VHS to Digital: How to Convert Your VHS Tapes

i recently converted nearly a hundred old school vhs tapes to digital and learned a thing or two about the process whether you are just wanting to convert some old family videotapes or you need to digitize old footage for an upcoming youtube video or documentary this video is going to walk you through step by step on exactly how to convert vhs tapes to digital along with a lesson or two i've learned from my mistakes to convert vhs tapes to digital you will need three things a computer a vcr player and a video capture device let's start with the video capture device the device that everybody swears by is the elgato video capture which retails for about 88 bucks i really did not want to pay that so i went to amazon and i bought one of the top rated generic capture devices for like 15 bucks and it was complete garbage i then went back to amazon i bought another one for about 35 again complete garbage the software on these generic devices is extremely limited and the actual cables work only half the time i can't tell you how many times the screen would just go green or the software would just stop recording for no reason when you've got a lot of tapes to convert you cannot afford those kind of mistakes so i finally bought the elgato device and man oh man is it worth every penny i paid do not buy anything other than this device right here i will link to it below and no this is not sponsored by elgato this video capture device works with both windows and mac and the software is always being updated to work with the latest os on your computer so here's how you set it up you're going to plug in the usb cable into your computer's usb port then you're going to plug your audio and video cables into the provided audio video extension cord keeping the colors aligned you are then going to take the other end of that extension and plug it right into your vcr again lining up the colors i should note that just about any vcr player will work for this process and if you don't have one your parents or grandparents likely do and if they don't you can always hop on a place like amazon or ebay or even your local facebook marketplace and buy one there just know that right now because everybody is still stuck at home converting vhs tapes has become a big trend in 2020 and therefore the supply is low and the demand is high aka a lot of high prices right now what's happening here is when you put a vhs tape in and hit play your vcr is sending a signal to what it thinks is the tv but what is actually happening is it's sending it to your computer and it's being digitized in the process the free elgato software you will download will then record whatever footage it sees on the screen the recording process is extremely easy and you do not need to be tech savvy to do it when you open the software you'll first need to give your file a name and estimate how long the video is if you don't know or you end up being way off it doesn't really matter so go ahead and just pick any number you want next you need to verify which connection type you are using and what aspect ratio you want to record on 16 9 is a common aspect ratio for today as it's a wider screen but more than likely your vhs tapes were recorded in a 4 3 ratio which is much more like a square that is likely going to be the one you select assuming your tapes are older and were shot on some type of analog camera you can toggle between the two while your vhs tape is playing and it will show you a preview of what each one would look like on the next screen you're going to verify that your audio is working and if you don't hear audio at this point and you know the tape has audio you're going to want to double check your cable connections just to make sure that everything is connected correctly at this point you've hit the record screen and as soon as you click that big red button your computer will start to record whatever it sees in that window i would suggest unchecking the automatically stop recording option below the reason this is checked is to prevent your computer from recording hours and hours of nothing after a vhs tape has already completed but that really isn't a big deal because as soon as you stop the recording elgato makes it extremely easy to trim both the beginning and the end of your video without the need of using any kind of video editing software the length of time it takes to record a video is the length of the video so if you have a six hour long tape which i've had several of your computer will be recording for six hours you likely aren't going to be at your computer that entire time so because you know you can trim off any extra recording after the tape stops you can leave your computer and work on other tasks without having to worry about stopping the recording at the exact moment the vhs tape ends once you've done that you're done you now have a video file on your computer of that vhs tape that you can do anything with if you're like me and you're recording family videos and trying to figure out a way to distribute to other family members there's a lot of things you can do you can copy them to a dvd but that's already getting outdated as more and more households are moving away from dvd players you could dump your files onto a google drive and then anybody you share that drive with can access those files and play them on their phone or their computer i wanted to make my family videos really easy to play and i wanted them to be playable on a tv so what i ended up doing for myself was i created a youtube channel dedicated to hosting my family videos however because i don't want the whole world seeing these videos i made all the videos unlisted and then i added them to an unlisted playlist so the only way someone could see these videos is if they had the exact url to the playlist which is something you aren't going to randomly get unless it's shared with you and because it's youtube all they have to do is add that playlist to their youtube library and now they can access these videos on any device with youtube including their tv that is assuming it's either a smart tv or their tv has some type of streaming accessory like a chromecast roku fire tv apple tv long list of items there give this video a thumbs up if it was helpful and until next time my name is brandon hassler and this is tech audit tv you

Channel: Tech Audit TV

Views: 581,749

Keywords: vhs to digital, vhs to digital converter, convert vhs to digital, convert vhs to digital elgato, convert vhs to digital files on computer, convert vhs to digital mac, convert vhs to digital windows 10, vhs to computer, vhs, digital video, vhs capture, vhs tapes, how to, how to transfer vhs tapes to computer, analog tape, elgato video capture, elgato video capture mac, elgato video capture review, elgato video capture setup, video capture

Id: X5ckSpuyuY8

Length: 6min 56sec (416 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020