How to Copy Family/Home Video Tapes (VHS, Betamax, Hi8, mini DV) to Digital - ElGato Video Capture

so you've got some old home movies on vhs betamax or some other type of video cassette tape and you'd like to bring them into the digital age well to do this there's a few things you're going to need first up are the most obvious ones uh you'll need your home movie on whatever medium it's on in my case i'm copying some old family videos from these mini dv cassette tapes here we'll of course also need something to play our old tapes with lucky for me our old camera is still kicking around and is in full proper working order next we need a device that will allow us to connect our old player to a computer so we can convert our videos into a digital format i chose to go with this guy right here the elgato video capture there are of course a lot of other options available out there the vast majority of them significantly less expensive than the elgato but elgato is a brand i know and trust i've said it before and i'll say it again i believe in the old saying you get what you pay for so even though the elgato video capture device costs almost 90 dollars i decided to go with it rather than to go with a less expensive option since we'll be connecting this device to a computer we're obviously going to need a computer and the final thing we're going to need is some type of software that will allow us to record the video as it plays through our capture device most likely the capture device you choose will have some kind of software with it so this one shouldn't be anything to worry about the elgato video capture comes with the video capture device itself a set of composite audio video cables and this skart adapter i'm not familiar with scart at all and don't have any devices that use it but if your old video player uses scart this adapter converts the scart connector into your standard red white and yellow composite video connectors which you can then connect the elgato video capture to as for the software needed to capture video that is not included in the box but can easily be downloaded from elgato's website i'll go ahead and place a link to their download page in the video description to make it a little bit easier for you once you've downloaded and installed the elgato video capture software you're ready to hook everything up and start capturing your old home videos like i mentioned earlier i'm copying some old mini dv cassette tapes so i hooked up our old video camera to power and plugged in the composite audio video cable the camera came with into the camera's av output port and then inserted the s-video and right and left audio channel cables into their corresponding plugs on the elgato video capture if you're recording stuff off betamax or vhs tapes you'll simply need to plug the composite audio video cable included with the elgato video capture into your player and then into the elgato video captures corresponding plugs next i plugged the video capture's usb cable into my laptop here uh powered on my camera and set it to playback mode i then launched the video capture software and here's what you'll see in this field you can type in a name for the file that's going to be output and in this drop down you can set approximately how long the video you're going to be capturing is this is important because later we'll be able to set the software to automatically stop recording after this amount of time our mini dv cassettes are 60 minute tapes so i'm going to just leave it on 60 minutes clicking on the preferences button will bring up this window here uh where we can set where we want to save our videos to when we're done and either tick or untick these check boxes for high resolution preserve source format and to automatically check for updates you can also mess around with the brightness contrast and a few other things in the video tab and then you can adjust the gain of the audio up or down in the audio tab once you're done messing around in here you can click continue and move to the connect video step at this point it helps to have video playing on your source device so i'm going to hit play on my video camera and you can see here that the video is showing up in the video capture window you need to select whether you're using the s video or the composite cable of course and then select the aspect ratio of your video if you're not sure what the aspect ratio of your source material is you can select one or the other and whichever one makes the proportions of things look normal is the one you'll want to choose in my case here selecting 4 3 makes the video look like things are being squeezed in from the sides and 16x9 makes things look normal clicking continue again takes us to the connect audio step since there's only the composite audio cables you don't have anything you need to choose from but this step is really just to make sure the audio is being picked up which if your video is playing you should be able to hear on your computer and these audio level indicator bubble things should light up if your audio is working properly you can then click continue again and we're now ready to record here's the checkbox i mentioned earlier when we set the approximate time of our video if you're not going to be able to or just don't want to wait around monitoring the recording process you can check this box here which will stop the recording after the approximate time you set in my case it's 60 minutes just below that is the option to mute the sound if you don't want to hear the audio playing through your computer the entire time it's recording you can check this box this does not mute the sound in your recording it simply stops the sound from playing on your computer speakers so you don't have to hear it the whole time the recording is going on at this point all that's left to do is rewind our video to the beginning since we've had it playing this whole time we've been setting things up and once it's back to the beginning we can push the big red record button here hit play on our video camera and then wait about 60 minutes for our video to be captured if you've been sitting around monitoring the recording yourself the entire time you can hit stop recording whenever you're ready to stop but if you use the automatic option which stops the recording after the amount of time that you set then when you get back you should see this this is the trim window where you can trim any blank sections from the beginning and the end of your video the little triangular grip at the top of the timeline scrubs you through the video and the little triangular grips under the timeline indicate where you want your video to start and stop you can drag these around with your mouse but i've found you can be a lot more precise if you click on the grip you want to adjust and then use the arrow keys on your keyboard to dial things in exactly where you want them once you've got your video trimmed up just the way you want it you can click continue again and now it will process your video and save it to the place you specified in the preferences depending on the speed of your computer's cpu and the length of your video this processing step can take a fair amount of time but eventually you'll be left with an mp4 file you can save to your computer nas upload to the cloud or whatever it is you want to do with it this last screen in the elgato video capture application i ignore for the most part because once i have the completed video file i just move it to our home media server i have used the again button here however to cue up the next tape and run through the process all over again okay that's it i hope you found this video helpful and or informative in some way if you did there are those things you can do to let the youtube algorithm myself and your friends and family know how much you enjoyed it if you appreciate the work i do here on my channel please consider checking out my amazon store at the link in the video description you can purchase items there that i feature in my videos like the elgato video capture to help you convert all your old analog videos to digital alright i'm gonna head on out i hope that you have a great day and i hope to see you again in another video real soon till next time [Music] you

Channel: Maraksot78

Views: 160,995

Keywords: ElGato, elgato, el gato, video capture, VHS, Betamax, Hi8, Hi 8, high 8, high8, mini DV, VHS to digital, betamax to digital, mini DV to digital, Hi8 to digital, analog video to digital, analog to digital, convert analog video, copy VHS to computer, copy video tape to computer, how to, tutorial

Id: CuTiMGm0YwM

Length: 9min 28sec (568 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021