Is it worth the money?

[extracheese]

anyone know anything about converting VHS tapes to DVD ?

i asked for a quote from a Video Store as follows

how much would it cost to convert a bunch of some family VHS tapes ( 2 -hours each) onto DVD that can be read by DVD players ( as opposed to only computers)?

They responeded with :

There is many ways of transferring from VHS to DVD. You can just straight transfer it "as is", which will preserve the sound, but would defeat the purpose of a digital transfer, that is not the way we work. What we do, is download the VHS on to a PC with a firewire VCR, which has 0 loss. After that we digitalize, render, pixel, chapter and if necessary, will encode it with your regional coding. Then we burn it at 1X to make sure of 0 loss again. After such process, you'll be able to zoom in, scan and chapter your DVD, and play it in ant DVD player.

QUESTION IS - is the quality THAT Much better to be worth spending that much?
I can just tranfer without all the fancy editing...
Anyone do this before?

THanks

This message was edited by extracheese on 10-19-03 @ 6:06 PM

[reeshy]

I have the answer but I'm not allowed to post in this forum!!!!

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Satcam makes the very best....sigpics!!

[Mike Teacher]

No Problemo...

1. Buy a DVD+/-R burner for your computer or,

2. Buy a stand alone DVD Recorder

If you're just looking to dub stuff that isn't copy protected; there is a nice market in used stand-alone DVD recorder, like the Panasonic DMR-E20 or 30. You can get these on eBay for a couple of hundred bucks, which is about the price of a good multi-format DVD burner.

Recordeable DVDs are going throu a bit of a format war: DVD+R vs DVD-R vs DVD-RAM and a couple of others. It's not as big a difference as Beta vs Vhs, since with those it was a different size; with DVD you're still having a laser etch bumps and valleys into a substrate; so soon just about all puters will come with something that can burn and read and play all the formats.

If it's copy-protected, piece of cake too; even for dubbing the best copy-protected DVDs; if ya know...

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[extracheese]

No these are not copywrite protected. they are family events like weddings and graduations on VHS. I want to place them on DVD before the VHS tape tears or just wears out. These tapes are irreplaceable.

So your method of buying a DVD recorder ( and connecting it to my VCR) , will make a copy euqal in quality to the VHS tape, but do you know if the method the STORE GUY talked about is that much better? or is it unecessary?

once im doing this i would want it to play on any DVD player and last forever even if they come out with better equipment..


thanks