Convert VHS to DVD

The generation game
One of the biggest problems that digital video eliminated was that of generational loss. In the pre-digital days, editing analogue footage necessitated copying it from the camcorder tape to an editing master tape.

Then, if you wanted to give copies of the edited tape to friends and family, a further copy would need to be made from the master. With each copy, the image quality noticeably degraded. If you want to get the best-quality results when digitising old analogue tapes, wherever possible try and use the original footage from the camcorder.

VCRs
Using a VCR as a playback device involves making the same connections as for a camcorder ­ one for the video and one for each of the stereo audio channels, but VCR outputs are not the same as those on a camcorder and vary from model to model.

If your VCR has composite video and stereo audio outputs you are in luck, all you will need to connect it to your capture device is three cables with RCA plugs at either end, colour coded yellow for video, red and white for audio.

If it’s an inexpensive model, your VCR will probably have only one or more Scart sockets for connecting to a TV. If that’s the case you can get an adapter for around £10 that plugs into the Scart socket and has the necessary RCA connectors on the back (see www.tvcables.co.uk/cgi-bin/ tvcables/SC300.html for an example). Some capture packages, such as Magix Rescue Your Videotapes, come with such an adapter included in the box.

CAPTURE HARDWARE
It seems suddenly people have realised their old analogue video tapes won’t last forever, and the market has responded with a variety of inexpensive, easy-to-use hardware capture devices. These range from small USB boxes to devices such as the Firebox Ion VCR 2 PC. These are described in more detail in the next section, but it may be that you already have the necessary hardware to digitise your analogue tapes and store them on your PC ready for burning to DVD. We will now look at the most common options for capturing.

DV camcorders
If you have one, your DV camcorder is, of course, a digitising device and has everything necessary to convert analogue video signals into digital video. The problem is that many camcorders lack an analogue input port to let you connect them to your playback device. Canon, JVC, Panasonic and Sony all produced DV camcorders with analogue-in ports, so if you own a DV camcorder made by one of these companies it is worth checking whether it has this functionality.

A digital camcorder will convert analogue video using the DV codec, producing high-quality PAL resolution (720x576) video. If the DV camcorder has a ‘pass through’ facility you can connect it to your PC using a Firewire cable and capture analogue video from a connected camcorder or VCR directly. If it doesn’t you will first need to record the analogue video to a DV tape in the camcorder, then capture it to your PC and edit in the same way as other footage shot with the DV camcorder.