Video tapes to digital/DVD? Options

[d_headshot]

I have bunch of home movies on VHS of relatives and myself when we were kids and I would like to convert them to digital files and burn them to a DVD for my grandma. I have no knowledge of how to do this, and what equipment is required, as well as having no knowledge of the different types of video formats and when to use certain ones. Are there any guides for this?

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

I have bunch of home movies on VHS of relatives and myself when we were kids and I would like to convert them to digital files and burn them to a DVD for my grandma. I have no knowledge of how to do this, and what equipment is required, as well as having no knowledge of the different types of video formats and when to use certain ones. Are there any guides for this?

DVDdoug did a nice job of giving a broad answer, so I'll give you a narrow one.

The first step is of course playing the VHS tape. I have a farily new Panasonic VHS HiFi player for that purpose.

Even though Ive owned several stand-alone DVD recorders, I favor digitizing to a PC because it allows editing and fixing up the tape. The choice of video capture card is imprtant because you want a video capture card that uses the same clock to capture both audio and video. Otherwise lip synch will be lost while digitizing the longer clips. A capture card that relies on the audio interface in your PC is thus disqualified from consideration.

If is a tape that you didn't make but is a commercial product, the VHS tape may be copy-protected which stops our discusison right there based on forum rules. I will only hint out that the problem and hardware solutions to it have been around for a long time.

I agree with DVDdoug that the software that comes with almost all video capture cards may be all that you need for capturing video well.

For cropping, touching up and authoring the DVD I use Premier Elements which includes facilities for editing, building and burning DVDs with nice menus. IME one generally ends up editing the video if you want a really nice DVD, including menus, titling, transitions, touching up the brightness/contrast/saturation/color balance, etc.

This post has been edited by Arnold B. Krueger: Jun 30 2011, 21:54