While everyone seems to be outing old shit, in the process of de-clutering, we have an odd-ball collection of stuff come to light. Video Cameras? we have 4 - in ascending order of age: A Canon little digital tape thingy (takes DV60) A Sony Hi-8 camcorder A FOAD Panasonic full size VHS camcorder (great for making people think you're a pro filmist when using - they **** off out of the way sharpish) and... A Bell & Howell 8mm clockwork cine camera! WTF did that come from? I have *no* idea! Stills cameras - drawers full of throw-away 35mm things, several generations of digital cameras, and Praktica LB2 c/w original lens and an Impakt 135mm lens Olympus om10 35mm SLR Oh, and a *really* ancient Garmin 'brick' satnav - which still works - just gets confused a little on new roads & junctions. Oh, and a shedload of VHS tapes - mostly tat, but some I would hate to chuck away, like Tommy, Aliens, Dr.Who, Flambards, Easy Rider, a couple of 'birth year' tapes of 1954 & 1956 etc. etc. as well as a few home recordings on the afore-mentioned Panasonic of holidays, kids etc. Anyone any experience of these USB capture dongles? any good? any recommendations for getting VHS onto PC/DVD ? -- Rob_P UKRM(at)indqualtec.co.uk uppercase(d) BBIWYMC#1 BOG#11? MRO#31 IBCDBBB#1(kotl) FJ1200, CCM130 Benelli Cabriolet (gone) Looks like Rab C Nesbit.
R C Nesbit escribió: Yup. I got one to copy VHS to DVD. It works, but it has to be streamed in real time, so takes as long as the recordings are. I suppose that goes without saying, really. Mine's a EZ Grabber.
USB capture dongles work well. I could do with borrowing a Hi-8 camcorder as mine broke while I was copying my home movies. I threw out an OM20 recently. Not worth anything.
Eiron spoke: Whereabouts are you? You can borrow this one once we've acquired a dongle and transfered our stuff. -- Rob_P UKRM(at)indqualtec.co.uk uppercase(d) BBIWYMC#1 BOG#11? MRO#31 IBCDBBB#1(kotl) FJ1200, CCM130 Benelli Cabriolet (gone) Looks like Rab C Nesbit.
I've got a similar problem, found some video8 cassettes but can't now play them. Tries my old camera but 15 years stored away and it's given up the ghost.
Coo, I'd be interested to find out that's worth its weight in gold - I have one, a NV-MS9b. It used to produce very good (for the time) S-VHS video. That's soemthing we're just looking at, for transfer of old family tapes to soemthing more up-to-date.
That's very decent of you, but I think we'll need one for quite some time, as Elly turns up more videos by the hour. Seems they were very keen on documenting stuff. Looks like the Roxio outfit from Amazon, with connectors, cables and software for titling all inna box. TYVM anyway.
Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, SIRPip Wanna go halves? I have some video that I could do with cutting to DVD before the players get so old they're on a different voltage.
Could be a plan. This is the kit: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Roxio-Easy-VHS-DVD-PC/dp/B001O5CUJ4/ref=sr_1_8?i e=UTF8&qid=1296494608&sr=8-8 looks foolproof to me.
Trouble is you won't find anybody because you (the great unwashed) won't fucking pay. I tried to set up just such a service a couple of years back. Plenty of enquiries, until I mentioned there was a cost.
I have a Sony digital camcorder that uses 8mm tapes but can also play the older analogue tapes from the early 90s. As it has a firewire port, so plug it in to the Vaio with DVGate software and you can control the camera and evryfink. Then stick it in to Adobe Premier 6 LE if I want to get creative. Still hasn't stopped me having hours of recordings of RAC rallies , hill climbs and the lad growing up that haven't been captured to HDD or DVD. Musr do it before the tapes age and crack. For VHS I have an old VHS box acquired off Ebay for a song and hooked up to the Vaio by the TV card. Gigapocket takes care of the recording and conversion to MPeg or whatever. It's one reason why I don't get a new desktop PC. This machine is a bit slow (P4 3.4 GHz) by today's standards but the PCV-RZ504 was geared up for audio visual fiddling straight out of the box. -- +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Pete Fisher at Home: | | Aprilia Shiver Yamaha WR250Z/Supermoto "Old Gimmer's Hillclimber" | | Gilera GFR * 2 Moto Morini 2C/375 | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+
Terrible reviews on that one, especially the bit about the copyright protection kicking in, even on home movies. I got something similar many years ago from Aldi. Think it was made by Tevion. Has a similar set of hardware, and comes up on the computer as a USB Video Capture device. Set up is usually simple enough. Getting the recording right can be a nightmare. There are lots of settings, starting with the version of PAL you want to use, right down to the brightness, contrast, saturation etc. I found that it needed a few passes to get the right combination in place to get a reasonable recording. When the settings are right though, it does the job and gives me suitable MPEG2 files, which still need converting to go through my DVD authoring software - although some software should take the file as is (but will likely demux it internally, before writing to disc). These days, I'd probably encode the capture as MPEG4 / DivX and simply store it on a media player, rather than faffing with the DVD route, which may not last as long as one would like anyway.
That's what I intend to do, tbh. Rather than having it all spanning a couple of dozen DVDs, I'll buy a(nother) terabyte HDD and it can rest on there until the next big thing comes along. That's what sparked all this for us in the first place, as Elly has some unfeasible number of photographs, a lot o them in various stages from RAW through to finished product and they're fairly space-hungry. We're both running more HDDs than we have space for, so it has become routine to use a caddy and hot-swap as required. Storage like this is just an extension of that practice, as we see it.
