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Preserving VHS Recordings For Another 20 Years?
efedora asks: "I have about 650 hours of VHS tape going back about 20 years (no, not my porn collection) and the tape is starting to deteriorate. What are the best options for preserving the contents? Quality is important but not critical, so long as it's close to the original. Very low labor cost/time and simple operation. are important. Is there an easy way to do this?"
"Some of the ideas I've had so far are:
- VHS to VHS tape with an analog 'clean up' box between the VHS machines. This would give me the same number of tapes but should last another 20 years. Quality will degrade.
- Burn DVD's direct from VHS tape. I have software that will do this. Expensive and the DVD's won't even hold a VHS tape if it's 2 hours long. Good quality with no degradation.
- Burn VCD's. I don't know of any simple direct-to-VCD software that will do this so there would be a large labor overhead. Good quality with some degradation. Cheap.
- VHS direct to cheap IDE drives. Good quality with no degradation. Relatively cheap. Probably could use the same technique as burn-to-dvd."
You say quality is not critical. I would recommend using an mpeg4 codec (proberbly divx or xvid), if you capture at full vhs resolution (352x240) then you can store image quality that far surprises vcd (and your slightly degraded vhs) quality at about 300meg per hour. 650 hours of tape will bring you upto 195gig. How you store your data is really up to you, but I would recommend getting a couple of 200gig hard drives and keeping two copies for safety reasons.
You might want to read this article on capturing from vhs.
I've had this long-standing theory that you could play a video multiple times, and merge them to get a higher-quality signal. Obviously, VHS has it limits, but in theory, with the right magic, you could filter out some noise and stuff?
One time I saw something on a TV show where detectives took a video from a store CCTV system that was almost COMPLETELY unusable. They took it to some experts (at NASA, actually, IIRC), who were able to work out a formula for the horrible noise almost completely obscuring the video, and get pretty good quality video from it.
Now I realize the original post here wanted a *quick* way to to do, so taking his home cassettes to NASA isn't quite what he wants. But what I'd like to know is... Is there stuff out there that can do what I've described (play a video multiple times and take the best parts from each), or is this just some insane, impossible idea I dreamed up?
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suwain_2
Blue laser DVD burners will be readilly available and probably cost about the same amount as the current DVD burners. This gives you two options:
1) You could buy the standard DVD Burner for around a $100(??) and use something such as the All-in-Wonder (~4.7 gigs per disc)
or
2)You could buy the blue laser burner for around $350(??) and use the same capture device (~24 gigs per disc)
You joke, but back when film was first invented, filmmakers weren't allowed to copyright it, so they sent a picture of every frame to the copyright office instead. Film restorationists have been able to go back to these archives and reconstruct the films from the individual photographs.
wrt the comment somebody else made about capturing at 640x480:
;)
video pixels are not square and 640x480 has no proper reationship to VHS resolutions. Capture at 720x480 and downsize. You're trying to fit a curve which means you want to sample at a multitude of the initial frequency then downsize to a proper video size.
640x480 would mean a distortion during the sample then a distortion when you change the size to be standards-compliant.
Then again, you could also get in a time machine and go beat some sense into the farmboy who invented TV so it would match computer resolutions and be progressive....But I digress
Many good ideas here but I think we all act with suggestions like if the world is going to end tomorrow and this is the last chance you have to preserve your video collection. Let's see some facts.
*You want to be able to see your video in 20 years.
*You want a cheap, painless and effective strategy.
*The technology wont be the same in 20 years.
What I recommend is to put it on a digital media that will allow to preserve good quality and that is easy to access. DIVX on DVD or Hard disk are good choices. I don't recommend CD's because in my opinion to many CD's is a pain in the ass and in a couple of years you will deeply regret that choice. (Like it was for me when I did a clean up in my hundreds of 1.4 Floppy Disks of data.)
Then in the next 5 to 10 years you will see if DIVX or DVD technology will be in the way to be extinct. At that moment you will be able to easily decide how to transfer your videos to a new format and then maybe you will have better solutions that will last for very long or maybe you will simply transfer your data on another media for another 10 years. The most important is to keep a good quality (DIVX 200 meg/hour will be OK and take around 150 gig) and keep it on a media where it will be easy to access when you want to watch your stuff and will be easy to do the transfer when YOU WILL NEED to do the transfer.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
Some years ago I had a problem with "stiction" (not my term...) on old R-to-R tapes, and I rang the local (Oz) office of the manufacturer (Ampex), who offered similar advice. They could (at a price) cook the tapes and return them to me. I would then have some time (not forever) to transfer them to other tapes or suitable media (CD burners were novel and expensive in those days).
He also advised me that the local Blind Society had had a similar problem with Talking Books, and that someone there (I had a name but never followed through, so I lost it) had had success using a microwave! (Obviously the tapes were not on metal reels - he he)
Sadly, I didn't follow through, and now have even more of a problem....but at least it was consistent advice.
It seems the "stiction" is caused by the plastisers or binders (one or the other) oozing, and sticking layers of tape together. I have had some where the coating falls right off as the tape is wound/unwound. Most critically at the end of the tape near the hub of the reel. Advice in other posts to regularly run tapes from reel to reel to even up pressures and generally loosen them up would seem good advice. I knew it all those years ago (more than 20) but always thought I'd be listening to them so frequently it wouldn't matter. Then along came CDs with all their convenience......
Hayse (down here in Oz)