Transferring old VHS tapes to DVD

I am thinking about having a VHS version of a family video transferred over to a DVD (which ironically came from an 8mm film).  I have a DVD-burner, and some basic DVD-creation software, but I am wondering how difficult it is to do such a thing.  Are there any good tutorials out there for doing this yourself, or is it something better left to a "professional shop"?

Just curious if anybody has ever done anything like this or would know how easy/difficult it is.

Thanks.

jsrfc58 wrote:

I am thinking about having a VHS version of a family video transferred over to a DVD (which ironically came from an 8mm film).  I have a DVD-burner, and some basic DVD-creation software, but I am wondering how difficult it is to do such a thing.  Are there any good tutorials out there for doing this yourself, or is it something better left to a "professional shop"?

Just curious if anybody has ever done anything like this or would know how easy/difficult it is.

Thanks.

Need a vidoe capture card.  Not hard just very time consuming 

Get a TV card (PCI, USB or PCMCIA); plug an AV cable from the back of the VCR to the TV card, then use the software supplied with the TV card to write the input to an AVI file... The playback has to be 1 to 1, so might want to leave the tapes playing as you go to bed...

Once you have an AVI file, contact your local MPAA association office and check it is ok to copy your own home movies and if it is (or you pay the fee) write the AVI to a DVD using any DVD, or VCD creation software... If you want multiple copies copy the DVD, don't re-write it from the source material (it is quicker)... And then delete the source AVI.

I suggest:
Roxio Easy Media Creator 8 - For creating the DVD 
Any Hauppauge TV capture card or USB peripheral

The best online source for information of this sort is http://www.videohelp.com/.

As others have said, any capture card makes it easy to do the capturing.  If you want just a straight transfer, then you're mostly done.  If you want to edit the video, then it's not that difficult but will be time consuming.  For making the DVD there's a lot of choices ranging from the extremely simple to fully controllable menu, button and background creation.  You'll find several applications that are free for editing video and/or creating DVDs on the Video Help site.  Most DVD burners will come with software that will do this as well, such as Nero Express.  The free software is generally lacking in features and/or is difficult to use, while the stuff that comes with the burner is usually easy to use but barely covers the "entry level" features.

If you want to seriously get into this sort of thing, but don't want to spend a fortune on the software, there are a few options.  The two that get the best reviews are Adobe Premiere Elements and Sony Vegas Movie Studio.  I personally use SVMS and can tell you that it's a very powerful, easy to use and very stable program (most other video editing software in this price range are prone to crashing).  I'd highly recommend it.  At the upper end, the professional version of Sony Vegas is what most people seem to recommend.  SVMS will only run you about $80-100 at your local retailer.

If you don't have a TV card but have a digital camcorder see if it supports AV-IN.  When I do this I go from my VCR to the camera then to a firewire port on the PC.  The camera acts as a bridge.  Get very good results this way.

Stephen.

Whatever you do, don't buy anything made by Pinnacle!

I have lots of 8mm that I want to convert to DVD.

 

When I was in High School we used to convert film to 2" Video tape running the projector image into a prism stright into the video camera.

Sven Groot wrote:

Whatever you do, don't buy anything made by Pinnacle!

Intreasting, I have a DV500 card, must be 6 years old now and is still going strong, though to be honest I only use it for the firewire ports these days.

Stephen.

I use Sony DVD Recorder RDR-HX 900, which has 160 GB disk (there are models with bigger disk) and 4 independent input connectors.

On one input I have VHS Recorder connected which enables me to copy the tape to disk.
On another input i can connect a video camera and copy old family videos.
If necessary I can do simple editoring, create a title, use noice reduction, etc. After that I insert a blank DVD and copy the video on it. The system compresses the content automaticaly depending on the size and also creates a menu. After the DVD is closed (finalized), it can be played on any DVD player or PC with DVD. The system supports all current formats (DVD+4, DVD-R, DVD+RW, etc). Perhaps new models support double layers too, mine unfortunately doesn't. Too old!

PerfectPhase wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: Whatever you do, don't buy anything made by Pinnacle!

Intreasting, I have a DV500 card, must be 6 years old now and is still going strong, though to be honest I only use it for the firewire ports these days.

I used to have a DC10+. It was a decent card, except for one thing: Windows kept finding it as new hardware. 80% of all boots it would come up with "new hardware found", and if you didn't go through to the steps of selecting the drivers manually, it wouldn't work anymore. Linux was even worse; despite the fact that there were no drivers installed, it came up with two displays: first one that said the card had been removed, asking to remove the configuration, then one that saida new one had been found.

Let's not even mention the horrible buggy mess that was Pinnacle Studio DC10+, the included editing software.

Then there was Windows 2000. Pinnacle said they wouldn't support Win2k, since it wasn't a home OS, and the DC10+ was a home product. Fair enough, although it sucked having to use Win98 for video editing.

Then there was Windows XP. Pinnacle promised drivers. Then they promised them some more. Then they procrastrinated a lot, and made some more promises. And then they did nothing. About a year after XP, the promised drivers were finally released. And guess what? I had to buy, as in, pay money, for Pinnacle Studio 7 to get those drivers (the drivers couldn't work with the original Studio DC10+ software for some reason). And of course, Studio 7 wasn't any less buggy. Maybe even a bit more.

Then, last year, I made a video, fortunately not with the long burried DC10+ card, but instead with an ATI. Somehow, I got tricked into using Pinnacle Studio 9. On the surface, it seemed a lot less buggy than the earlier versions, and it had a lot of neat features. So I spent a few weeks making my movie with it. Sure, there were some problems (such as the nasty habit of including a few frames from the previous scene in a scene, which means the preview image for each scene is actually from the previous scene, which makes finding out which scene you're actually selecting a pain), but overall it worked nice. Then I tried to produce a DVD from my movie. It crashed. I tried again and again and again with different settings, it always crashed while rendering. I installed a clean copy of XP with nothing but Studio 9 installed, and it still crashed. Eventually, after a few more wasted weeks, I found out that if I removed the menu, it worked. Sure, my DVD players all thought the movie was 20 minutes shorter than it actually was (they did play the full length, just jumping someplace on the timeline became very hard), and I didn't have any menus, and a few scenes were very jittery (which they're not in the original source material), but it's the closest I ever got to getting a movie out of that thing.

So no, I do not particularly like Pinnacle anymore. They are the pinnacle of bad, if anything.

I agree with Sven on the poor quality of Pinnacle Studio.  My wife and I used it for a while and there was no support info on their site for when things screwed up.  All of the Knowledgebase pointed to two phrases: You CPU isn't fast enough and You don't have enough RAM.

Which was funny, because this was over a year ago and the 3.2 Ghz CPU and 2 Gigs of RAM was pretty top notch (still is for the most part).

Anyway, I also second the notion of using a Analog-Digital converter through a camcorder if you have it.  Our camera supports it and it works beautifully, although be prepared with plenty of space on the HDD.   One 30 some minute VHS tape came out at like 18 Gigs of AVI if I remember right.

Jared

Sven Groot wrote:

<rant>

So no, I do not particularly like Pinnacle anymore. They are the pinnacle of bad, if anything.

OK, I can see your point

Only ever used their hardware and their capture utill.  

Stephen.

hi

And the point of resurrecting this thread was...?