Most of us still have old copies of VHS video tapes stacked
on our home and office bookshelves just collecting dust.
When was the last time you actually used your video
cassette player? If you are like me, it has been sitting
disconnected underneath my DVD player for more than a year.
If you are in the same boat, then you will be happy to know
that the copying process of switching valuable content from
VHS tapes over via DVD duplication is really quite easy.
It's a great way to preserve and also share your old tapes,
whether personal or business related.
The process of converting to a DVD basically requires a VHS
tape player, or a camcorder. Simply plug either the
camcorder or the VHS tape player into your PC, as long as
your computer has the ports for plugging in these devices
in. You also need a minimum of 512 MB of RAM and a 2 GHz
processor, plus about 20 GB of hard drive free space. And
your computer also needs a CD-RW drive for the duplication
process. Plus you will need video editing software.
There are several conversion options if you want to
transfer VHS tapes to DVDs, and if produced properly, the
DVDs can look even better than the original VHS tapes
including formats such as VHS-C, SVHS, Hi8, regular, as
well as Betas. Here are some tips for what to do.
First you will need to capture a VHS video to a computer
video editing program using an analog-to-DVD converter.
Otherwise you would need to encode it to MPEG-2 and publish
a DVD. This provides some flexibility to edit the video as
you wish by adding transitions, music or special effects.
One drawback is that it is time consuming.
You could also capture the video to your computer as an
MPEG-2 using hardware capture devices that will convert VHS
to MPEG-2, then author the DVD. Some inexpensive hardware
analog-to-MPEG boxes offer good quality because the analog
source video does not have to be converted to DV before
it's encoded to MPEG.
Last, the fastest and easiest way to convert VHS to DVD is
to connect your VHS VCR or camcorder to a standalone DVD
recorder. This works like a VCR, and the VHS to DVD
recorder basically gives you a DVD copy of your tape in
real time. However it is important to make sure your analog
video is of the best quality possible because any flaws in
the original video tape might be magnified when encoded to
MPEG-2 and then converted to the DVD.
It takes very little time to copy VHS tape to DVD. However
if you are not inclined to take on this kind of project
yourself, a DVD authoring and production house will be
happy to do it for you via their own conversion and DVD
duplication process.
----------------------------------------------------
Kristin Gabriel is the marketing communications director
for Acutrack, Inc. (http://www.acutrack.com). The company
enables customers to create, publish and deliver custom
content for DVD and CD distribution worldwide. Acutrack's
proprietary On Demand production produces and ship custom
packaged CDs or DVDs one at a time. Ideal for customers who
are selling downloadable content and are not sure how many
units to produce, On Demand takes care of inventory,
packaging and fulfillment.
No comments:
Post a Comment