Getting VHS on your hard drive for editing (noob here) need help

[ramsanine]

I tried search and i am really a noob at this so i still could not understand. This is the first thing i have ever done with vhs besides record basic tv.

I want to put all my families home Movies onto a hard drive for editing. But getting them all onto the hard drive is priority number one. So if someone could tell me in English how to do it and what i need to do it that would be great. What type of hardware would i need. what type of sortware would i need? Could i just use a VCR and hook it up to my computer? Any help or suggestion will be apreciated.

[guns1inger]

You need

a) a computer (D'oh)
b) a VCR (OK, just being insulting here - I assume you have both of these)
c) some form of interface between the two
d) some software

a) and b) are no brainers.

c) is where it gets interesting. Option include

1. mini-DV camera with analogue pass-through and a firewire card. This is a simple option. The camera encode the video to DV as it pass it through to the computer via the firewire card. DV is easily captured using win-DV, and easily edited on a medium spec computer. There are also devices like the ADVC range from canopus, that are dedicated analogue to DV devices. They do the same as the DV camera, but are just small boxes that sit on your PC.

2. USB 2 based capture devices. Nice because they are easy to install. Just plug it in, install the software, and go. Some will encode to mpeg-2 on the fly, other won't Budget will determine what you get

3. Video cards with VIVO. Your graphics card may already be able to capture the video. Consult your manual or post detail here.

4. Dedicated capture cards. These can be cheap or expensive, and can be just capture cards, or have built-in analogue and/or digital TV tuners. Some just capture, others will capture and encode to mpeg-2 for you.

Finally, most capture cards/devices come with some basic video editing software. You may find this adequate at first, but will soon want more. Premiere Elements or Vegas Movie Studio are good beginner/intermediate options.

[Video Head]

To record from your VCR to your computer, in a form that is editable (is that a word?), you will require either a video capture card or a digital camcorder with pass-through capability. For the capture card you can check "capture cards" in the list to the left. For the DV Cam pass-through you would need to check your camera's manual to determine if it can do it. Also check the capture guides and if your tape has some years of dust on it, the restoration forum.

Good luck with your project.

VH

[IKnowNothing]

Another option is to go via a DVD recorder!

Hook the SCART out form the video recorder to the scart on the DVD Recorder and record onto DVD as you play on the video.

This has the advantage of giving you a backup of the raw video before you start.

Once you have the DVD you can "copy" the video to the Hard Drive using VOB2MPEG.

Depending on the editing you want to do look at the Womble offerings. These have the advantage that they don't re-encode the video if it hasn't been changed so quality is maintained and creation of the final file is quick.

[ramsanine]

Thanks guys, now i just need to see if i have any of this stuff and then i need some money to buy the stuff i dont have and just give it a shot. Im actually trying to do this for someone else and it just sounded interesting and hopefully it will work out. Ill probably be in this site a lot with all the problems that i am going to come across. I dont think at this point that i would need to restore anything but i will see. thanx

[thecoalman]

Here's a good starter guide: www.nepadigital.com/articles/analog-capture.php