VHS to Digital

[Calicajun]

Going through more of Mom's stuff I just found three drawers of VSH-C tapes. Most all if knot all of them are tapes of my kids and old friends I grew up with over the years. At least according to the labels on her tapes. Anyway I would like to transfer them to digital format to a external hard drive.
Each VSH-C tape is 20 minutes long, so the question is what size hard drive would be a good size to buy. Been looking at 8tb drives just don't have any idea how many tapes I may get onto a drive that size?

 

[Joeseph]

given a DVD is somewhere around 750MB in size and long enough for full length movies, I'd say 8TB size should be plenty, but if it were me I'd be making more than one copy so you might want to consider more units rather than have only one.

Probably your number of tapes question largely depends on how you do the conversion. Might be a case of converting one to check the process and doing the sums to work out what you need.

 

[Calicajun]

Thanks, now to find a VCR that works, the three here that my house died.

 

[John from PA]

Going through more of Mom's stuff I just found three drawers of VSH-C tapes. Most all if knot all of them are tapes of my kids and old friends I grew up with over the years. At least according to the labels on her tapes. Anyway I would like to transfer them to digital format to a external hard drive.
Each VSH-C tape is 20 minutes long, so the question is what size hard drive would be a good size to buy. Been looking at 8tb drives just don't have any idea how many tapes I may get onto a drive that size?

You mention VHS-C which is the compact version of the VHS format that was used for camcorders. The camcorders also had a playback feature that might be able to be used for digitization. Any chance you have the camcorder and if so post the make/model.

 

[Calicajun]

You mention VHS-C which is the compact version of the VHS format that was used for camcorders. The camcorders also had a playback feature that might be able to be used for digitization. Any chance you have the camcorder and if so post the make/model.

Yes, still have/found one of the two VSH-C camcorders mom had but not the power cable which is a odd size cable setup. Anyway after going through a bunch of trouble setting up to record it turns out that the tapes were too degraded for viewing or copying. But to my surprise after completely giving up I found that at sometime in the long pass I had copied them to DVD. So I have now copied the DVDs to a new hard drive and hope this format stays for a while this time. BTW the wife is very happy now as most all the tapes were of our kids when they were little. No sleeping on the couch for me.

Now on to the next tape project, copying mini DV video tapes to the computer. Yes, I can't find one to the cables for recording from camcorder to computer and of course the software disk is too old to load to the computer. This is why I like doing stills much more over movies.

 

[Well Bonded]

Thanks, now to find a VCR that works, the three here that my house died.

Before you begin spending a lot of money in hardware you might be better off sending the tapes to a conversion company, these companies specialize in converting tapes to a digital format, they not only have pro-grade players they have editing equipment that can clean up to a degree the damage time does to old tape, they also understand how to repair stuck or jammed carts and how to backwind tapes to reduce oxide loss as much as possible hen duplication them.

Older tapes tend stick from layer to layer and if not handled properly the oxide will pull off causing dropouts.

 

[Calicajun]

Having an outside company do it cost a whole lot. Anyway if turns out I found that I had already transferred the tapes to DVD. So all I had to do now was transfer the DVD to a Hard Drive which I have already done. Now my next project is transferring fifty plus mini DV tapes to the hard drive. Hopping that should be easy but won't know for sure until the cable (I lost) comes in from Amazon. Camera takes a 4 pin IEEE cable but my computer doesn't have that old type port. So I ordered a 4 pin IEEE to USB cable and that should work.

 

[Clc327]

I've been going through boxes of my old VHS tapes and digitizing whatever is worthwhile. I found a little success posting old TV commercials to my YouTube channel. Quality isn't great but it's passable.