Re: Best way to archive VHS?
- From: HerHusband <unknown@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 07 Dec 2007 09:46:41 -0600
I want to archive my VHS tapes while I still can. I have a Sony
Digital8 camcorder but I wonder if that would be a good option
since that format seems to be rapidly fading. Would DVD be the
best route?
I was in the same position a few years back, and I got the same
recommendations to keep the original tapes (whether it be VHS, DV8,
etc.). But, I was already seeing degradation of the tapes, and no matter
how good the quality was, there was only a single copy. So if we had a
house fire or the machine ate the tape, I would lose years of
irreplaceable video.
Also, our tapes generally consisted of lots of small segments, one after
another on the tapes. If I wanted to see the segment at the end, I had to
fast forward through the tape.
I first transferred all my home videos to the computer in DV format. By
converting to a digital format, I could access any video immediately. But
more important, I could make backup copies of the video files.
Unfortunately, DV files are huge. I could have transferred them back to
my "new' Digital8 camcorder tapes, but then I was right back to the
situation of having to fast forward to the segments I wanted to access,
and hoping that tape format would still be around years later.
A couple of years ago, I realized I was never going to "Edit" the home
movies, I just wanted to preserve them. So I now use "Cinemacraft Basic"
to encode my movies to a high bitrate MPEG2 format (9000kbps video,
256kbps audio). This results in much smaller files, and the MPG format
still provides more quality than the original VHS tape ever had.
Normally, you wouldn't want to use MPEG as an archival format, as it's a
lot more lossy than DV is. But your videos aren't going to get any better
than the original VHS source material.
On the off chance that I might someday want to clip or otherwise edit an
old video, I made sure I could convert the MPEG files back to DV
(VideoDub Mpeg2 Mod works great for this). I even tried multiple
generations of loading and resaving, and the results were practically
identical to the original. Certainly good enough for the VHS source
material.
Now that I have my home movies saved as high bitrate MPEG2 files, I save
a copy on my hard drive, then make backups to external USB drives as
well. I keep one of these in a safe deposit box in case we ever have a
house fire or something.
I also like to copy the MPEG2 files to "data" DVD-R disks once a year or
so. However, DVD-R disks actually fail quite often, so it's important not
to rely on them as your sole backup medium.
Once your movies are in digital form, the most important point is to keep
MULTIPLE backups. Optical disks fail, could be scratched, or broken. You
could drop your hard drive and leave it unreadable. Having multiple
copies of your data allows you to recover the files when problems to
occur.
Works for me...
Anthony
.
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