$ if purchased locally), and a little bit of luck to get it all to work, but it should. Patience can pay off for the cable if you're willing to wait. They are spendy at places like BestBuy (as are ALL cabling at BB because that's where they make their money!) but if you're willing to wait a few days and order one, they are dirt cheap at places like www.monoprice.com .

The good news is that it is still agreed in my industry (security, networking, and computer systems control) that tape is STILL the best long-term archive media. It has proven itself over time. The problem is that your camera has NOT, and finding mini DV cameras in the future (already really) is just going to get harder and harder, especially if something happens to your camera, so you really need to at least get it over in a standard file format (as you have already realized). While mini DV is a standard, the implementations are not. Sonys won't play Canon tapes and so on and so on. Some older Sonys won't play newer Sony tapes either. What I'm trying to stress is that even though you already have it on a pretty reliable medium, you don't have a sure-fire way to know you can play them in 10 years and you certainly don't have a way to copy tape-to-tape to backup the singles you have now anyway. Drives eat tapes and we all know that, and the mini DV wrap sequence is very complicated. It has many potential points of failure just by its very design.

You're on the right track and headed the right way. Let us know what you do as a next step.

OK.....I have a 7 year old Dell. So if I were to do this myself I would have to install the firewire port and get Adobe program. All I have are USB ports on my machine. No SD spots nothing....but....another machine HP does have SD slot. Can I get Video onto SD card then save it on that machine?

 

[DISNEY FIX]

I found Firewire port on HP machine. So what I need nest is the i-link to computer cable. I think it is 4port and 6 port ends. Hopefully HP recognizes it and I can start moving foward on this.