convert my VHS tapes to DVD

I just majorly downsized the number of VHS tapes I have, so maybe I’ll actually achieve this goal.

in cleaning the house, i found my stack of vhs tapes and picked four i wanted to keep. i shipped them to a studio that’s putting them on dvd for me. my audio tapes are all on mp3 now and my photos are being scanned, so this will be the last of my analog media to be digitized.

For now, I’ve been watching a couple of my tapes, and just throwing them out.

It feels good each time!

But there are a couple of videos I’ll want to convert… my personal finish of the NYC marathon, some family-recorded coverage of one of my Ironman races, and the finish video from my first Ironman.

it will take me, and for the number of tapes I have, I’m just not going to focus on this any more. But what was good is that it forced me to look at the huge pile of tapes I had and look at what was on them – and realize that most of them weren’t worth putting on DVD, anyway. Maybe sometime I will revisit this goal but for now it’s toast.

on this one. The external hard drive I scored didn’t work right. But I don’t have enough footage to want to just get one of those machines that burns it right to a DVD. I think I have too much, though, to just put it on my computer directly. This might move more to the bottom of the list.

Just not worth the effort, anymore. I tried, and can’t find a simple, affordable way to switch all my VHS’s to DVD. I’ll just save what I have, and only buy DVDs from now on. BAH!

Every time I get the camera from school I end up with some technical difficulty. Now I may have fried my external hard drive. Starting to think it’s not worth it, just as my bf (at my urging) has picked up the home movies from his parents! Grrrrrr . . . if this won’t work out, I might go buy one of the VCR/DVD-R machines that have been advertised rather cheap-ish lately. It wouldn’t be pretty but it would get the job done.

I got some footage transferred. I thought I’d be able to put it directly from VCR through video camera into computer, but it didn’t work. So what I did was put it on the video camera and then transfer again to the computer. The problem is that the video camera tape ran out before the VHS tape, so I had to repeat this process. And then I didn’t finish transferring it into the computer. So, man alive – is this turning out to be more involved than I thought! But . . . I’m going to try the direct-to-computer method again, because I had trouble with both methods on the same section of tape, so my hope is just that it was kind of a bum section and that with a better VHS the technique will actually work. And then I will actually have to move my operation to my boyfriend’s on the weekend to actually get anything done ;)

Can’t get the tape to play to the camcorder. I think the VCR I got from my parents is a piece of junk. But the bad thing is, I don’t have a TV to check it out. Grrr. This project is further delayed. May have to borrow BF’s VCR, at least I know it works. But I discovered in the manual that there is a way to feed directly to the computer – saving replaying everything from the camera to the computer (if it works).

this weekend from my parents. That will help with this project. Now I’m looking forward to actually starting!