Elgato Video Capture can help you transfer your VHS tapes to DVD. You'll need to buy separate burning software to complete the VHS to DVD transformation. In 2006 Peter Hilton unearthed a collection of homemade VHS tapes in his dad’s basement. There were hours of concert footage from 2000 to 2003, when Peter's high school band—Down in Flames—briefly gained a following and toured the country. “I just knew that if I didn’t do something with those tapes in a few years, I’d lose them,' Hilton says. 'There might not be the technology to support them.” He didn't try to convert the VHS tapes to a digital format then, but the project earned a spot on his to-do list. Evolving technology has left many of us with our own videos in older formats. At B&H Photo Video in New York City, nearly a dozen people per day come in asking how to convert film or VHS home movies to digital formats they can watch on a computer or, says senior technologist Mark Steinberg. Like Hilton, people often 'will find a stash of old home movies,' Steinberg says. 'They don’t want to hang onto boxes of films or VHS, but they want to save the memories on a digital format.” After his dad passed away in 2015, Hilton decided it was finally time to do something with the tapes. He figured out how to get them into digital form, but the learning curve was steep. To simplify things for everyone else, here's a guide for converting VHS to digital and getting your old media out of the attic and onto. As a bonus, we've included advice on how to make sure the video you're capturing today is still easy to read a few years—or decades—from now. Although Kodak released 16 mm Kodachrome film in 1935, then 8 mm (aka Regular 8) film a year later, home movies didn’t really take off until the 1960s, when Kodak released Super 8. If you have old reels of film in the attic packed in iconic yellow Kodak boxes, they’re probably Regular 8 or Super 8 film. “Regular 8 film is about as wide as a pencil on a small reel about 3 inches in diameter,” says Howard Besser, professor of cinema studies at New York University and founding director of the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. Super 8 film will be a similar size. Each 3-inch reel contains about 50 feet of film, good for only a few minutes of action. How to download movie to mac. If the film strip is roughly two pencils wide—and on a reel that looks like the kind you might see in a documentary about the Golden Age of Hollywood—it’s probably 16 mm. Once you’ve identified the kind of film you have, you can turn it into a digital format—but it’s going to take some time and money. The good news: “Film is a pretty sturdy medium,” says Ashley Blewer, an archivist, developer, and moving-image specialist, “so old home movies on 8 mm, 16 mm, or Super 8 reels are likely to be in decent shape.” Do it yourself. There are two DIY methods. First, you can buy a film-to-video converter, which looks like a compact version of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel projector. These machines can be expensive—the Wolverine Data Film2Digital Moviemaker Pro, for example, costs about $400, though you might find other models for closer to $100. As the film runs, the new files are recorded to a small, just like the one you find inside digital cameras. This is an analog process: If you have 5 hours of film, the conversion will take 5 hours. “There is another way, but it’s a bit of a project,” says Elias Arias, Consumer Reports’ project leader for audio/video testing. ![]() ![]() You’ll need a film-reel projector, a digital video camera, and a clean white wall or a projector screen. In a dark room, set the projector and video camera up next to each other. Project the film evenly onto the wall or screen, then adjust the viewfinder in your digital camera so that the image being projected fills the whole view. Then press Play on the projector and Record on the camera to capture your footage. “The problem with this method is that you need to work with a very clean white sheet or wall,” Arias says, “and even with a pristine projection surface, you could end up with lower contrast than the original, color shifts, or a softer image. The final quality of the recording will also be limited by your video camera’s capability.” Hire a service. Though film conversion services aren’t cheap, they're a lot easier than the DIY methods described above. In addition to local film specialists, major retailers such as Costco and Walgreens have conversion services for 16 mm, 8mm, and Super 8 film formats. You’ll need to take your media to a store. Expect to pay a base price, plus a fee for additional feet—which can add up quickly.
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