2024 How To Convert Old Camcorder Tapes to Digital | databits

hello there if you're watching this video you're probably in one of two situations you're a subscriber to the channel and if you are thank you for that or you've stumbled across this video because you're looking for a way to transfer some old home movie tapes onto something digital and something modern and digital not dvd-r or a DVR but you want to transfer it into something that you can share on the internet or send to a family member that sort of thing well if you have as much as I have here which is the camcorder the device you have the power supply for it you have some tapes and you have the original audio/video connection cables that go from the camera to the television or from the VCR or laserdisc player or whatever it happens to be then you only need one more thing and there's a bunch of different things out there you can buy but imma pick one of them and I'm gonna show you the one I've picked and then we're gonna actually transfer a home movie live and then I'm gonna show you what that video looks like after it's been transferred so you can decide for yourself if this is something worth investing in let's get started so again there's a lot of these devices out there on the internet that you can buy I've chosen to go with the cloner alliance so this particular little box will take all of your retro tech all your retro video formats and transfer them to a flash drive and then you can take that flash drive put it in your computer you can edit up the video you can make changes to it and so forth this particular device comes with the power cord it comes with a remote so you can remote control it from your couch after you major masterpiece you can actually use this to show it off this particular one has HDMI in and out so you can do it as a pass-through it's got a connector to connect it to your PC to do firmware updates power connectors right there it's even got connections for line-in lineout and a microphone so you can actually narrate your video as you're transferring it over of course that's where you're going to plug in your USB flash drive it's got some weight to it it doesn't feel totally and completely cheap in your hands and it looks kind of nice as well so I like that the Multimedia Interface that's on the back here that's the center connector has all these ports on it you can do composite you can do VGA and you can do component so take an old component HD video source like W VHS or Muse laserdisc and transfer it over to something like this ok maybe even D VHS some of you out there probably have D VHS in your library so let's go ahead and just go through this process let's hook up the camera let's get it hooked up to the TV and let's transfer something over it's gonna be super simple so stay with me okay so first let's go ahead and plug in the power connector it's going to go on the back right here plugs in there and then we're going to connect our TV or our monitor and that's going to go into this output here and then we're going to connect our Multimedia Interface cable where it says mm in or something similar that connects right there and then just set it down keep it ready to go and let's go ahead and take this flash drive plug it into the USB port on the side right there now we're gonna hook up our camera so again make sure that your camera has power so go ahead and plug it into the power outlet again we've got our connector audio/video connector and that plugs into this port here on the side of this camera it goes into AV out so that AV out goes there then I'm gonna plug this into my color-coded cables over here so we got white yellow and we've got red so we're all hooked up now as far as the camera the camera is connected this is connected to the TV all of our connections are done now we get to do the video transfer go ahead and power on your TV and then make sure it's on the right input on the side on here so in this it's HDMI and of course it says not support so it's probably the resolution so I'm gonna go ahead and hit the 720p output here on the front there it goes and it says okay yeah I'll support that alright next thing let's go ahead and put in a tape and I'm actually gonna share with you guys a whole movie I made when I was much younger of my mom and my grandma when they were much younger okay make sure your camera is on player not record or camera alright so in this case I've got it on player now the next thing I need to do is make sure the input for the HTML cloner Alliance device is set to a V so I'm just gonna press AV right here in my remote and that should show me what is going on down here it shows me a V and it shows NTSC if we go into our home button there it's got some settings in there you can set the time that way your date and time stamp on the video is the accurate thing to do and you can also change your bitrate I'm gonna go ahead and go with this limited 16 M that's the setting I'm gonna go with okay not gonna explain what that is well let's just go with it alright so again back to AV go ahead and rewind your tape in case it has been rewound in a while sometimes it's good to rewind it all the way or fast-forward it all the way to the end and then back to the beginning again kind of loosen up the tape a little bit and I'm just go ahead and hit play here and we should see an image begin to appear there it is and I'll go ahead and crank up the volume so there's my mom talking down there alright everything looks good here so let's go ahead and rewind it go ahead and hit stop okay I know that's the part of the tape I'm going to play not every tape is gonna start from the beginning sometimes you might want to find the spot that you want to start recording at and then watch this it's as easy as hitting the record button which is right here on the top left side shows here on the top it's recording of course we're getting the flashing HTML life here on the top so that is my late stepfather he is no longer with us he has passed on this is my grandmother that is my mom so this was Thanksgiving in 1994 and so this is a great example of I believe this is a hi-8 tape if I remember correctly I don't even remember being able to afford a hi-8 video camera back then but this was a very simple Thanksgiving it was literally just me my mom my stepdad and my grandmother that was all we had as family to eat Thanksgiving dinner together pretty crazy and my stepdad sitting there talking about how he couldn't find a place to buy a cup of coffee because everything was closed that day which I don't know why you couldn't just make coffee at home oh and look he's watching Honey I Shrunk the Kids it's a good old movie all right I think you've seen enough footage at this point so let's go ahead and hit stop on our recording here so let's go ahead and hit the stop button up here in the corner all right and then the HTML light will stop flashing and then I'm going to go ahead and stop the video over here and then what I'm going to do is take this out put it in my computer and put it directly as part of this video edit for this YouTube video so that you can check out the quality and you can let me know what you think you're on candid camera hi Brad hi I'm taping now what are you going to put on [Music] fried lobster tails well as they say the proof is in the pudding so you can see that the quality of that video is really good especially for an old analog NTSC formatted tape and before I let you go if you're a little bit geeky you can hang around and I'll show you a couple more things that this cloner alliance will do if this is all you needed then you can move on let me show you some of these menus that are on this thing so I'm gonna go here if you hit the right arrow here on the remote it shows you different picture modes which is kind of neat and you can also change your color temperature your aspect ratio here you have a sound mode and you can actually set an equalizer to customize the sound quality of this little box we have on-screen display language we have restored to factory if you've gone in you've really messed it up just restore it to factory we can do our on screen display transparency we can tell it how long we want the on screen display to stay on the screen etc again we're back at system time so so yeah there's the date on today yep today is October 21st 2019 and it's Back to the Future day as I am making this recording so some of the other features that you'll see on the remote here notice this is the cloner Alliance Pro that we're using because there is a regular cloner Alliance box as well we've got two resolutions here 720p 1080p we've got the PC and put there actually what is that PC oh it's pc resolution that's what that is yeah 1024 by 768 if you actually wanted to play something from your computer you would either use this VGA button here or this HDMI button this ypbpr that is component video and of course AV is the yellow connector then you can set the the size of the screen you can do 4:3 or you can do 69 so 4:3 is usually the aspect ratio that some of these old recordings are made in it's the boxing look so we've got some microphone input volume here volume playback here stop record etc delete you can go back through your recording and play it back back if you want to see that I'll go ahead and put my flash drive back in plug that back in and then I'll hit the playback button with the playback it divides it up into the different types of media that you can have on there you could have text files music files photos and film it calls it film it's actually video but we'll go with film that's nice that I can go in arrow over playback my video it's got a little camera button up here at the top you can make a little screenshot of whatever you're watching it's kind of cool too so you can just take stills video stills rather than actually making the whole video well I told you it was gonna be short and simple and it is so I appreciate you watching I hope this was helpful to you if it was please share it with a friend you can subscribe to the channel at any time leave a comment below follow me on Facebook and Twitter and you can be a patreon contributor to buy me a cup of coffee you can do that through patreon and we will see you next time for the next great retro tech video this program is brought to you by the following patreon contributors [Music] become a contributor at patreon.com forward slash data bits and by viewers like you thank you [Music]

Channel: databits

Views: 121,277

Keywords: VCR, databits, minidisc, VHS, vinyl, turntables, reviews, electronics, history, laserdisc, compact disc, cassette, 8-Track

Id: DkNUUGY0VbU

Length: 14min 58sec (898 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019