Educate me on transferring VHS to DVD

[EpcotKilterFan]

Ok, I need a bit of education. I have ALOT of video taken at WDW and other places. This was all taken on a Panasonic that is a few years old and on VHS-C tapes.

The camera is not digital.

I would like to transfer to DVD and if possible be able to edit them. (I can pull the Off Kilter shows out of the middle of the christmas tape ) . The new Dell PC that I have does not have a video cpature card (I don't think).

Talk me through what I need to purchase. Including hardware and software. I really do not want to break the bank on this, but am willing to spend a few pennies to be able to transfer all these hours of tape to something safer.

So any help will be appreciated!

Debbie

 

[BeautyLLM]

I would like to learn how to do this as well...

Anyone??

 

[nkjzmom]

My Grandpa JUST bought a DVD recorder...Philips, I believe it was. Maybe a few hundred $$$ though!!! DH set it up tonight after dinner and Gpa is trying it out as we speak so I can't answer many questions right now...but maybe in a few days. What I can tell you is to make sure to get +R discs....the -R were not compatible with his laptop or DVD player.

 

[Towncrier]

It's a piece of cake Debbie. Just bring your tapes over to my house and I'll convert them for you. I won't tell you (or my wife) how much I've spent on video capture equipment. And please don't tell her that the new PC is really for.

Honestly, to do it right, you need a decent computer with a fast processor and large hard drive, a video capture card, and plenty of patience. My capture device makes my VCR look like a DV (digital video) camera. I simply play the tapes through this device (a Canopus ADVC-100) and the device in turn sends the video to the PC using a Firewire connection. One hour of VHS turns into 13 Gigabytes of digital video. You can then condense that video using any number of video editing packages (TMPGENC, Ulead, Pinnacle) to a more reasonable size. It's fairly easy to fit two hours of video onto a single DVD.

I purchased all the equipment with the thought of doing VHS to DVD conversions as a way of earning some extra spending money for Disney. After my first couple of projects, I decided that I'll just stick to doing conversions for friends, family, and for myself.

I've found a couple of places on the web which contain good reference material for doing DVD "stuff". They are:

http://www.dvdrhelp.com
http://www.doom9.org

Hope this helps some.