I am trying to figure out how to put some old VHS home movies onto dvd. Some of these are irreplaceable. I am trying to do it so I can send some DVD's to my sister who has not seen them, and does not have a VHS.
I have a VHS player, a computer runnng Vista Ultimate and plenty of drive space. I had the Dazzle Digital Video Creator 80 from Penicale (hardware) but their lovly (i.e. crappy) support center says it is not compatible with Vista. Anyone have any suggestions? Of course any suggestions would have to take into consideration, my meager budget (my empeg is still non functioning as I can't afford to have it fixed yet.

Thanks

I have been doing this exact thing. All those USB and most PCI input cards are lame. I found that many of them have severe lip sync problems when clips get too large.

The best solution for me has been the Canopus ADVC110. It appears to the computer as a DV camcorder. Analog in, DV out. Because of this, the quality is superb and it works with basically any software and firewire-equipped computer. There are some less expensive models from Canopus, but this is the one I have.

If that's too costly, there are some DV camcorders than will do the same. Just run your VCR into the camcorder's inputs (if equipped) and you get the same result. You may have one of these already, or can borrow one from a friend.

I have a DCR-HC20 Video Camera that I am going to try to sell to get the Empeg fixed...but it only has a USB, DV, AV Out (which is a wierd little plug, so I would have to get a special cable? If so any idea where/what?
Thanks

I can't find any confirmation that the DCR-HC20 has this feature (called analog pass-thru). I do see people claiming that the DCR-HC30 does. You may be in luck.

If you can use it for this purpose, you would likely need a 4-pin to 6-pin firewire cable and a firewire port on your PC. If you don't have these things, maybe you would want to check around the web to see if your camera is indeed capable.

Probably the easiest solution is to buy an all-in-one VCR/DVD burner. An Amazon search seems to suggest you can pick one up from a variety of vendors. In "refurbished" condition, you may only pay $140.

Some digital video cameras have audio/video in, others don't. In this world of cost-cutting, you're probably not going to get much love going that route.

Finally, you might ask around if you've got any buddies with one of these new hard disk video cameras, which tend to have corresponding customized DVD burner attachments that connect via USB. My wife, for work, needs to be able to make lots of recordings and quickly burn them to DVDs (taping people giving practice talks, then they go off and watch themselves). We ended up settling on a Sony HDD camera and Sony's "DVD Direct" gadget (~$150). You could easily hook this up to the output of a VCR and use it to burn DVDs. It can even deal comfortably with multi-session (each time you hit "record", you get a new session, and it sorts out the title screen menus at the very end).

I don't think I could ever recommend you buy a special purpose gadget like this, but if the only choice is buying some wacky video-in card and spending hours of your time trying to make all the software play nicely, then the special purpose gadget starts looking more attractive.

(Annoyance: A friend has a JVC HDD video camera. We tried plugging it into our Sony DVD burner gadget. Of course, it didn't work. JVC happily offers its own proprietary DVD burner. *sigh*)

Oooo. Just noticed you said this model doesn't have an analog input. That may be the key difference between the DCR-HC20 and 30.

If it did have an input, the jack is likely a 3.5mm headphone-type jack. The cable that turns this into composite RCA connectors probably came with the camera, or is available at RadioShack.

A VHS/DVD recorder hybrid isn't bad if you don't plan on editing the files later. Getting DVDs into an computer-editable format is really annoying. The multiple video conversions also don't make for a very nice final product.

Well, some of the VHS were products of 8MM being put on VHS, as these are movies of my mom and stepdad's wedding (in LV in the 50's) so the quality of those suck. The ones of my daughter's first steps are much better but still taken with a VHS Camera back 'in the old days' of the 80's.
Thanks for all the help guys. Guess I'll just need to play and see what happens.

Cool. The VHS tapes I'm doing also have some 8mm clips. They're actually a lot better looking than the video that was captured with an early-80s VHS backpack camcorder. My guess is that the telecine equipment used by the conversion company was much higher quality than the camcorder.

Funny you should mention this, but I do the exact same thing. I have an older DVDirect, but it accomplishes the same thing.

It appears to have some smarts, too. Example: recently my mother-in-law needed some very short VHS tapes (~20 min) converted to DVD. I popped the VHS in my Sony VCR, and a blank DVD in the DVDirect, which is just connected via composite video. I hit play on the VCR and record on the DVDirect. Then I forgot about it.

Fortunately, the DVDirect detected when the tape stopped and ended recording there, leaving me plenty of room left on the DVD.

I'm a big fan of it for this purpose. I would definitely recommend this setup or a combo unit (but like Rob said, only if you don't need to edit).

I've tried doing the analog pass-through with my camcorder, but it's incredibly flaky. I had it working a couple months ago, but last month when I hooked it all back up I simply couldn't get it to work (without using the camcorder at all in the meantime, so all the settings were the same). Plus video editing on a PC is a nightmare, IMO.

I seem to remember that last time this topic was discussed, somebody recommended the Plextor ConvertX, at the time, I was struggling with the Dazzle, I can't now remember what the problem was.
I've used the Plextor since, even using it to store some prerecorded videos to hard disk, acceptably: using the little SCART adaptor that removes the copyright protection.
In fact, only last week, I put videos of 4 of a friend's wedding VHS's (One already transferred from 8mm)on to DVD to universal satisfaction. The only thing it points out is how poor the VHS picture quality was: you can't put back what's not there.
The model I have is superseded by the ConvertX PX-AV200U, which according to their website is compatible with Vista.

Someone I know is doing this exact same thing at the moment.

He is simply playing the VHS into his DVD Recorder. I was quite impressed when I saw the results, even when some of the footage was from 8mm before it got on VHS. You don't get any fancy menus but it seems a really easy way to do it.

I think part of it is using a really good VHS deck to play the video back on, I would say this one is playing out in RGB as the picture looks pretty good on the TV too (for VHS!).

I have tried playing VHS into a PC before, editing it and then output to DVD and found it took ages and the results were not as good as the solution I suggest above.

Cheers

Cris.

Ahhh! I completly forgot about the DVD Recorder! Thanks so much!

It may actually have the hardware for video input already but disabled in software. The tax on a DV camera in Europe was higher if the DV camera had analog input because it was then classed as a VCR. There used to be dongles you could buy that basically flipped the analog input enable flag in the firmware. This was a few years ago so no idea if it is still true today however.

So my £29.99 LG, special offer from Comet in Bradford, doesn't cut the mustard then?

I didn't know that you could get RGB output on a VHS recorder, surely, again, you can't put back what wasn't there. I know that there are/were S-VHS machines, but you have to record in S-VHS to get the benefit on playback.

What puzzles me is those, mainly "Readers Offers", of turn your LP's/Cassettes/Video tapes in to CD's/DVD's. Turntables and decks at vastly inflated prices with USB outputs: Surely if you have any of those formats, you have the machine to put them on
- if not, surely you can borrow one of a friend or relative for the one off exercise of transferring your stuff over? - whatever, you can feed them in to the line in sockets or an appropriate video input at a fraction of the cost.

If you wanted to transfer your prerecorded VHS tapes, you would probably still come up against the Macrovision copy protection: As far as I'm aware overcoming it isn't a software issue.

The only problem I had with transferring wedding videos, using a PC, is that one was a wedding in China: When they say Red China, it has nothing to do with communism, everything in the Country seems to be red - from the decorations on the wedding cars, signeage to uniforms - with the potential to flare on the video.

Stop me if I'm wrong, I speak with a certain authority as my great uncle was our ambassador in Shanghai many years ago, but I'm told that China never had VHS tapes/recorders - by the time outside influences became acceptable, the world had moved on to the DVD.

What I haven't been able to do successfully is transfer slides/negatives to jpg's: I bought a PrimeFilm gizmo some years back, but it was never satisfactory, I think you've got to spend a great deal of money to do it well. I wish they had had digital cameras when I was in to photography, I have mountains of prints, negs and slides going back to my mum's slides of our childhood: To put them all out to a professional service would be prohibitive.

This was a guess on my part. I seem to remember an old Thomson deck I had once having RGB outputs on the back, but I can't be certain. I do remember that the type of VHS deck you had made a massive difference to the quality of the output of the tape you were playing. I can remember trying out different decks in my local store on the massive (32" wow!) CRT I was buying at the time. I proved there not all VHS players are the same



My Dad has done a lot of this with our family back catalogue of negatives. He found a good scanner was needed and he ended up with a very expensive Konica (I think!) model that took slides, negatives and rolls of film, the ones that used to put the negatives back in the case for you. It seemed to take forever to scan each one, and needed a lot of correction in software, but the results were pretty good in the end. I think this is a time and patience game. Not fun.

It also helps if you read the manual first, and when asked to select the DPI make sure it's a high number, as like my Dad you may end up redoing them when you get half way through and realise the file size is tiny DOH!

Cheers

Cris.

No clue about China but VHS tapes were everywhere in HK. For rentals, LaserDisc or VideoCD were both very popular at their respective times.

But during that time frame, HK was still under British rule, and very much more progressive than the rest of China.

True. I'd still expect VCRs and other equipment to be relatively widespread though. Crappy electronics have been made in China for years now. They can't have all been for export only.

I have a Direct Network DVR. Could I burn DVD's while watching the programs or playing them back?

I know in the days of VCR's they had "things" in place to block the recording from VCR to VCR.

I did some breif looking and there are DVD Recorder/VCR combo units out there. Maybe with one of these you could just press "go" or something and get the job done.

I don't have time to look into the details.

Those same copy protection signals in the vertical blanking interval of commercial VHS movies are supposed to be interpreted by DVD recorders too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macrovision#Analog_Copy_Prevention

I would have thought that if the VHS tapes are of your own material then copy protection wouldn't be a problem as it won't have been added when it was made. You should be able to copy from from format to the other without problems. You can watch the footage back as you do it, I personally wish there was some kind of high speed dubbing option so it only takes half the time

I know you can get magic little boxes that strip out that protection, but I have never used one myself and would assume that it would only further reduce the quality of the picture.

Cheers

Cris.

Correct. Copy protection is only an issue for commercial movies.

Not IMHO, as I've mentioned, I've used the gizmo and it looks fine. In fact, the Plextor software won't work without the gizmo in the circuit, it just comes up with an error message.

However, as already mentioned, it's not relevant to this enquiry.