Hands on: Transfer analogue video to digital

If you’re old enough to vote, there’s a good chance that you have some analogue video footage lying about. Whether it’s years of family holidays still on 8mm cassettes or the first series of The Sopranos on VHS, one day you won’t be able to watch it any more.

In the not-too-distant future the only place you will be able to find a VHS VCR is in a museum, where the staff are not likely to be receptive to the idea of you turning up with your mates and a recording of the 1994 FA Cup final.

To ensure you can continue to watch your archived analogue material you should be thinking about digitising it and storing it in a format that’s going to be around for some time to come which, for most of us right now, means DVD.

So what are the options? Whatever format your analogue material is in, the steps involved in digitising it are, for the most part, the same. You need to connect the analogue player, be it a camcorder, VCR or whatever to your PC.

Capture hardware
Unless you already have some means of connecting an analogue video player to your PC, you’ll need to buy an analogue capture device.

Analogue TV cards often have a composite and/or S-video input port so, if you have one, it’s worth checking to see what input options it provides. Note that standard 3D graphics cards often have an S-video port, but it’s usually output-only for connecting to a TV set.

It used to be the case that you had to pay a premium for cards capable of converting analogue video to good-quality digital files, but these days you can get external converters that will do an excellent job for less than £50.

These usually consist of a small box that plugs into a USB2 port and provides inputs for composite video, S-video and stereo audio.

For the purpose of this column and with the ulterior motive of transferring a few years worth of S-VHS family videos to DVD, I’ve been testing out a couple of options.

Terratec’s Grabster AV150 is a neat grey plastic box about the size of a pack of cards. It has composite and S-video input ports and a video pass-through port, but no sound inputs, so you need to directly connect the sound outputs from your camcorder or VCR to the line-in jack on your sound card. A cable is provided for this purpose.