Friday, April 13, 2018

Do it Yourself VHS Transfer to DVD, should I hold onto the VHS tapes afterwards, Yes!

In the event you have already done a "Do it Yourself VHS to DVD transfer" or plan to, I strongly recommend keeping the original VHS tapes for several reasons.

Besides making sure the VHS machine is in good shape, which may mean a trip to someone who knows how to clean the VHS machine and evaluate it to make sure it does not damage your VHS videotapes when you play them, identically labeling your DVD's so they match the labeling on the VHS essential.

The other danger in playing the tapes back yourself is VHS tapes are old and they could be coming apart while being played and you may not even know it. 

However, if you have already made a copy of your VHS tapes to DVD or in the digital domain, you can now view your videos digitally. You watch the digital version of your vhs tapes and you rate them in terms of importance.

I strongly recommend cataloguing one vhs tape per one dvd or one SD memory card. Please remember DVD is not an ideal editing nor archival format so if that is all that you made from the VHS you may want to consider doing additional transfer work at a later date from the original DVD or at the very least making a digital back up from the digital work that was already made.

If any of your VHS tapes that you have transferred to DVD or digital have a magical or sentimental quality to them, then you should consider retransferring those VHS tapes in a professional studio. The cost can be hundreds of dollars and you can even be there to supervise the session. The reason one would do this is there are an array of adjustments that can be made to the original VHS tape while it is being played and transferred to digital that can improve the quality of the VHS tape so much that any digital software used to then improve the picture once it is on a digital forma may actually have a better signal to noise ratio to work with.


Contact Alessandro Machi at vhs at AlessandroMachi.com if you want to book a session in his amazing Analog to Digital Studio. Alessandro's Studio Credits include over 25 IMDB credits and a Los Angeles Emmy. He is also currently ranked top 25 out of 20,000 Lifetime Tongal Ideationists. Mr. Machi also won the prestigious Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Internship Scholarship Award in the Commercials Category many moons ago.

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