Preserving Your Past…Converting VHS to CD/DVD



Making a New Gift Out of Old Memories

If you’re like us you’ve got a long holiday gift list and a short budget.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales were fantastic but buying a consumer electronics product to give this year just didn’t seem right. We wanted to give something people would really like, really cherish.

Money was important but it was really more about showing people we really cared.

Our son actually came up with the idea because he had begun the monumental task of saving all of the still analog photos and videos we’d taken over the past five – 10 years and was digitizing them to put on the new family Verbatim’s new 1TB Quad interface hard drives. It was great…huge capacity and supported all of the leading interfaces.

Scanning all of the photos is time consuming but is necessary if you want to bring them into the 21st century. Converting VHS tapes to digital is a snap.

Our closet held stacks of tapes – birthdays, family outings, events with our folks, grandparents and the kids.

We’ve known for a long time that there’s nothing permanent about tape and if we didn’t get the content digitized the moments, memories could simply…disappear!

The special moments, the memories are suddenly…simply memories.

Signs of video quality degradation can become apparent after five years or sooner if the tapes aren’t stored properly.

Videotape wears and gets scratched every time it’s played. Images fade, tape can age and turn black. The coating can mysteriously peel away or flake off when the tape is played.

Before those precious videotaped moments disappeared, we were going to transfer them to DVD.

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Figure 1 - Tear Drop Device – The compact Pinnacle dongle comes with all the components necessary to connect easily to our ancient VHS player and then to the PC’s USB port. Then it’s simply play/record.

When we were at a major consumer electronics store our son spied the Pinnacle Dazzle DVD Video Creator Plus. Seemed to be just the ticket. High-quality video capture, software for editing, easy to save (archive) the content to DVD.

All for less than $90!

There was a cheaper package ($45) called the DVD Recorder we could have bought that went from source to DVD including menus and chapters.

The more expensive package seemed to have more powerful software and seemed worth the extra money.

New Gift, Old Moments

As we walked out of the store our son said he had a great idea for gifts for the family.

“We can take the photos and video that we put on the server, do a little post production work with transitions, special effects, music track and titles and make holiday DVD presents for everyone,” He commented.

“Won’t take that long to get everything digital,” he continued, “and if you do half the family list on your computer and I do the other half on my system we should be done in no time!”

To a Gen Xer who was born with a mouse in his hand, that’s easy for him to say. For his dad it sounded like work but we thought the idea was great and the price was certainly right…time and printable DVDs (neatness counts) !!!!

Ready to Go

Today almost every computer – desktop or notebook – has a large hard drive, plenty of processing power and a DVD burner. The task of transferring video footage to quality brand name DVD discs promised to be fast and simple.

The whole idea of giving folks custom DVDs of past holidays and family events seemed like a sensational idea.

When we finished the task, we’d have videos that:

* Won’t deteriorate no matter how often you play the disc because the laser never touches the media

* Will play on virtually any DVD player, recorder or drive

* Will last 50-100 years

* Can be copied again and again and each copy will be as clear and crisp as the original

* Have Hollywood style menus so folks can quickly move from video clip to video clip

* Take up almost no space on the shelf or in the drawer

Basic System

Almost every Windows XP or Vista computer sold today is “video-ready” and ours were both less than a year old.

Our son loaded his dual core notebook up with RAM (4GB) because he likes to stream video. But then he does “everything” with his system it seems.

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Figure 2 - Digital Content Device – While he does have some school work on his notebook, he’s like most Gen Xers with most of the hard drive filled with music, photos, videos and lots of YouTube and MySpace downloads.

Ours only has 2GB but like his it has a high-performance Intel processor and high-capacity HD (they are so inexpensive today!).

Both systems came with DVD burners so saving the video gifts to broadcast viewing quality DVD was going to be easy.

All we needed was our old (retired) VCR and the Pinnacle Video Creator Plus to make up the complete conversion system.

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Figure 3 - Plug ‘n Go – Set-up of the Pinnacle Dazzle Video Creator Plus takes just minutes to hook up to the tape deck, camcorder and even the TV.

The package contains an easy-to-connect video capture device, connection cables and Studio 12 software for simple analog to digital (VHS to DVD) conversion or additional movie production.

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Figure 4 - Tape to Digital Archive – The Studio software included with the Video Creator hardware enables you to edit, author your movies, add photos, transitions, special effects and do special titles for family member holiday gift DVDs

It wasn’t on the to-do list but our son liked the idea that he could also use the device to capture/save TV shows or copy videos from our camcorder to DVD.

It’s almost like a movie production company in a box.

If you simply want to simply preserve yesteryear’s irreplaceable videotapes, use Studio 12’s automated movie creation tool, SmartMovie.

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Figure 5 - SmartMovie – If you don’t want to do a lot of post production work, the software’s SmartMovie almost does it all for you. It automatically adds transitions and chapters so all you have to do is add your own special menus and titles

The step-by-step wizard guides you quickly through the process. Almost effortlessly, it helps you turn family videos -- direct from tape – into excellent DVD movies.

This holiday though our goal was to make brilliant family/friend movies.

We took turns copying the content to server hard drive. Then we use the Studio editing/authoring software to add chapters, transitions, special effects and music.

The hardware/software combination includes the latest in video conversion (our son copied some of the videos to his video iPod and put some of them on his mother’s smartphone at her request).

He did a couple of outtake videos (you know the embarrassing stuff) and uploaded them to YouTube for folks to enjoy. We’re going to get even and make a few of his less shining moments after the holidays…revenge is sweet!

We used the software’s filtering technology to remove video noise from the content when we copied the VHS tapes.

The software also included technology to ensure perfect lip synch throughout the capture, edit and disc burning process. That way they don’t sound like the old Godzilla movies when folks play their holiday gifts.

Direct to Disc

To make an exact copy of the tape to DVD without any edits which we did for a couple of the movies, you simply use the direct-to-disc feature.

In this mode the software automatically captures the video, converts the file to DVD format and burns it to disc.

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Figure 6 - One-Click – Done – If you’re only interested in saving the old video tapes before the content disappears, you can quickly go direct from the video source to the DVD burner to archive the content for 100+ years.

If you have a large number of VHS tapes as we did, this can be a tremendous time saver.

The software will automatically add DVD menus and chapter points by detecting scene changes.

When the process is complete you will have rescued your family videos from certain loss and will have discs you can play forever, again and again without damaging the quality.

But for the 15 holiday movie gifts we made for our family – close and extended – we compiled a video that included segments from five different tapes as well as more than 20 of the photos our son had scanned and stored on the hard drive.

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Figure 7 - First Showing – Once you’ve done all of the editing/authoring, adding sound tracks and titles the best thing about showing any video project is the premiere showing. It’s great to drop the disc into the player and listen to all of the ooohhhsss and aaahhhsss.

We played the discs for our wife and daughter to preview for our parents, aunts/uncles.

The reviews?

It’s going to be a super holiday this year!

We – our son and I – have to agree…we did a fantastic job.

Best of all?

They not only look expensive but we know no one else will get them a duplicate of our gifts.

And we’re pretty certain it is a gift of special family moments, memories, events they will cherish for years to come.

While the world around us may be a little uncertain we are going to really feel good when the family opens up their personalized video DVDs of the things we did, saw and enjoyed together this year.

Can’t wait for them to pop the discs in the DVD player so we can see the expressions on their faces.

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Figure 8 - One-of-a-Kind Gifts – This year we’ll give family members a gift that will cost us very little – time and a couple of printable DVDs – but will be something they will treasure forever. Maybe the best things really do come from the heart

We’ll be giving them something that comes straight from the heart and something we think (hope) they will cherish forever.

In addition, we’ve rescued all of our videotape memories to the server hard drive and to archive DVD.

Who knows. Next year we may produce sequels!

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By: Andy Marken

andy@

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