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I have dozens of old VHS tapes in the house from family simchos, vacations, etc.
A few months ago, I bought a cheap device that captures movies. One end goes into the computers USB2 port, the other has VHS and S video connectors.
The device captured the sound and picture OK, but the picture quality was noticeably degraded. The color was washed out, and object edges appear to jump and jitter ever so slightly.
I have a few questions, which I would greatly appreciate answers to:
2) Have you been able to capture VHS to digital without degradation in quality? If so, what hardware and software did you use? Was post-capture editing, filtering and enhancing necessary?
3) Did you originally have this problem and then come up with a fix? If so, what was the fix?
Thanks a lot.
personnally i like videos better then dvds…they are forever scratching!
Brought mine to Reel to Real 🙂 they did an amazing job!
Sacrilege-
Same here, we brought in those old film strips (without sound) as the bulb in the projector blew out and there aren’t replacements anymore.
They did a great job but it can be very expensive if you have hours and hours of family videos.
But if you are going to do it I reccomend Reel to Real.
ICOT – Real to Reel that I went to is in Boro Park. I think it was $25 per hour of video conversion but I’m not 100% sure.
Honestly, I did it for my grandfather…
But he seems to be enjoying it 🙂
$25 per hour? That can get pricey…
ICOT-
I’ve only ever converted VHS to DVD by using a professional’s services. He asked me to certify that I own the rights to reproduce the material and did the job. I paid around $25 for each one.
I experienced no noticeable loss of quality.
If you are an A/V DIY guy or if you have so many tapes to convert that there is a lot of money at stake, I would recommend that the quality of the transfer is only as good as the quality of the equipment. I don’t know what you paid for your equipment, but my experience is that with technology there are two classes- consumer quality and professional quality. Even the highest end of the first class does not compare to the second class. But price-wise there is a tremendous difference.
With absolutely no actual knowledge, I would guess that your equipment is consumer quality, and not the best either. I am basing this on the USB transfer. A high-end converter would definitely use HDMI.
I have also made some copies at home but ended up using a company as i was also not to happy with the quality i could get using the ezgrabber. went with http://www.vhsontodvd.com in the end. Let us know what you go with!
Hopefully this info will be more helpful to you:
Question
I have a bunch of vhs tapes that I need to put on dvd’s. I want to get nice quality. Any ideas are appreciated.
Best Answer
Easiest is probably use a standalone DVD recorder to digitize them, and then convert and edit from there to whatever your final output is going to be.
Best is probably old-school method of inputting through something like VirtualDub and saving the file with HuffyUV codec or similar. It won’t lose any quality this way, but the file will be huge. You then edit and convert/compress from there. If you have a strong enough PC you can probably save to a more compressed codec right away.
Another is using a camcorder with digital pass-through.
Just some ideas to give you something to look into.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what VirtualDub is.
They do it in costco.
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