VHS-to-Digital Conversion

[Qs Laptop]

I threw out all my VHS tapes many years ago. I used a board that fit in my PC and had svideo and RCA inputs. What I came to realize was the nobody cares about these videos (and scanned pictures and slides); nobody is going to look at them. I happened to end-up with my Dad's 8mm film, slides, etc, plus all of my stuff. Everything got digitized, saved to DVD and handed out to the sibs, and kids. Crickets. Nobody cared to watch. This might be a family culture thing, though.

I'm glad I did it, though. It just wouldn't sit right to just toss the media. I think I spent too much effort on how good the quality of the copy was; the older the media, the worse the quality anyway. You're 99% of the way there just doing the digital capture.

That would be crushing to do all that work and get no thanks.

I've got my Dad's 35mm slides and a bunch of family photos. Several years ago my sister "gifted" me with a digital film and slide converter she bought a at garage sale. "Wouldn't it be cool to get these converted to digital then have a viewing party at my house?" (Her son has a projector that can be hooked up to a laptop and the images shown on a screen.)

I'd guess Dad has over 500 slides almost all of them from our childhood. Yes, it would be cool. You want to convert all the slides? No, she didn't. And I didn't either, so it remains undone.

 

[steelyman]

I realized that a few old commercial VHS tapes might be interesting for someone else. Example: a PBS video called “Liberty!” about the American Revolution. I can’t find it on PBS Passport and I thought it was quite good, 6 hours total (3 tapes).

I digitized it and will take them to the thrift shop. Most of my other stuff is going to the trash.

 

[ERD50]

I wanted to add - if you are going to do this, do it now! Those old tapes degrade, I really struggled with a couple to get a decent conversion.

That's where the pros may be able to help - I assume their commercial equipment is much better at playing degraded tapes than typical consumer grade (especially old, bought at thrift shop) VCRs.

At the time I did mine, I had a Mini-DV camcorder, with 'pass thru' capability. I connected my VCR player output to the camera input jacks, and connected the FireWire camera output to an old Mac-Mini I had, and the camera did the digitizing (in real time - this was a sloooooow process!), the Mac-Mini stored the files to a hard drive.

So there's many ways to do this, use whatever you have available, or buy converters as needed. And then..... BACK THEM UP!!!! That's the great advantage of digital format, make copies (quickly!), store some off-site, the copies are as good as the original. After a lot of double checking, I trashed all the original conversions and kept just the compressed ones. I still have the tapes, but I'm sure they'll just get tossed one day.

I just revisited my old converted tapes. I had also gone through some batch processing to reduce the file size. The old Mini-DV format just couldn't do much compression in real time, based on 1980's portable micro-computer power. I found I could compress ~ 10:1 w/o any noticeable reduction in quality. What I think I gave up was maybe ease in editing. What apparently happens is, the compressed version creates a "key frame" in full resolution, then encodes just the differences in the following frames. So if there is little movement, the data reduction is very significant. But some of the editing software is thrown off by this - you can only cut at the key frames, making it hard to zero in on a specific frame (key frames can be many seconds apart).

I think there is more advanced software that will rebuild those incremental frames into full frames, essentially making a new 'key frame' where you want to cut, but I never got that far. Someday?

-ERD50