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I've done it for a hundred or so old tapes. It is not so involved. I used thrift store VCRs and an Amazon USB video capture device. Almost all the old tapes pla

I've done it for a hundred or so old tapes. It is not so involved. I used thrift store VCRs and an Amazon USB video capture device. Almost all the old tapes play just fine. If the tape has gone bad, it's gone bad. Just toss it and move to the next one. Yes, you have to clean the heads now and then with a qtip and ethanol. No skill required. Usually just running one of those head cleaner special tapes does the trick just fine. I never had a sticky tape. I have had broken cassettes, but the fix was just taking it apart and moving the reels to an unbroken cassette. Once I had the tape itself break, and a bit of scotch tape got that working again :-) The results are plenty good enough. My relatives were quite happy to be able to see their old home movies again by clicking a button on their Roku rather than wrestling with their long lost VCR or 8mm camera. Seriously, this isn't rocket science. It's much easier than recording LPs onto cassettes. The result will be converting 8000 tapes and their storage problems to two 10T drives, which aren't a burden to store. Though you should copy them to new drives every year or so. Saying one doesn't have $100,000 to do a 2% better studio job, so throw all the tapes in the trash, is a choice I don't understand.

LocalH 8y ago
Most of the cheap ways of capturing analog video will end up dropping half the image data before the process even starts. At a minimum, full SD-resolution capture is necessary. 480 lines and whatever seems reasonable (for VHS, doubt there's much of a difference between 640 and 704/720). Capture such material at 240 lines and you might as well not be capturing it at all. It's somewhat involved to make archival-quality digitizations.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  Elgato video capture captures 640*480 and is $90. I have it, use it, and it produces very satisfactory results.

LocalH 8y ago

Most of the cheap ways of capturing analog video will end up dropping half the image data before the process even starts. At a minimum, full SD-resolution capture is necessary. 480 lines and whatever seems reasonable (for VHS, doubt there's much of a difference between 640 and 704/720). Capture such material at 240 lines and you might as well not be capturing it at all. It's somewhat involved to make archival-quality digitizations.

skookumchuck 8y ago
Elgato video capture captures 640*480 and is $90. I have it, use it, and it produces very satisfactory results.