Capturing VHS Tapes to Computer

Video Transcript

"In this clip, I am going to show you how to capture your footage from your VCR to your computer. I will be using Windows, the Movie Maker, but you can use any number of applications. They are all pretty similar. There are a various number of other ones that you can find. Windows Movie Maker is a registered trademark of Microsoft, a company that I have no affiliation with, whatsoever. OK, so, we are in Windows Media Maker and we are going to capture. First, we are going to 'File' and will choose capture video. Since I am running my VCR through my camcorder, I am going to choose that. You may have other options, if you have the capture card or what have you. I am going to select the camcorder, move on and then title the clip. I am going to title it 'Test' and then tell the program where to store it. I am just going to place it in my CD drive, but you can store it wherever you want. Moving on, it is called 'Test #0001'. Then, it will ask you what type of format that you want to save it in. This is where you will select DV AVI, because that's the highest quality, so we want to capture it as that so that we can edit it. These are the technicalities of that. Remember that this will take about 14 GB per hour of captured footage. Knowing that, you want to clear out whatever space, or whatever hard drive that you are putting it in. Which is, in our case, why don't we just go back here, select DV AVI and move on. You are going to have to capture it manually because the automatic feature is for capturing a tape, a digital tape, from a camcorder that you could actually tell when to capture scene-per-scene. However, here we are going to do it manually and show a preview during capture, so that we can see this. So, here it is. I've already have my VCR plugged in and playing. Here's the footage that we're seeing and I've have. You can set a time limit here for when you want it to stop. This one would be 3 hours and 34 minutes or, I'm sorry, only 34 minutes. So, you can just click capture and then walk away. Come back in 34 minutes and it will automatically stop. However, for me, I am going to to do it manually and do just a few seconds here. Say, "This is where I want to start capturing". Click 'Start' and the seconds start to tick away and our drive starts to fill up. This is all being recorded right now to the hard drive. Then say, "OK, I've had enough of this." So press 'Stop". It recorded for just under 16 seconds and took up to 15 MB. Even though the tape is still playing, because the VCR is sill giving us a feed, we are not actually recording this to the hard drive anymore. That was the end of that scene, so, now we will press 'Finish' and it will import it automatically for us. It'll take a few seconds here. Here's our footage and we can watch it playback. There it is and it is all ready to start editing."