Hiya, pretty much the title. I have a dozen tapes I want to backup before age takes its toll. My basic idea after watching some videos online is to buy a hardware based upscaler that can interface with my vcr then throw that signal to a video capture card and record on my computer. I’ll go with name brands to avoid problems but is that really the best method? I want to avoid sending them to a service since it will cost more than just buying the hardware in the first place and I got time to kill.
I found this useful post to convert VHS tapes to DVD.
Are you sure that you need to upscale with the hardware? It’s just that, the signal is interlaced on VHS and good interlaced scaling can be elusive. I haven’t tried hardware based options, but software based ones can be good or bad and I find it useful to try different ones until something works well, but if you’re putting the scaler in front of the capture card then you’ve got no opportunity to try a different scaler if the results aren’t great. This is particularly important if you later plan to deinterlace the footage because of the interlaced scaling isn’t done well, this hampers the deinterlacing and can give worse results and in some cases there is no interlaced scaling done at all and the fact that the source signal is interlaced is just ignored which greatly hinders deinterlacing later on.
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A lot of places like local libraries sometimes have events for this purpose. You bring your stuff and they help you digitize it. Could look into that locally.