Preserving VHS Recordings For Another 20 Years? 605
efedora asks: "I have about 650 hours of VHS tape going back about 20 years (no, not my porn collection) and the tape is starting to deteriorate. What are the best options for preserving the contents? Quality is important but not critical, so long as it's close to the original. Very low labor cost/time and simple operation. are important. Is there an easy way to do this?"
"Some of the ideas I've had so far are:
- VHS to VHS tape with an analog 'clean up' box between the VHS machines. This would give me the same number of tapes but should last another 20 years. Quality will degrade.
- Burn DVD's direct from VHS tape. I have software that will do this. Expensive and the DVD's won't even hold a VHS tape if it's 2 hours long. Good quality with no degradation.
- Burn VCD's. I don't know of any simple direct-to-VCD software that will do this so there would be a large labor overhead. Good quality with some degradation. Cheap.
- VHS direct to cheap IDE drives. Good quality with no degradation. Relatively cheap. Probably could use the same technique as burn-to-dvd."
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
you can't... (Score:1, Insightful)
DV to HD or DLT (Score:3, Insightful)
Store what you can that will fit onto DVD-RW now, and save the rest for later when larger capacity DVDs come out.
You can also get a used 35gb DLT drive off ebay and store DV onto that. Tapes are pretty cheap and DLT is pretty rugged.
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
they can store the player software and codecs on the same hard drives, and when the next leap is required at least they'll be ready.
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
MPEG, not divx (Score:5, Insightful)
MPEG-2 is used in current DVD players. For that alone, if you go digital, you should store the data as MPEG-2. It's also supported by pretty much anything that's capable of playing video.
If it were me, I'd use the copying sessions to decide what video really mattered to me. It's a chance to weed out some junk. Anything that I'd keep, I'd burn to DVD-R.
Tradeoff (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:352 x 240, not a good idea (Score:3, Insightful)
DVD-R is NOT expensive, it's now cheaper than VHS (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, blank 1X DVD-R discs are 58cents in quantity 100. I picked up 200 Princo DVD-R blanks last month, they work fine in several DVD players I've tried.
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
I can run binaries for the PDP-11 and play old Atari and Commodore 64 games, and old Amiga tunes on XMMS. But all the geeks who have hours and hours of anime and TV shows and porn in DivX are going to be unable to port the DivX codec to whatever system were running in 20 years, and not even be able to run xine under a x86 emulator? I regard that as very unlikely.
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Think back 20 years.. In 1983 you may have had an Apple IIe, TRS-80 Model III, or C64.. If you did save video then for that platform on a media that would oxidize over time (DVD's have a shelf life too), what are the chances of having working hardware to view it with? The last of any of the above that I've seen were headed for a trash can about a year ago when I cleaned my garage.
In 20 years, more than likely FreeBSD and Linux will both be dinosaurs that no one will have a clue how to work, except for a few of us geeks with perfect memories that say "Ya, I used that 20 years ago!". I wouldn't place bets on a continued existance of Microsoft either. There'll be some bigger, better, faster that comes along and everyone will switch to. (I have inside information that says BeOS and OS/2 are making a comeback, hehe)
Definately, I'd see problems trying to get your movie from the DivX format to a new format intact. You may not have any similiar connections to use. Serial and Parallel may already be dead (they're close to it), and USB version 2020 may not be compatable with what we're using now.
I don't have a good solution for him either. In 20 years you may not be able to get a working VHS player, or the TV's may not support them. Do regular VCR's work with HDTV? Isn't the US Gov't doing some manditory change over?
Maybe he can keep copying between formats, for as long as he remembers to.. Are those family memories worth it? That's a question he'd have to ask..
Maybe he's already taken it from an old film movie camera to Beta to VHS, so the trend can continue.. At least with digital formats (as long as they survive), you shouldn't have too much degregation between generations. But, compressing and recompressing video will make it look worse over time too..
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
VHS has been great in the absence of options that are easier to move forward.
Now that you're thinking digital, why not think about 2-5 years and, since it's digital you can batch-convert everything to the next best thing.
Cheers
NO PINNACLE!!! (Score:1, Insightful)
A basic run of the mill pinnacle card and computer sounds good on paper, until you end up waiting 8 or more hours for a 2 hour DVD for it to render out your video. And then another half hour for your DVD.
Unless you're wanting to invest $3-5K in a dedicated video editing system, skip the computer solution and get a Panasonic DVD Recorder. It's about $500 or less if you shop around, and you can plug it directly into a VCR. No fuss no mess. Just play VHS into it and record, and presto. DVD.
The pinnacle card solution will only bite you in the butt later on. I promise you... If I had a dime for every customer who walked in claiming "Pinnacle Studio 8 is (insert favorite derogatory term), help me!) I'd be rich.
If you need more help check the DVD Authoring Forums on www.creativecow.net
Good luck!
Re:DVD (Score:5, Insightful)
Depending on the manufacturer and model, you can set the bitrate so that 2 hours should fit with fairly reasonable quality (in the 5Mbps range off the top of my head, which should be plenty for a VHS source).
Newer units should have no problem with generic DVD-R blanks that run in the $1-2 range.
If you want to spend a little more money, Pioneer has a new "industrial" dual-burner model coming out with a built-in 120gb HD for storing video until it's ready to burn. Also has simple editing features I think. Cost is estimated at around $3,500 according to the magazine I read.
Even still, 650 hours is a LOT of work. I don't envy that task.
Fortunately 80% of my own VHS collection is just movies I've taped off of movie channels and the like - no great loss as I'll replace most of them on DVD eventually anyway.
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ATI All In Wonder (Score:4, Insightful)
Make sure you use a good Time Base Corrector! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a high end consumer video deck, it may have a built-in TBC -- disable it. These consumer TBCs work great on good-quality tapes but can actually mess up your image pretty badly on degraded tapes. Use a real, adjustable professional TBC.
Not only will it give you a stable signal for capture (preferably with a pro capture card rather than a consumer one), but it will actually make your videos look better when you view them!
Re:DVD (Score:5, Insightful)
Degrading media vs the DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm... 8-Track never caught on.
You're kidding, right?
For about 5 years, *everyone* had an 8-track. They were designed originally for cars, but lots of people had them in their houses. Like movies are now available on DVD and VHS, most music was available only on LP (33RPM record) or 8-track.
Smaller, more dubious record companies (K-Tel, Time-Life Records, etc) would advertise in TV commercials as recently as the mid-80s, "Available on LP, cassette or 8-track! Order now!". (In the mid-80s, there were still lots of 8-track equipped cars driving around.)
I can't give you exact statistics, but I can tell you that the machines and cartridges were everywhere. Now? Well, 8-track tapes were endless loop, and they tended to split at the splice. Not to mention the lubricated tape shedding due to poor binding, and the integal pinch rollers jamming or failing... the cartridges almost all got pitched, but the machines can still be found in many thrift shops and old cars.
The format was bad, too... in the middle of a song it would fade out, the machine would click (and knock its heads right out of alignment) and the song would fade back in. Signal to noise ratio, print-through, wow and flutter and frequency response were all atrocious.
This explains why so many older shows look like horse shit compared to the quality they originally aired at.
Uhhh... Well, you can't expect *no* degredation. But a well-stored tape running on a properly aligned Quad or 3/4" machine will perform pretty close to the picture quality limits of NTSC. These things were built for TV stations, not for Joe Sixpack.
I think you might be confusing a few things.
1. Kinescope. This was before the popularization of videotape. A film was exposed from a video feed on a picture tube. A similar technique ("flying spot kinescope") was used to scan film for showing on television. This is the way that I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners were done, for example.
2. Image Orthicon camera tubes. These produced the black halos around performers. They were low-light cameras in their day, making them preferable to the absolutely punitive surface-of-the-sun lighting used to make a good image from an early plumbicon or vidicon camera tube.
3. Poor film. In the early days, there were no re-runs and most stuff was live; the only reason to film or videotape a TV show was for the producers to do a "debriefing" after the performance.
4. Poor TV. Are you remembering stuff you saw on a 1950s TV set and wondering why it looks so crappy on your new TV set? We look back with rose-colored glasses, you know. With my collection of restored 1950s TV sets, I can assure you that even with all new capacitors, good tubes and properly aligned, TV sets were cutting edge technology in the 1950s, and they were pretty bad compared to the picture quality from even a cheap modern TV.
5. Are you comparing video to still photos? Keep in mind that those still photos probably aren't frame grabs; the technology to do that in video certainly didn't exist, and with film mostly being for analysis rather than archive, they were probably using studio photographers for publicity stills.
6. Re-runs of more recent stuff. The original air of a sitcom, for example, will leave the network head-end by satellite and be run from that feed by all affiliates in the time zone. The tape playing will be some uber-quality format; as recently as 10 years ago it was some offshoot of Quad. When stations later syndicate that same episode, it's often provided in the format of the station's choice. Any station with syndication rights can order a broadcast quality copy of Seinfeld on 3/4", Betacam, Quad, hell - even Betamax and SVHS are still covered by some syndicates. Of course, all of these copies are several generations old.
Hollywood is currently in a panic because so many older films are falling apart. Compare how Vertigo looked before and after restoration to see just how much they have degraded.
This is true, but
Re:Will DVD Be Around In 20 Years? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ah. I'm glad you pointed that out. Everyone says hyped-up things about digital storage like "Digital is forever" or "it doesn't degrade" or "It's better quality" or other such nonsense. Digital video is no better than analog. Yes, analog signals get fuzzy, but compressed digital video gets artifacts. Or if you scratch the CD or the sattelite transmission isn't coming in perfectly, you get no image at all.
I'm not arguing that VHS is better quality than DVD or anything like that. But analog is still superior to digital in some ways.
VHS != 720x540 (Score:3, Insightful)
I seriously doubt VHS recorded on a 20 year old VCR is going to output a picture sharper than DVD quality.
Yes, 720x540 will perfectly reproduce a perfect, noise free NTSC signal. But NOT VHS. Even today's VHS recorders probably only output a usable resolution of 500x400 give or take. I say usable, meaning, that you would extract more pixels than that from it, but it would not increase the clarity of sample.
Buy a SONY brand name blue laser DVD recorder here (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/03/04/blue.d
ask your local retailer for the model