VHS Transfer

Part for what has kept me busy this past month has been the long process of converting the contents of a large stack of VHS tapes for their original analog form to a more relevant digital format. This task was inspired by a recent cleaning binge in which I negotiated the removal of our VCR and said tapes if I could make DVDs out of them. A fair number of these tapes were Hollywood movies and after sampling them on the TV we decided that, yes, the VHS tapes can be safely considered low quality and not worth the effort. If we cared enough about these movies, we would be best off  buying DVDs.

Which left the home movies. Hours and hours of home movies.  We ended up hitting up parents on both sides of the family for contributions and ended up with a substantial pile of cassettes.  Thankfully, the transfer process itself was simple: the output of the VCR was fed into a (borrowed) digital video camera which was connected to the computer.  iMovie recorded the footage and allowed me to do any necessary editing and each event was exported as a stand-alone movie.  To make DVDs I used iDVD to build up the DVD menu structure and assemble the individual events onto the disc.  Discs were burned, memories were preserved.

The process is time-intensive but most of it is spent with the equipment unattended while the VCR plays and the computer records.  The format that the video camera puts out (DV) consumes hard drive space rapidly and I used a dedicated 300GB hard drive to collect the footage.  This ended up not being enough for all the tapes so once the drive filled up I created DVDs of the footage and erased the original DV source material.

Several people have suggested I set this up as a mini-business; I have no interest in this. Ignoring the time involved in just copying the footage, doing a good job of transferring this video requires having at least a passing familiarity with the content so intelligent decisions can be made when assembling the individual events on DVDs. Multiple times I had to ask my wife to interpret the events I was transferring, helping me with chronology and relationship. I suppose if I was willing to just make one big movie out of the tape that would not be very time intensive.  I suspect, though, that customers would not be very happy with the product, even though they think this is all they want. I suspect what they actually want is a DVD with high production values that allows them to easily find specific events from the original tape.  The format comes with inherent expectations that are not always recognized and I'd rather not get in the middle of stated and unidentified expectations.