How to use the Elgato Video Capture device for transferring VHS to Digital

hello and welcome back to my channel you know if you're like me he's probably spent the last few years thinking how can I transfer those precious loving memories from a VHS analog tape to a more digital format over the years I purchased a couple of devices that I thought maybe could transfer the data from the analog tape to the electronic format uh one didn't work out so well the other one I never really got to try software kind of disappeared but the device that I'm going to be talking about today to transfer this to this is the Elgato video capture device although I am not sponsored by Elgato I wish I was this device really works well so let's check into the Elgato video capture and let's do it to it [Music] hey those of you that were around in the late 70s the 80s the 90s even maybe into the 2000s you may remember these bad boys VHS tape maybe your parents or even grandparents might have had these or still might have these in fact I have stacks of these things this is what you recorded your family life in now you're probably wondering okay that's pretty cool and everything this antique technology well how do I watch it if I don't have this thing in front of me here called a VCR for those of you that are not familiar with it what this does is you put it inside here foreign hooked to your television set and all you would have to do is hit where's the play button right there and it would start to play now these things were notorious for not being able to for most people set the clock on it but you would always have that thing flashing but this thing here if I want to stop it I just hit this eject foreign the one bad thing about this was if you had this in here there was two ways you could rewind the tip kind of like a cassette player you could hit the rewind button and it would rewind it and you'd just be sitting there maybe go get a drink or something and then come back and maybe by that time it would be rewound or you can use this handy little device here strictly for rewinding video cassette tapes now this functions is put the tape inside and then we're going to remind it for you to save wear and tear in your VCR now is reporters became smaller so did the tapes this compared to this so you're thinking okay well how do you rewind that because a little well in that case you would have to use an adapter battery operated and you could put it in here then and Rewind it that way the only problem with these VHS tapes is after a while they're sitting there and they begin to oxidize or they could even get chewed up in the gears of the machine if that tape is oxidizing and eventually it's going to lose its color and audio and everything like that how do we save the precious moments that are on these videos well what I had to do is something similar to what we had done I had this uh eight millimeter film that my dad had taken years ago with an old eight millimeter camera no sound just video and we had to send it into this company that would then transfer the original images from that eight millimeter video to a DVD but the problem with that is it's kind of expensive and you're sending those original images to the company hopefully they get them that's not lost in the mail they do a good job with it the originals aren't destroyed and everything gets sent back to you which was good in this case but if I want to do that with my own videos and not have to send them out I have a device that I'm going to use before we get to the Elgato device I would like to show you two other devices I had previously purchased one was a Magnavox VHS DVD writer and then this other one is the HP DVD movie writer DC 3000 it is a simple videotaped DVD transfer complete no hassle solution preserve your video on long lasting DVDs I never did use it let's see what's in the boxes okay we have a data transfer cable from the device to a computer you can use USB a foreign [Applause] there they are yellow red and white audio and visual helps connect your VHS DVD VCR to the device itself the HP device the software oh where's the disc foreign cable dusted there handy dandy instruction booklet place these RCA cable somehow the device itself which is where you put the DVD that you're going to record to the on off button nothing on the side here inside there but underneath for our RGB cables go you've got an S-Video cable here and a USB a slot the back here there is a second USB cable and the power that's where you connect it from here to the computer my help we had the software what is this all right two free months of America online 8.0 version never got to use it valid in the U.S only okay last but not least something to hold the cord I guess anyway it's kind of useless without the software which I have no idea where it's at so this was a device that was never used for some reason it got pushed back in a closet and forgotten about but HP usually makes some pretty good products eventually if I can find the software one day or get a copy of the software for this I will use it to try and see if this works okay so instead of sending out the memories and video to a place that might lose them it's got this on Amazon I saw a video that Tom Buck had produced a while back on this video capture card from Elgato and let's take a look at what we have inside here this is the device that is going to help transfer the video images from the VHS tape to an electronic format that you can then store on your computer or an SSD drive it comes with this so you can hook it up to some other device instructions are inside the cover here going to use these RGB cables the RCA old RCA connect these to the back of the VHS player the VCR and then we're going to connect the other end of this to a laptop computer and I'll show you how to do that now those of you that didn't grow up in the 80s and 90s here is our VCR player so we're going to connect these cables here you have to make sure when you plug it in is the out from the camera or the VCR player and not the in okay looks like the out is these are the connectors here so it's going to be yellow to Yellow white to white and red to red audio and video okay now let's connect it to the Elgato video capture device now again it's red to red yellow to yellow and white to white and then this end here is going to connect to my laptop fire up the laptop and it'll be ready you will need to go to the Elgato website and download the software so we're going to choose the Windows operating program for my laptop the video capture card and then hit the download button all right the first thing we're going to do once we get into the Elgato software is change the name of the file to video capture test and then click continue and then next we're going to verify that we've got the composite RCA colored cords checked as well as the 4-3 ratio we're going to use for our video and then click continue next we verify our RCA audio cables are connected and click continue and let's get ready to record so let us take our VHS tape that has been rewound to the beginning put it into the VHS player we're going to hit play on the VHS and then we're going to hit record [Applause] this is a video that my son recorded when he was younger I could have accidentally okay the transfer of the images from the analog tape to the digital format seems to be working well we'll keep monitoring throughout just to make sure everything is working properly I won't bore you with watching this whole video while it's recording so we'll get to the end in just a second the video has now finished recording and we'll shortly go to the next step of trim to see if the video needs to be shortened in any way and we adjust this for the camera so you can see it but now next step is trim let's see what this says here [Music] all right I think we're going to leave it as is so continue all right the next step is the finish up stage where the video will be rendering this may take a while so we'll shorten the process for this video okay we are almost done green bar is just about to the end okay finish up you want to play with multimedia player here all right looks like we have our video saved okay time to quit and let's find here all right we will now double check and triple verify that our video has been saved to the computer and that we can play it back so I'm going to be looking for Windows Media Player there it is and let's see if the file has not only finished rendering but has saved now and we can then copy it to the desktop or to a file there it is just appeared okay all right we will double click on the file and hopefully it will open up properly in Windows Media Player and it sure did again you can see that this tape is kind of old so the oxidation didn't really help with the transfer all right I hope this video helped you uh maybe you too can with the Elgato video capture and transfer your memories and maybe by using this Elgato video capture card or video capture device you can transfer your memories from a VHS tape to a digital format and be able to preserve those memories for a long time and be able to preserve those memories in your computer so that you can look at them again and again so until my next video take care [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Know Tech

Views: 35,063

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Id: RTq8hdwDRTw

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 07 2022