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I recently spent 200-300 hours of my life digitizing, editing, and tagging about 60 VHS tapes of family home movies. It's harder than you think... The stuff yo

I recently spent 200-300 hours of my life digitizing, editing, and tagging about 60 VHS tapes of family home movies. It's harder than you think... The stuff you can buy on Amazon is cheap and captures with the audio and video out of sync. It also loses parts of the video frame. I ended up going through three different capture cards and bought two different VCRs, one of them a high-end S-VHS player with S-Video out for around $200. I could never get the quality to where I wanted it and finally surrendered and sent the tapes to a pro digitization shop for ~$600. But that was just for the capture part of it. I still spent ~150 hours cutting the long files into clips and tagging them.

skookumchuck 8y ago
It's nice you were willing to go to that effort and expense for your family, I hope they appreciate it. But it isn't necessary to go that far if it means throwing the tapes away because it is too expensive. I never bothered to do it, but the audio/video sync can be addressed with a video editor. The point was to capture the information on disk and toss the tape. Anyone can sync it, cut it into clips, etc., later as there would no longer be any urgency. Many TVs also cut off the edges of the signal, and nobody notices. I've even seen many movies on TV with the edges cut off, such as everything above the eyebrows. No, I don't think it was filmed that way :-)