After some success last weekend transferring some VHS to DVD, I’ve made it my raison d’être to eliminate all VHS from my home. It’s not that it hasn’t served me well, but it’s far too inconvenient to watch. Most of the stuff is home movies and creative projects from years ago. I actually had to go out and buy a VCR as the one I had wasn’t really working any more. Who actually watches videos on anything other than a computer these days anyways?
I’m not converting any of the hollywood movies… I’d just buy those again on DVD if I wanted them. The question remains whether to bother converting the porn. That would take a while.
Bah. Most pr0n is already on the interweb somewheres. Hey, what did you use to do this? I have some film (8mm, both super and not-so-super) that I’ll want to convert at some time.
Yeah, porn has been almost completely devauled online. Yet it still seems like a booming industry!
When you say “film” I’m guessing you mean video tapes, right? Some of my stuff actually originated on Super 8mm silent film, but luckily my Dad had that transferred to VHS nearly a decade ago. As far as transferring video, you need to run in through an analog-to-firewire converter. The one I got was the Canopus ADVC110. It’s almost $250, so if you’d rather not buy one I’d be happy to lend you mine for a bit. Once you’ve got that, you can just import stuff into iMovie, edit it a bit, then export it to iDVD. Overall pretty simple considering.
Actually I did mean film-film, although I have plenty of VHS tapes as well. I think my Dad also tried transferring the film-film over to VHS, but heaven knows where those tapes are now.
Every time I think about trying to transfer film to tape or DVD, I do a quick calculation in my head and figure that it’s just easier to simply keep the ol’ Super-8 projector running. It’s not that hard to find light bulbs and motor belts.
Ah wow. Yeah, you’d probably have to send the film out to a company to transfer it properly. It’s not cheap.
My main problem with 8mm film and VHS (other than the inconvenience of actually getting out the equipment to watch them) is the degredation in quality over time. My old 8mm projector tore up more than a few priceless moments and some of my VHS stuff has dropouts where there were none before