How To Convert Your VHS Tapes - Convert VHS To Digital

in this video I'm going to show you how to capture VHS tapes using your PC with the i o data capture device and OBS software when I went on Amazon I found that this i o data capture device is the best bang for your buck when it comes to video capture using your PC it's just about 60 dollars and there's other ones out there that basically look like this but it doesn't work like this the video quality is really poor with those that are about like 10 or 15 dollars so do yourself a favor stay away from that and get yourself this one it's really good and it comes with a CD and the CD has a driver and it's basically just a plug and play you put it in your computer and you open it up and it should download the driver immediately you may have to toy with it just a little bit but it is pretty simple and straightforward if you do not have a CD DVD player to go along with your PC I'd suggest just buying one on Amazon they're just about 25 30 dollars to get one because I know that you can find drivers to download for this but I really don't know about the websites and it was a little iffy to me about downloading it this was really really straightforward and I think it's the best thing to do just get yourself a CD DVD player if you need to now I'm also using a free software program called OBS studio and I'm going to show you where that is and how to download that and that is another great software program to be able to capture video basically what I'm showing you is a great cost effective way to capture your own old VHS saves onto your PC so if you like what I'm saying and you find it useful instructional please do me a favor hit that subscribe button I would really appreciate it if you would support the channel so let's go ahead and get this stuff all set up so this is the back of my VCR you're going to want to find your line outs you have yellow for video white for left audio and red for right audio just going to want to match them up just like this and then on the other side you're going to want to do the same thing with your captor device White yellow and red we're going to now plug this in to the PC my computer the USB is right on top see and you probably heard the computer recognizing the device okay here we are at my PC and the first thing I want to do is download the OBS software program so just type in the search bar obs project.com and here comes the official website it's called open broadcaster software you have your choice of Windows or Mac or the Linux so we're gonna pick windows I already have it installed so I'm just going to get out of this program I just wanted to show you where it was at I'm going to load the OBS Studio here it is it looks a little intimidating there's a lot going on here but don't worry I'm going to make it as simple as possible since we're only doing a VHS transfer we don't have to worry about all the other bells and whistles that it has so the first thing you're going to see is this big black screen and that's basically your canvas that is where your video is going to appear bottom left you have scenes you don't have to do too much here it already has a scene selected if you want to add a scene you can and name it what you want but for all intensive purposes scene is fine we then have sources and this is where your capture device is going to appear your audio mixer window is where you're going to see your levels of your audio scene transitions you don't have to worry about that and then controls you have your start recording and your settings that's basically all you need for this what I like to do is go into the settings first and under the general tab you have language English the theme is yummy really not too sure what that is but don't worry about it just keep all that as a default updates output you don't really need to know anything in this window so you're fine let's go to the video first when you originally launch it it's going to set up as a default aspect ratio of 16 by nine sixteen by nine is a letterbox format which is on all of our TVs anymore but the 4x3 ratio format is what the VHS tapes were originally recorded at now if you leave it at this 1920 by 1080 it's going to stretch your video and make everyone look wide people don't like the look wide so what you want is 1440 by 1080. and that gives you the aspect ratio of four by three and then for the output resolution you're going to put the same thing 14 40 by 1080. Downs scale filter you don't have to worry about that but the common FPS values FPS stands for frames per second and we want to record this or capture this at 60 frames per second now you have all of these different choices here and right here is 59.94 that is the United States version for 60 frames per second if you were European and you did pal you'd choose 50 but for us we're going to do 59.94 click that and you can hit apply we now want to go to the output at the top it says output mode simple keep it simple don't mess with that the streaming you don't need to worry about streaming because we're not screen streaming but we're going to go to recording right here and we're going to set up our recording path which is the folder we want all the video video to be saved to so you hit browse and you pick your folder I'm picking the video capture test folder that I already created we're now going to go to recording quality high quality medium file size you have some different options here indistinguishable quality large file lossless quality tremendously large file because it's VHS we just need the high quality medium file size it's going to be perfect the recording format MPEG 4 the MP4 format that is a nice Universal format for mac and PC so go ahead and choose the MP4 the video encoder if you don't know what kind of PC you have you don't know what software you don't know anything about it pick the software x264 low CPU usage preset increases file size that's okay it's going to get the job done I promise and then the encoder is the AAC that's the default leave it there and audio track one keep that there is nothing else here that you need to worry about so hit OK all right we are now back to the main screen and you had seen right here and the source what you want to do is hit this plus sign and hit the video capture device you can name the video capture device whatever you want but it's really not necessary if you're just going to do VHS tapes so you can just keep it at video capture device and hit OK we can go over and we can hit play on our VCR we have the screen right now and this is uh you care to know this is the 2000 National Enduro Series highlights this is a video that I did back in 2000 when I first started my video career it was all about motorcycles so uh the device is GV USB 2 analog capture that is the device capture that I have plugged into my computer I don't have any other choices here because that is the only device that I have loaded on if you have other devices loaded on it's going to give you options but for this we're gonna just keep it there because that's what it is configure video this is your device driver setup move it over the only thing you really have to worry about here under custom properties is the weave make sure that weave is set now you have video proc amp and that controls your brightness your contrast your Hue your saturation sharpness it's all a default and I gotta tell you this software program is perfect with the default as it is so I wouldn't worry about anything else here just make sure that weave is checked you can hit OK resolution device default is fine everything else here is good don't have to worry about anything else so now we're over here to the audio mixer if you see it's green and yellow and red and you see that they're dancing back and forth so we are getting an audio signal you really want to keep it within the green and the yellow you don't want to go under the red think of it as a stoplight red is stop red is bad yellow is warning green is go green is good so it is on this video going into the red a little bit you just have to move it down and let's just get it somewhere so uh so it's sort of peeking in the yellow maybe you're on 15 looks good now if you look at your canvas again you can see that my picture is really small right here it's not filling the canvas like it should don't worry we're gonna fix that right now what you do is go to video capture device and right click and you go to transform and then you go to stretch to screen and Bam there it is it's stretched out now if we start getting into some higher faster motion you might see that things are a little lining let's see if we can fast forward to some motorcycle stuff here we go you can see it's a little Liney the white flashes or the white flashes that I put in the editing so right click on your video capture device again and go to D interlacing and see it's under disabled you want to pick yadav 2 x you don't really need to know what yadav 2x means not important but what's important is that it made the picture look nice and clean and smooth you don't have any more lines going across scene transition you don't have to worry about we already did our controls and uh if you want to do a start recording you can do that just to do a test and let's see what happens so let's just go for a few seconds you see how the video is nice and smooth looks good that said stop recording now let's go to our file video capture test it's right here uh it names the file according to the date and the time you did the recording you can right click and you can rename I'm going to do Enduro test one let's check it out [Music] it looks really nice looks really good it's not lining it's nice and smooth basically looks exactly how I had shot it 20 plus years ago that was a long time ago okay we can get out of that now if I want to capture this entire video what I want to do is this foreign I can take my remote and I'll hit stop and fast forward it to if it'll work right when the counter hits to zero um just hypothetically doing this you're going to want to shut it off and now you can either hit counter reset on the interface or on your remote or you just simply eject put the tape back in it's going to go to zero you rewind that's going to give you how long the tape is to record you don't want to sit here and watch the whole thing recording that can be really time consuming so what I like to do is I just have a little timer right here and I just do how long the tape is going to be it's going to be an hour and 45 minutes or whatever just set the timer and then once it's at the beginning of the tape it'll say how long the tape is I hit play I can hit the start recording I can hit the start timer and then whenever the timer goes off I give myself a minute or two to get back to the computer because I might be somewhere else in the office or in the house once that is all done all I have to do is hit stop recording and you should have a very nice transfer on your PC so that's it that's how you transfer a VHS to a PC in a very cost effective way with good results now if you don't have this type of equipment and you frankly just don't want to invest in it or you don't have the time I would love to be able to help you out you can contact me at info Colorado springsvideo.com or you can go to my website Colorado springsvideo.com I do have a special order form for media that you can fill out and send to me along with your media I do have the contact information in the description of this video along with all of the software and Hardware that I use thank you so much for watching I really appreciate it make sure to subscribe like and ring that Bell for future notifications you have yourself a super wonderful day

Channel: The Media Nerd

Views: 6,588

Keywords: vhs, vhs tapes, obs, obs project, pc, transfer, vhs transfer, vhs to digital

Id: yPJR8u3RgFg

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023