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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."
I've really found that getting a Pinacle Video-editting compatible card and software is helpful. I've converted the majority of my VHS collection to DVD for a relatively low price... WHich comes out to be less than I spent on all the VHS.
How about the recently made Ars Technica Guide to Capturing, Cleaning, & Compressing Video? It was made with exactly what you want to do in mind.
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?"
No. There is no way that you can copy 650 hours of VHS video simply, inexpensively, and with little labor. It's going to be time-consuming, expensive, and labor-intensive.
That said, making more VHS copies seems like a poor idea as they, too, will degrade and machines to play them will cease to be available long before 20 years is up (remember Beta, 8-track, U-matic, and Elcassette?)
You need to get them into the digital domain and, once there, moving them from format to format is relatively easy.
Stick with well known formats that have a future.
DIVX, XVID etc.. could easily be forgotten in 20 years time, DVD and MPEG2 probably won't be.
true, but neither will most storage media.
they can store the player software and codecs on the same hard drives, and when the next leap is required at least they'll be ready.
But, what *will* last 20 years?
Michael Loves Me!
This is crazy but it'd work. Print every frame out one by one. This comes out to something like 70,200,000 pieces of paper, which as long as kept away from open flame, sunlight, moisture, wind, etc will essentially last forever. Plus the bragging rights for having a huge pile of paper is cool. (23,400 feet high to be exact given that paper is 0.004 inches thick, of course quality of paper will affect this.;-)
Between the VCR and the capture card, second deck, etc, make sure you use a time base corrector. Don't trust the TBC supposedly built in to the VCR or capture card, get an external unit. Otherwise, audio sync problems will haunt you forever.
The broadcast video processor (also from b&h) is also useful for this application. I like to put it before the TBC.
Regards,
Mark
markrages@mlug.missouri.edu
Oooh... Giant Flip-book!
Michael Loves Me!
Modern paper is too acidic, it will just eat itself up given enough time. I'd opt for inscribing it in tablets of lead, myself. That would sacrifice color, but you could make three tablets for every frame...
Actually he did that when he put it on VHS.
"Typically VHS and 8 mm tape are rated at a vertical resolution of 240 lines, 3/4 inch SP at 325 lines, S-VHS and Hi8 at approximately 400 lines, Betacam SP and MII at close to 400 lines, and DVC at 500 lines (although some tests point to effective resolutions of around 400 lines)."
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
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)
miniDV is a horrible option. Anyone who suggests that hasn't really worked with the format much. It's great for camcorders but not archival of this volume.
You DO need a good deck. I use an upper-end JVC S-VHS deck with integrated comb, genlock, and digital buffer to stabilize. The importance of a clean incoming signal CANNOT be overstated. Garbage in, garbage out and bandwidth wasted. S-Video is important because it delivers a far higher quality image. Composite video mushes parts of the signal together.
For the bulk of my straight archival I use an Athlon-based system with USB2 connected to an ADS USB Instant DVD MPEG-2 encoder and an iMic USB sounde device.
USB2 is important because you need lots of available bandwidth. The iMic uses the same AD/DA chip as some of teh pro Roland devices. Doing the sound grab outside the computer's case helps cut down on noise. (Yes, I use a USB extension and the iMic is "housed" near the VCR.
Some people prefer the Snazzi USB encoders. I found the ADS, factory refurbished, at TigerDirect for $150. hard to find a hardware capture at that price.
I've also got a Canon DV camcorder with passthrough and an ATi All-in-Wonder. Neither is a good solution. DV is HUGE compared to the quality of the source and any cheap capture card has poor performance. If you want to spend $1K for a Canopus, well, that's a different story...
For plain-vanilla VHS and S-VHS you're going to be just fine if you use CVD which is half DVD resolution and is compatible with the DVD spec.
Which leads to storage medium. You can burn CVDs to CDR if you want. It's cheap because, at least in the U.S., you can find CDRs for full rebate a lot and the drives also. Right now, if you're lucky, you'll find both at OfficeMax.com. Alternately, got to DVD.
Now, a word about bitrates: Your comment that a DVD can't hold 2 hours is incorrect. Sounds like you tried and captured at too high a data rate for your source.
If you're willing to re-compress, you can easily use various clean-up filters and get at least as good an image as you have on tape, putting 3.5-4 hours per disc in CVD format on a DVDR. That's not a typo. If you properly use filters the result of cleanup on onld VHS source can be better than the raw version. There are filters specifically to deal with the various colorswim and dropouts of magnetic tape.
For a list of links and info on hacking the ADS capture device:
utils@mindspring.com
A/V Utils for the Masses!!!
Curator of links at
http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/
For info on the iMic:
http://griffintechnology.com
"The Philips DVDR-985 will copy DVDs, VHS tapes, TV shows, VCDs, audio music CDs, and more onto DVD+R and DVD+RW discs. Then, it can be played back on DVD players and on your DVD-ROM [computer] drive.
With this DVD recorder, you can record using video-in (RCA), s-video, or firewire (lEEE1394) connections. It also has a built-in TV tuner for your convenience.
The most compatible of all recorders, the recorded discs (DVD+R and DVD+RW) can be played on more than 90% of all DVD players and on DVD-ROM computer drives. Also, with DVD+RW, you can erase the recorded disc and re-record onto it again for thousands of times.
There are four recording modes: DV quality (1hr ), DVD (2hr), S-Video (3hr), and VHS (4hr).
As an added feature, the DVDR-985 will also play play CD-R, CD-RW, SVCD, DVD-R, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD+R, DVD, and VCDs.
And like most stand-alone DVD recorders, the Philips DVDR-985 is as easy to use as a VCR."
Easy , just not as cheap as you would like to go, bout 700 bucks but i'm sure you can find a better deal as i spent only 4 seconds looking.
Whats better than clubbin' baby seals?... Absolutely nothin!!! -Zero Wing
Chances are DivX won't last 20 years.
I can run binaries for the PDP-11 and play old Atari and Commodore 64 games, and old Amiga tunes on XMMS. But all the geeks who have hours and hours of anime and TV shows and porn in DivX are going to be unable to port the DivX codec to whatever system were running in 20 years, and not even be able to run xine under a x86 emulator? I regard that as very unlikely.
Better question is "why 20 years ?" ...
VHS has been great in the absence of options that are easier to move forward.
Now that you're thinking digital, why not think about 2-5 years and, since it's digital you can batch-convert everything to the next best thing.
Cheers
OTOH, my phono record collection dates back to 1949.
[lame humour attempt]
If you bought everything in your phono collection new maybe you should start worrying about preserving yourself for another 20 years instead of your music...
[/lame humour attempt]
Do you Gentoo!?
-Any Dazzle products. Especially the DVC-80. The price is right but this piece of trash is so terrible that it does not even belong in the trash. The FireWire DV Bridge is decent, but it has severe problems with slightly unregulated power source. And the only thing worse than dazzle products is dazzle tech support.
-Pinnacle Products. Sometimes they work with excellent results. But they are very unpredictable, with often buggy software and whacked out compatibility problems. If you are starting out and don't have an existing video conversion infrastructure, avoid these things!
-Adaptec VideOh. It looks good in the surface but I have heard reports of these things acting in a very whacked out fashion.
So what do you get? Check out the card list at www.vcdhelp.com which has a huge list of products with many user ratings which tend to be quite reliable. The best products for converting your VHS to digital format in the lower price range that actually work tend to be the Matrox devices as well as the Canopus ADVC-100. From personal experience, I can say that the canopus (~US$300) kicks serious ass, and I have converted several VHS tapes to VCD with its help. The output from these into the computer can be sent to VCD, SVCD, DVD, etc.
Also check out rec.video.desktop which is a low-spam, well populated newsgroup with people who deal with this kind of stuff a lot. I read it regularly.
Breakfast served all day!
To follow up on what someone earlier said, make SURE you run the output from your VCR through a good professional (or at least semi-pro) external time base corrector.
If you have a high end consumer video deck, it may have a built-in TBC -- disable it. These consumer TBCs work great on good-quality tapes but can actually mess up your image pretty badly on degraded tapes. Use a real, adjustable professional TBC.
Not only will it give you a stable signal for capture (preferably with a pro capture card rather than a consumer one), but it will actually make your videos look better when you view them!
Most people are suggesting stupid solutions with Video cards and Video editing software
I agree.
Okay. I used to work in a TV station.
DVD is the big thing right now, but history has proven that formats with meteoric rises (as in, DVD went from nowhere to everywhere in four years) is that they have meteoric falls. Case in point: 8-Track tape.
Every day, someone builds a shorter wavelength blue laser, and someone else builds a better compression algorithm, or even a better copy-prevention scheme. How long until the DVD format is revamped or replaced? Will the new players play the old discs?
VHS was introduced in about 1977, and home VCRs didn't achieve anywhere near the market penetration of the DVD player for 15 years. CD players took almost 10 years to achieve ubiquity.
Here's what's done at TV stations. We store the tape carefully. That's it, that's all. Now, TV stations buy good tape and use good video formats (ie. no crap like VHS with its ridiculous tape wear). The average VTR in a TV station is in the range of $10,000.
The video is saved in a tape format which will be around in 20 years. You can still find an Ampex Quad machine to play nearly 50 year old tape; almost every large city will have at least one in a video production house or tape archive.
Local stations tend to run Betacam SP or Digital Betacam. The investment in video formats is huge, most TV stations will stick with whatever format they chose for years after it became obsolete.
As recently as 1993, I was carrying around an Ikegami camera and a 40 pound Sony BVU-110 3/4" VTR handing off my shoulder. The battery belt for the VTR and the sun gun was another 20 pounds. Meanwhile, the bigger stations in my area were all running around with single-piece Sony Betacam ENG setups.
Interestingly, there's one video format that you can take anywhere in the world, and any TV station or production house can use it: 3/4". Razor sharp analog pictures, very little generational loss, good and fast tape speed. It's Beta's big brother, but it's old now, so the tape and the machines can be found used all over the place.
Why not pick up a 3/4" deck? You don't need anything fancy, just make sure it will take the full-size (not just portable) 3/4" cassettes. The tape is cheap enough, the machine will last forever, and you won't be able to visibly see any image degredation from VHS. Hell, if the stuff was recorded 20 years ago, the VTRs at the TV station you were recording were probably 3/4". Look for a 25-year-old "U-Matic" machine, preferably from Sony (popular enough to be easy to service), top-loading is fine. Record a couple of DVDs to it - if it's working properly, most people could never tell the difference. Newer U-Matic SP machines are even better. Watch out for the machines which are player-only, and for the ENG machines which only take the small cassettes. (3/4" cassettes come in two physical sizes, but the full-size machines will play both sizes.)
Tape storage - this applies for all formats, including the lowly VHS:
Fire and Meat. Yummy.