Turning Trash into Beauty (VHS)

[Marvingj]

Hey Everyone! I got a problem serious as Cancer! my Uncle recently gave (never, ever did this) me 50 VHS & 50 Beta Videos. Some are priceless Movies. The problem is that there is physical damaged to the videos such as crinkles or creases in them. Is there any inexpensive way of recovering video on these tapes. Any Advice would be a Blessing.

[redwudz]

Depends on what you want to do with them. Inexpensive translates into what you can do yourself without going to a commercial restoration site. FF and Rewind a few times to get the tension equalized. If your aim is to put them on DVD, you can try it with your capture card. If you don't mind spending the money, you can use something like a ADVC-100 to capture to DV and convert. (TBC highly recommended) and then burn to DVD. You would probably have to edit/cut out the really crinkled parts when you edit. Unless they are really priceless, you are in for a lot of work to recover the video.

[Marvingj]

So your sugesting TBC. O.k. Whats a sure way of getting rid of the crinkles. Cap it with what program?

[CaseyComb]

There is no way you're going to get around creases and wrinkle in the physical tape without throwing lots of money at a professional somewhere. Redwudz is right...that's your only option. I might go on to Ebay and try to secure the best Beta machine you can find. Possibly even a semi pro grade VHS deck for the VHS cassettes you have. It never hurts to have a machine with a good drive mechanism and good video heads. It's akin to having good shocks on a bumpy road. I have a set top DVD Recorder to transfer stuff but if I had my way I'd use a capture card and a brand new 7200 hard drive, because realistically you're only gonna get 1-3 passes at these old cassettes. Of course this is all dependent on what you want to spend to transfer these tapes.

If I was in your shoes This would be my wish list:

1.) Two semi-pro/pro grade decks (VHS and BETA) in good shape.

2.) Video Stabilizer (cuz you will run into macrovision problems eventually)

3.) Quality Capture Card (ATI seems to be the card of choice)

4.) Brand New Large Capacity 7200 speed hard drive. (Full 2 hours of high bitrate Mpeg2 Video will be between 6-8 GB). Dependent upon your needs.

Another option for 3 and 4 would be to hold off and get a set top DVD recorder w/ a built in hard drive. I believe one is coming out this year with 2-pass VBR encoding, which would be quite nice for your purposes.

This is merely how I would go about it, as I don't know your budget and I'm not sure how many tapes you wish to transfer. Or even how truly important it is to you. I am also assuming that you know your way around basic DVD authoring.

Anyway, hope this helps