Show Notes

Episode 120 My VHS to Digital Project

 

00:00

Hey guys, Robert Cairns here. I’m the founder, CEO and Chief creator of amazing ideas that stunning digital marketing. In today’s podcast, I’m going to sit down and talk about a little bit of a fun project I’m working on. And that is what to do with old VHS home movies. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this special podcast.

 

00:34

Hey guys, Robert Cairns here again. So in this podcast this week, I’m going to talk about something not business related, and actually something really fun. And that’s what to do with your VHS home movies. We all know VHS and beta tapes have kind of gone by the dodo bird VCRs have been long gone. I remember as youth when they first came out. And I wanted to talk about how we preserve those movies. So the cool thing is, if you have a VCR or Betamax, the beta version of VCR, or the VHS VCR, you can actually that works, you can transfer these movies quite easily. If you jump on Amazon, there’s a numerous pile of video capture cards. And basically, all these video capture cards is a device that plugs into the USB port, it comes with some software, the software will and install the drivers for the capture card. And then you connect the yellow, the red and the white from the VHS or the beta machine to the capture card, push play, hit capture on the softer and away you go. And what this will do is create video files. So the ones I’ve created. I’ve actually created MPEG files, which is one of the many movie formats. And MPEG yuck, actually. So what I’m going to do next, because I let some of these overrun at the back end, I’m actually going to edit out the overrun stuff on the background. And I’m going to take these MPEG files, and I’m going to save them to mp4 AVI files, which is pretty standard. mp4 A is a video format, that’s high res. Now it won’t matter for quality for these. But I believe it’s a format, that will be a long time. And then after I create the mp4 res, I’m going to actually use curl Visual Studio and burn DVDs. And somebody asked me today and said frankly, why don’t you just burn DVDs and not keep the digital? Ha, there’s a good reason for that. And the real reason is, are we going to have DVD players in five years, I think there’s a better chance personally, of playing video files in a different format. And somebody will write a code x or a program like VLC player that can play multiple formats easier than actually having them on DVDs. So in this particular case, I’m going to burn both the DVDs that can be used now. And I’m going to save the video format files in the cloud. And frankly, on a on a USB hard drive. And that way of formats change, I can always take those video files and output them to something else. And most video editing software will do that for you. I’ve used curl Visual Studio, it’s one of the programs I use. But open source video editor which I’ve talked about on this podcast, DaVinci Resolve Premier, they will all burn out to a DVD. So that’s the cool thing about this. And then you’ve got a video file that you can watch on a tablet, or a smartphone. And then you’ve got something like a DVD that you can pop into a DVD player. So just food for thought. This is what I’m doing with some home movies. So it’s been a fun project. I just finished rendering 15 videotapes, and now I got to do some cleanup. That means eliminating the overruns, as I mentioned, and switching the format and then I’ll start burning the DVDs. What you need to do is start to think about moving forward ahead what is the best way for me to store priceless material. So a generation from now we don’t have this problem. And unfortunately, that’s one of the challenges with the electronic age. Rob Karen’s studying digital marketing just thoughts on how to preserve a VHS or a beta video collection. You can tweet at me at Rob Karen’s my website stunning digital marketing comm email me via piette stunning digital marketing com This podcast is dedicated my late father Bruce Cairns. So my wife Jill Mclean-Cairns. please keep your feet on the ground, keep reaching for the stars and make that business succeed by now. Have a great weekend. Bye bye for now.

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