I did this kind of thing in college. It's more involved than you think. If you want good results, you're going to need at minimum a professional VCR (We used the Panasonic AG-7350), a timebase corrector, and a professional grade digitizer. Luckily, the equipment is much cheaper than it used to be. You'll probably need a food dehydrator to bake sticky tapes for one last playback. And since tape that old is probably falling apart, you'll need to get good at cleaning heads with cotton tech wipes and ethanol.

I've done it for a hundred or so old tapes. It is not so involved. I used thrift store VCRs and an Amazon USB video capture device. Almost all the old tapes play just fine. If the tape has gone bad, it's gone bad. Just toss it and move to the next one.

Yes, you have to clean the heads now and then with a qtip and ethanol. No skill required. Usually just running one of those head cleaner special tapes does the trick just fine. I never had a sticky tape. I have had broken cassettes, but the fix was just taking it apart and moving the reels to an unbroken cassette. Once I had the tape itself break, and a bit of scotch tape got that working again :-)

The results are plenty good enough. My relatives were quite happy to be able to see their old home movies again by clicking a button on their Roku rather than wrestling with their long lost VCR or 8mm camera.

Seriously, this isn't rocket science. It's much easier than recording LPs onto cassettes.

The result will be converting 8000 tapes and their storage problems to two 10T drives, which aren't a burden to store. Though you should copy them to new drives every year or so.

Saying one doesn't have $100,000 to do a 2% better studio job, so throw all the tapes in the trash, is a choice I don't understand.

Most of the cheap ways of capturing analog video will end up dropping half the image data before the process even starts.

At a minimum, full SD-resolution capture is necessary. 480 lines and whatever seems reasonable (for VHS, doubt there's much of a difference between 640 and 704/720).

Capture such material at 240 lines and you might as well not be capturing it at all.

It's somewhat involved to make archival-quality digitizations.

Elgato video capture captures 640*480 and is $90. I have it, use it, and it produces very satisfactory results.

I recently spent 200-300 hours of my life digitizing, editing, and tagging about 60 VHS tapes of family home movies. It's harder than you think...

The stuff you can buy on Amazon is cheap and captures with the audio and video out of sync. It also loses parts of the video frame. I ended up going through three different capture cards and bought two different VCRs, one of them a high-end S-VHS player with S-Video out for around $200. I could never get the quality to where I wanted it and finally surrendered and sent the tapes to a pro digitization shop for ~$600. But that was just for the capture part of it. I still spent ~150 hours cutting the long files into clips and tagging them.

It's nice you were willing to go to that effort and expense for your family, I hope they appreciate it. But it isn't necessary to go that far if it means throwing the tapes away because it is too expensive.

I never bothered to do it, but the audio/video sync can be addressed with a video editor. The point was to capture the information on disk and toss the tape. Anyone can sync it, cut it into clips, etc., later as there would no longer be any urgency. Many TVs also cut off the edges of the signal, and nobody notices. I've even seen many movies on TV with the edges cut off, such as everything above the eyebrows. No, I don't think it was filmed that way :-)

As I understand it, the cost of digitization is often regarded by archivists/special collections curators as a substantially more expensive than traditional methods of "store it in humidity controlled vault". In the frame of university archives/special collections considerations like, costs of specialized staff (or retraining staff to deal with digitized collections), software that allows for public access and upholds existing copyright restrictions, and future-proofing file formats can add up.

I've digitized family letters, pictures, and home movies, and it doesn't take specialized skills to do it. Quite adequate results can be had with consumer equipment - even a phone camera is very good and fast at capturing documents.

Sometimes I suspect professional archivists would rather lose the material than use simple consumer equipment and techniques. (Not that there is any "technique" to using those Amazon video capture devices.)

8,000 2hr tapes equate to nearly two years of running time. For the transferred footage to be of any use, it needs to be tagged and catalogued. You'd be looking at around $100,000 in labour costs, assuming that the tapes are in good condition and don't need significant restoration.

Sure, it's 2 years of running time. It's not 2 years of labor time, though. Put the tape in, push "play" on the VCR, "record" on the app running on the computer, go spend some quality time with your friends, come back in 2 hours, push "finish", and stick in another tape. Then, simply scan or photograph her index card for it.

To reduce the calendar time, get more VCRs (often going for $5 each at the thrift store), more cheap computers, and more capture devices, and do them in parallel.

Some of the tapes will be unplayable, sure. Toss 'em in the trash.

A RAID array full of unlabelled .MP4s of borderline-unwatchable VHS transfers isn't much use to anyone. Good VCRs and timebase correctors aren't cheap; keeping those VCRs running well is a major challenge due to age and the lack of spare parts. Getting a good transfer from an old tape is a lot more complicated than just pressing record. Anyone who works with video will tell you that metadata is both essential and enormously time-consuming.

There's a world of difference between getting some sort of video off the tape and producing a useful archive.

> unlabelled

I said: "scan or photograph her index card for it"

> There's a world of difference between getting some sort of video off the tape and producing a useful archive.

With 8000 tapes (and for most people), the choice isn't a consumer grade copy or a professional grade copy. It's a consumer grade copy or no copy.

Ah yes, cheap second hand VHS players, definetly not famed for chewing up cassettes.

> Ah yes, cheap second hand VHS players, definetly not famed for chewing up cassettes.

IIRC most of the best VCRs for digitization have been worn out from years and years of use in other digitization efforts (like home movie digitization businesses).

I've bought second hand ones, and never had one chew up a tape. They'll sometimes need the heads cleaned, which you can do with a qtip and alcohol or just get one of those head cleaner tapes.

(Putting a tape in with a broken case, however, will get you what you expect.)

A single person could probably run 20 machines at once. That's 800 hours of labor, at $15/hr, is $12,000.

May you never work for bosses whose estimates are as optimistic as yours.

Actually, it's conservative. How many times per hour can you push a tape in and press "play" then click "record"?

But hey, I've digitized a hundred or so home movie tapes for my extended family. I'm sure I've got it all wrong.

What resolution did you use to capture? What deinterlacing algorithm did you use to process the footage? Did you run the VCRs output through a quality TBC?

If the answers to those questions are "I don't know" or "I don't care", then you got it wrong. If you ended up with a 29.97fps or 30fps file, or if you ended up with a 320x240 (or 352x240) file, then you got it wrong.

https://www.amazon.com/Elgato-Video-Capture-Digitise-iPad/dp... at its highest setting, 640*480