“I’ve got a bunch of old VHS tapes filled with great family memories and now
I’ve gotten myself a slick little DV camera and I’ve been filling up tapes like they’re going out of style.
How can I transfer them to DVD, or better yet, how can I combine them both with music and still photos and make a really cool movie?”
I’ve been hearing this a lot lately so I’m going to give you a quick lesson
on the very basics of movie making. Although it’s not enough knowledge to get you to Sundance, it will help you to get
your feet wet.
I transfer and edit video in a couple of different ways. The first and most straightforward
procedure is to hook up a VHS player or DV camera directly to my DVD player/recorder. I use this method for making an exact copy of a VHS or DV tape or for recording bits and pieces
of multiple VHS and DV tapes onto a DVD. You just plug either your VCR or DV camera into the front RCA inputs, find the spot
on the tape you want, then hit record on the DVD recorder and play on the input device. You can then pause the DVD recording
and change sources/tapes until you have all the data you want on the DVD. My recorder has a direct copy feature that makes
the process a little easier. Last step is to finalize the DVD when finished so that it will play on other devices. I also
suggest that you use DVD-R blank discs when recording. Most recorders accept –R, +R, -RW and +RW discs, but I’ve
found that recordings made on –R media will work on more DVD players then the others. A lot of older players were designed
to work with this standard and won’t recognize anything but. The only exception would be if you wanted to edit the DVD,
then you must use a – or + RW disc as they’re rewritable. If you do you need to keep in mind that playback options
might be limited.
The problem with this method of transfer is that you can’t add titles, transitions
or music, plus editing is painful. If I want to transfer video or capture live tv and edit and add titles to it, or if I want to make a slide show set to music,
I use my PC to do it.
I have a Windows Media Center PC that has a hardware video capture/TV tuner card. The
PC is like a bigger more functional DVR (Tivo). In fact it’s called a PVR or Personal Video Recorder. Plugging a device
into one of the inputs and turning it on cause’s Windows to open your video capture/editing software. If your PC has
a Firewire port you’ll want to use it for digital video transfer. This is the most desirable method as it keeps the
video in a digital format start to finish. You can use the RCA (Composite) jacks but you will be converting the cameras digital
data into analog to use this connection then back into digital on the PC. This will affect the picture quality.
For software I use InterVideo WinDVD Creator. I’ve found it to be a very powerful tool and easy to use but there are many
options (Pinnacle, Ulead, etc., features and prices vary widely). You can add video, stills and music to the storyboard and
then add titles and transition effects. There are options for editing and stretching both the audio and video, capturing stills
and setting the length of time a still frame is shown. Once you’re satisfied and are ready to burn it to DVD or a file
the software will render your project into whatever output format you choose.
You can also use the software to make great slide shows set to music. This has become
one of our favorite features. Sometimes you can tell a story better with a few stills and the right tunes. I made the slide
show below with Intervideo and saved it to disk as a .WMV file. This reduced the quality and frame size a great deal but made
it small enough to upload to Youtube (100MB limit). Don't judge it on picture quality, it's just to give you an
idea of what you can do. I originally saved it as an .AVI file and it looks and sounds great, but it's 706MB. A DVD holds
4.7GB.
