VHS to HDD

[kenshinx34]

I was wondering what was the best way to convert my old family VHS tapes to my HDD?

Would a RCA to USB adapter be sufficient? or would it give me bad results?

How much space would one full length tape take up in terms of GB, and bitrate?

Could someone point me to another post maybe?

Also I would like to preserve as much quality as possible!

Thanks

[jagabo]

Best way will cost you several hundred dollars in equipment before you can start. An S-VHS deck with line time base corrector and noise filters, a full frame time base corrector, an analog video proc amp, then a decent capture device. You sure you want the best?

[yoda313]

As jagabo suggested doing it yourself for top quality output can be expensive.

Since these are home tapes and presumably no copyrights are involved perhaps you should consider getting them professionally transferred.

If there are only a handful of tapes it might be easier and cheaper in the long run for a third party to do it. If you don't plan on copying any other tapes than you are looking at investing a lot of time and money into something you won't keep using. Of course you could resell it later but that is its own hassle and chances are you won't recover your original costs.

I'm not trying to tell you not to learn how. I'm just trying to give you the best options.

Also best is not cheap and if you start with cheap home equipment you will be disappointed. Don't forget either that you can't make it look better than the original tapes. Other than some filters that can tweak it but will end up softening or oversharpening the original video.

If you have a large collection of tapes than yes doing it yourself will pay for itself versus taking it to a professional. But I'd setup a budget and see what you'd be willing to pay a professional and what you'd be willing to pay for in terms of equipment for yourself. Don't forget the time you'll take doing it. You will need to take the running length of the videos as the starting point - realtime copying remember. Also if you want to do special editing aside from simple cuts you'll need editing software.

Editing software can be had at a reasonable price these days but if you want full hollywood effects and the like you'll start adding a lot to the software packages.

These are just some things to consider.

Edit - plus if you are looking for dvd as a final destination just about any pc can handle it and dvd burners are 20.00-30.00 new these days and blanks are cheap. HOWEVER if you want to output to bluray (will still be standard definition as vhs tapes are standard definition) you will need a bluray burner and bluray blanks (burners are dropping all the time but blank media is still a bit pricey compared to blank dvds).

For editing bluray you'll need a faster computer if you capture in h264 with something like a hauppauge hd pvr. So if your computer isn't particularly powerful you'll need to think about upgrading that too.

[jagabo]

If you can live with 1 hour on a DVD get an old Panasonic ES15 DVD recorder. It has a built in TBC and records with decent picture quality at 1 hour per DVD.

[kenshinx34]

Wow thanks for your help, and I'm really sorry to hear how much this is going to be. I guess I was naive in thinking that I could just use my computers RCA input card to just record from my vhs player. But from what you're telling me the quality will be terrible? I have a lot of tapes, i'd say like 30 minnimum... any idea how much 1 vhs would be in terms of size? and how much just 1 would cost?

I really appreciate all of you taking your time to help a novice like me.

Thanks

[jagabo]

I guess I was naive in thinking that I could just use my computers RCA input card to just record from my vhs player. But from what you're telling me the quality will be terrible?

It won't be terrible but it won't be the "best".

[lordsmurf]

It will be closer to 'terrible' than it will be to 'best'.

Depending on condition and length, I've done tapes for as little as $10 each, when there were a couple dozen. So theoretically, you could get them done for you, in top quality, for $350 or so. That's still cheaper than the DIY route.