Ask Camcorders

Do you still have old copies of VHS video tapes stacked on our home and office bookshelves collecting dust? If you are like me, you have a video player sitting disconnected underneath your DVD player.

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. Your computer also requires a CD-RW drive. You will also need a video editing software program.

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 a few tips on how to do this.

First you will need to capture a VHS video to a computer video editing program using an analog-to-DVD converter. You would otherwise need to encode it to MPEG-2 format, then publish your 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. If you are not the type to take on this kind of project yourself, a DVD authoring and production house will be happy to handle it for you by way of their own conversion and DVD authoring processes.