Video Conversion

For the past few years I have had an ongoing project to preserve all my family's old home movies. This has involved a deep dive into understanding videotapes, VCRs, and video capture technologies that I never thought I would do, but I feel it's necessary to get the highest quality copies of everything I can before these tapes and their contents degrade further. Every once in a while I get asked how I do this and what tools I use, and this time I decided I'm going to blog about it. So thank you, Kendal, for asking! What do you…

I have long been the digital archivist of my family, putting countless hours into tracing genealogy, scanning and organizing photos, and, recently, digitizing old videos. For the past few years, my labor of love has been converting VHS, Betamax, and 8mm camcorder tapes to digital formats so they can be preserved. It's been a tremendous undertaking in my spare time that I hope to share details of in the future. But for now, I want to share one tip. If you ever find yourself digitizing old family memories, do not put them on DVD (or Blu-Ray). Why? DVD Media Back…