Elgato Video Capture ... analog video tapes to digital

[Music] hey everyone wayne fox here been a weird year huh i'm still living the life of a recluse uh trying to be really careful i'm you know getting close to 70 and so i'm kind of in that pretty high risk category much higher risk than i'm comfortable with hopefully there's a vaccine that'll actually work in the near future in the meantime i've been kind of working on my digitized memory project and i'm in this phase now where i'm trying to do the motion part the video part i thought i would do a quick update on part of that there's actually three different segments because i've got three different mediums i have to deal with and this one is about how to get your analog videos onto your computer and if you just want to skip my wildly entertaining introduction you know jump to that time stamp and we'll just show the device that i'm gonna use and how i do it but i thought i'd give a little background and also talk a little bit about my philosophy on what i'm gonna my end goal which has changed in the last three or four months as i've kind of been thinking about this and especially different than 10 years ago when i first started it you know i'm old enough to have been through the full gamut of recording of motion eight millimeter movie film no sound still got my eight millimeter movie projector here uh you know three minutes for i think five bucks for the film and three to five bucks for the film and eight to ten bucks to process it pretty expensive and seventy eight dollars when we bought this in 1978 but we really couldn't afford it but we really wanted to make sure we had a way to capture memories it it felt important to us i've got about 40 of these three minute videos in here and i've actually got this step done it'll be another video on the device i used i got what i feel a surprisingly good quality video out for this old movie film uh colors are still not too bad they're not faded too bad and uh much better than you know projecting it onto a screen and trying to shoot it with my smartphone or something like that which definitely will work but anyway i have another video on that next came uh our first camcorder and it was a box about two-thirds the size of this unit here and hung on your shoulder had a big old heavy battery on it and then you had a camera attached to it with a wire cable about that size it's not this one and you know basically made it portable i mean if you wanted to you could go to the zoo now obviously hauling something like that around was pretty heavy so for a lot of times it was you know where can you set the box with which you didn't have to walk around and it used a normal vhs tape 120 minute long i've got three of these that's full so about six hours of video and it you know at the time it was really cool to be able to shoot it i mean compared to shooting three minutes it had sound and so it was really it was really cool uh but it was still not very convenient and then in 85 we bought our first self-contained camcorder and this one used uh i don't have that one anymore but this one used these little uh come on little small vhs tapes now this only held 20 minutes of video but now you had a camera that was small enough that you could actually go someplace with it only wait a couple of pounds so you know you could go to the zoo or go on vacation with it and the cool part is because it was vhs they made an adapter and you could just drop this little 20 minute tape into this adapter now it would fit in any normal vhs deck which almost everybody had one of the challenges with this movie is convenience of watching it and especially nowadays but even then you know you really didn't go and watch it and the other challenge is you know you have a two-hour video and you wanted to watch a particular event well there's like 20 events on this i don't know if you can see all the different uh writing on there but but you know if you wanted to watch uh derek's third birthday well you know you had to fast forward and try to find it and so really just sitting down and watching two hours of video is not something you tended to do at least with movie film you had just little three-minute clips you all let's watch this one and you put it on but you know despite the fact that we recorded all this video it really never got it's never been watched i've never watched most of it and that's one of the reasons for the project anyway shortly uh i think around the early 90s i bought an eight millimeter uh camcorder and they now suddenly became quite small i don't know if this was the original one i had but at the time we felt man this is really little and it used the tape that was this size so much smaller but it's still you could still record two hours of video on this and uh one of the challenges with these early camcorders is it was so cheap to record a lot of video that you tended to over record and i'll talk about that here in a minute when we get to my current project philosophy anyway this box here has got about well i won't open it up so this box is the 20 minute long video tapes about 40 of those this has the eight millimeter ones and i've got about 30 30 of those so 60 hours of video here uh i don't know 10 or so hours of video here obviously i've got i don't know maybe an hour of movies and then in the late 80s or late 90s early 2000s they came out with the dv format which now used a little tape this size which still recorded 60 minutes of video on that recorded stereo audio and was a digital format so it's a little easier to get it off and that's what this camera is this is the uh this most of the digital video cameras were very very small half the size of this but this is the high end one this is basically at the time i think i paid like three grand for it because it's got a really high-end lens stereo microphones and uh it's designed for you know kind of semi-professional production so uh and i've got this whole box is full of those and there's at least uh 50 20 of those in there probably so uh we're probably talking 100 hour video now before i get into how i'm going to actually get the analog part on let's talk about my process and what i've decided to do if you're interested because i think it's changed i originally started doing this back in 10 15 years a long time ago i used a firewire converter and it would do little two gigabyte segments so each 20-minute video each 20-minute segment of these small videos ended up to be like three two gigabyte files and of course back then a gigabyte was you know we're talking a lot of you know i mean a good hard drive only had you know uh 250 gigabytes on it and so it's a little hard but i started that and my original plan was just to take these and put them on and give them to my kids on cds well you know dvds well dvd players have pretty well died and so now this is what i've decided to do the first step is just to get all of the raw footage onto my computer i've got the movies i've got all the 20 minute ones on there i'm working on getting these on there and then i'll work on getting these on there and i'm basically going to set this up in another room and i'm just going to one tape at a time one disadvantage is if you want if you've got a two hour tape that you want to digitize you got to play the whole tape it'll take two hours so i got a hundred hours of video to play and fortunately i'm down to a lot less than that and that gets all the raw footage on in the meantime i'm also taking each individual tape and as i mentioned this is these are individual events and i'm actually taking each event making its own video segment i'm going to name it with the year and the month and the description of the event my wife was really good about keeping the labels organized so i can figure most of it out and then i'm going to organize those into folders by year and i have a synology server which has a video cloud service and i can put those into this server and my kids using an app on their smartphone or their apple tv actually can access those and watch them from wherever they are so that'll be phase two that's and you know i think it'll be at that point pretty useful uh but now i've thought about it i'm going i gotta go one more step if i have time and i'm going to try it it'll probably take me five years to get it done but you know because i'm not going to do a binge it over a a month period of time i'm going to do a little here a little there but if you think about what happened when the iphone was invented and shortly after the android phones and both both uh began to realize the camera was one of the most valuable parts of either of those devices if you think about what apple's done the camera's been the focus of their and their their phones now are good enough to shoot incredible video well think about that around 2008 shortly after that as these phones became more popular suddenly people changed the way they did video they no longer took a camcorder they just used their smartphone i can still remember going to elementary school program with my big old really high-end jvc camcorder here and i'm seeing you know i'm recording all this now there's an advantage i got this really awesome zoom lens and i can get semi-professional quality if well considering 1080p at the time which was no longer that great anymore but um most of the audience is just holding their smartphone up and they're recording it and they're doing digital zoom and to be honest with seeing that on a tv looks fine but the other thing that changed was they quit recording long sessions in my case when we did easter eggs we would put the camera on a tripod and we would record you know we had a two-hour tape so we record 20 minutes if we did the birthday party we'd record the whole birthday party we didn't record now nowadays you go video of them opening one present video of them opening in a present you didn't you don't even do a video of them opening all the presents it's only the oh this one's from grandpa let's get a video of it because we know they're going to really like it at least grandpa hopes they do so most of these events are broken into little short segments a video of them singing happy birthday and blowing out the candles we don't do it you know and the nice part about that is it's easy to watch my son-in-law has taken all these little video clips they've taken over the years since the smartphone came out and they put them onto youtube and i can go in there and i can see all these little clips in a description some of them are just funnier than all get out and really cute and that's what i think i want to try to do i want to take each event i got a 20 minute event i got to try to get that down to two minutes give me the good parts now the way i'm going to organize it they'll see the abbreviated version if they want to watch the whole version it'll be easy to go and find the same segment and watch it if they want to but i think that's my goal and so wish me luck because it you know might take a decade and hopefully i've got that many years left to get it done anyway so now we need to talk about how we're going to get these analog tapes onto our computer and we need three things obviously we need a computer with decent storage and we need a way to play the tape we'd either have to have the camera itself most of the cameras a lot of time like this is an eight millimeter one most people didn't have an eight millimeter deck so they had to use the camera to play it and that's one reason people didn't watch a lot of their videos so we've either got to have the camera or we've got to have a deck and then we've got to have a device that converts it and the one i've been using is this one from elgato i'll put a link down below where i bought it on amazon it's only like around 80 bucks let me get it out of this mess over here and we don't need that cable and it's a usb device so it just clicks into any usb ports not even and it converts that into both stereo audio this is what's called composite video and this is what's called s video now this video everybody called it super video but it wasn't all it does is change the way the signal is transmitted and so it's maybe slightly better quality if you've got s video i would encourage you to use it but it's not like you've got a cause you'll have to buy another cable to be able to use it it's not like it's going to be so much different that it's worth spending a lot of money on and now you've got to have a way to connect that and most camcorders from that era they've got a little port so you can hear i've got my audio my composite and my s video port here so i've just got to have a way to connect those and i believe it comes with this cable i this might be one of my own but it sure comes with this cable which is the composite and audio and so basically i'm just going to connect these um to this and let's see get like that sorry about this and then i'll connect the other end up to my camera or in my case i've got tape decks which also have all the ports on them i i basically put the video in and then i go to my computer and start the software now the nice part about this elgato device is the software is really straightforward really simple to use and it's kind of a no hands-on thing i mean what i've got to do if this is a two-hour video that i've got to record i can't re i gotta it takes two hours you gotta play it you just gotta play it and so what i've got in another room i've got another mac and the nice part about the elgato software is you can get it all set up and then you can say how long do you want it to record and then it will stop uh digitizing so if you've got a 120 minute tape you can say yeah i do 120 minutes so you don't even have to be there you can just start it go away and then when you get a minute a few hours later go put another on so the cool part is if you've got another computer sitting somewhere that just you know doesn't get used a lot or at night before you go to bed you actually throw one on and you go to bed uh it's really good software so what we need to do now let me jump over to my computer and actually i'll move one of these decks we'll actually set up the process of recording one of the videos and i think for the money it's a really good device now i think there are devices that maybe claim they give better quality but understand this is not high quality video here i think eight millimeter might have been 480 interlaced i think the original vhs cameras i had were only 320. uh you know we're talking video from the quality from the 80s here and you can record it as high definition but you don't get any high definition there's no way to manufacture data that's not there so i think the quality from this is just as just plenty good enough looks great on my 60 inch tv my kids were watching it at their house the other day i put it on one i think it's it's really good anyway let's get that set up and i'll show you how the software works and then we'll be done with this one okay so i have my eight millimeter video deck attached to my uh elgato video capture here i'm gonna use the s-video connection since i have a cable and it's available and i'm gonna digitize this particular tape here this says derek graduation in hawaii so i know this was in around may of 1997 so i'll use that when i make the title first thing i'm going to do is put the tape in the deck and i always rewind it i find most these tapes are not at the beginning so we'll hit the rewind button while that's rewinding let's go over here and go ahead and launch the software and the first thing we have in the software let's go ahead and take a quick look at the preferences here you can decide where you want to save the video to and you can also have these directly sent to i think uh a couple of services like uh dropbox we'll get to that at the end anyway i've got this set to go to a special folder on one of my hard drives and you can force it into one of two formats and automatic i'm not sure what that means uh here if you are not using uh if you want to force it into a specific tv standard typically automatic is what you want to do okay the video here allows you to control some of the color and and contrast if you know the tape has got a problem you can actually tweak it and so you record it within improvements and here you can actually adjust the recording volume so if the volume of the tape is too quiet or too loud now most of the time that's something you can do in post-processing anyway so those are the preferences we need to give it the movie in my case i'm always going to start with the year 1997 and then the month 05 followed by a brief description derek graduation hawaii vacation all right now here you can choose one of the default recording links or you can go to custom and you can actually enter one what i found is that the decks aren't super accurate so you might have a deck that plays slightly slower than so your video will actually take 123 minutes to play and so to do that i always over record now the one thing that is nice and we'll get to that at the end of it the software allows you once you've finished the recording to trim the beginning and the ends so this tape might have 60 minutes of blank space on it it could be after the vacation we just put a new tape in and a lot of the tapes there's considerable blank at the end and at the end of this process you have the ability to trim to get rid of all of that so your video isn't any longer than it needs to be so here we're going to hit continue and here we should be able to see the video on the screen and what i always do is i start playing it and we're not recording yet obviously i let me get rid of that sound looks like it's working really well you can change the format but notice it doesn't crop the top and the bottom instead it squishes so only use the 16 9 if you're recording 16.9 content from maybe a dv camera that came along a little later as i said i'm using the s-video input so looks good hit continue here i can verify that the audio is about the level it should be typically i think you want it bouncing around about two-thirds of the way up is pretty good you definitely don't want it pounding against the top and clipping all right so now we hit continue and here we can override that time setting if we want we can tell it while you're recording please mute the sound and now i'm ready to start so i'm going to stop the tape and we'll rewind it back to the beginning now i'm gonna what i always do is i start recording and then i start playing all right now we're good to go now it's kind of cool this video camera put the date so i can see this was actually 1998 march 30th and some of my cameras did that had that feature and it helps quite a bit to figure things out so this is actually my daughter's uh birthday this would have been her uh let's see 15th birthday and so this must have been and the graduation occurred i assume i think he must have graduated in 98 i thought it was 97. so anyway that'll help me fix i'll just change the title when i'm done so anyway we'll let this record it's going to take a couple hours and when it's all done i'll get back on and show you the finishing processes and we'll wrap this up okay so i had it next to me and i want advantage of doing it and keeping your eye on it is if your tape you know you get to the end of it and there's still 20 minutes to go in the tape you can stop recording any time uh once you hit the record button uh you can stop recording my case it didn't stop on its own because i happened to see and there was only a couple minutes left it would have stopped anyway but it did go over the 120 minutes so it just shows my tape player is slightly slower than the speed it's supposed to be and i think it ended up to be 121 minutes long i think i can scroll uh yeah two hours almost two hours and three minutes and it was still playing and that that's when it stopped so my tape player is about one percent slower than uh the regulation speed so here anyway we can look and see the type and we can scroll through at any point we can actually quickly scan it so i can go through here and see the different events on this tape that i didn't know about daughter's birthday son's birthday uh this is a some kind of a recognition thing daughter singing in the chorus just go along and it's all the way till here before we get to the graduation and that's actually a golf recognition thing and finally the graduation what's interesting with me and i was talking about the challenge of making it interesting if you look at this graduation here it goes from here all the way to there so that's like 40 minutes and it's like i recorded all these kids getting their um diplomas and some of them i don't even remember who they were anyway there's the hawaii vacation what we can do we get to the end now and we can find when the tape ends and if if we find out that the tape ended for example now here in my case it ended right right there which is you know i was there so i caught it in time but let's say that my tape ended here all we need to do is move these pointers and wherever we move these two pointers to this will trim the front and the end of the tape so when we save it we get just the part that we want and we don't have to get the whole two hours if only one hour of it's good video and all we do is once we set those trim points uh in this case i'm not going to trim any of it because i just have a few seconds of video it's not super accurate so like if you've got 30 seconds on a two-hour video you're probably not going to be able to trim that off it's better to do that later and all i do is hit continue now it tells me that my movie was saved successfully so the movie is already saved you'll notice i gave it a different name because i had to start over i got the year and month right and i can also play it with quicktime player i can add it to itunes on the mac or i can upload it to youtube now i'm assuming that elgato has windows software as well and there are probably a couple of options it's interesting you can actually upload this straight to your youtube channel so if you have a private youtube channel to put all your little video clips on it's not a bad way to go because just like i said my son-in-law really awesome he's got 100 or 200 video clips that he's put up there and they're fun to go through anyway then at that point we can say let's do another one hit again and then we start at the beginning or we can just uh quit so maybe you'll let me just show you a little bit about the quality and i understand this is only captured in 640 by 480 and this is a 1080p video so it's scaling up gonna be a little fuzzy but if you're watching on a phone it probably look really good and like i said i play this uh on my 60 inch tv which i'm you know 15 18 feet away from looks terrific it's fun to watch yeah it's not ultra crisp like a 4k video but you know it's not what it's about here so let's just uh let me just show you a few clips now so here's a little short clip of part of a sequence of my daughter singing in her the choir i believe this was her sophomore year and then here we have my son in his graduation ceremony in may walking up and then finally i did a little clip this is us going on a helicopter ride not sure what that distortion was something that i did but here's a couple of my kids walking out to get on this helicopter we went to kauai shortly after they graduated well i think that's a wrap hope you got something out of if you have any questions feel free to leave me a comment i'm not great at answering the comments for some reason youtube doesn't send me emails uh consistently when people send put a comment i try to keep my eye on them but i'll try to watch for those if you like what i'm doing i've got a lot of stuff like of this coming up i've also got if you're a lightroom person a lot of videos about that please subscribe to the channel and hit the little reminder bell down there in the corner and until next time thanks for watching hey see ya you

Channel: Wayne Fox

Views: 53,098

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Id: ojumlPo6d4U

Length: 25min 15sec (1515 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020