Hi! All
I wondered if there is anyone who could give me some advice, at the moment I am trying to sort my bedroom out as basically it is a mess as I have lots of gadgets as well as videos, dvds, records, tapes and cds.

I would like to be able to convert my videos to dvd and have tried to ways so far one being a Tevion dongle from Aldi and another being an Ion box, but both have not produced very good results as there have been problems with the sound being out of sinc.

I have even tried using a video recorder connected direct to a dvd recorder but I am finding that what with the tapes being old that the tracking on the video recorders are quite poor, I need a quick way of converting so what is the best without the sound being out of sinc or should I just cut my losses and get rid of the videos?.

Thanks in advance.

If your VCR won't make a clean recording on a DVDR then nothing else will either.

If you can't get good results with a dvd recorder (or unless you have videos of the Second Coming or Bigfoot) I'd bin them.

there is a fundamental truth that VHS is crap.

It's really not worth the effort of trying to convert anything that isn't a video of your first son being born.

but if you want to. then you are unlikely to find a more faithful recording than the dvd recorder. but if you use a computer you might be able to run some noise filters.

Back in the 80's and 90's I used to edit quite a bit of video tape based programme material on VHS, Super VHS, U-matic (Low band, High band, High band SP), MII, and Betacam. The firm I worked for also had duplication facilities for most sources to VHS.

The reason you're getting poor results is that VHS has a poor timing pulse track (Control Track) because of tape stretch and mechanical variations as the tape is played. No amount of filtering after duplicating on to a PC or DVD recorder is going to fix that. What needs to happen is to correct those faults as soon as the signal comes off the tape.

In the world of TV production we used a device called a time base corrector (TBC) to stabilise the video signal. The thing is though that they were blooming expensive devices. A cheap TBC was £2500. Then towards the end of the 80's Panasonic brought out a device with a stripped down budget version of a TBC. Suddenly it became possible for home users to make reasonable copies of VHS source material. This was a godsend to the wedding video crowd.

Frame Store TBCs as they became known migrated from video mixing desks (MX10, MX12, MX30, WJ-AVE5 etc) in to some of the high-end S-VHS VCRs. (NV-FS100, NV-FS200) and eventually other brands joined in (JVC HR-S9*** series I think) and Mitsubishi I seem to recall. There's probably fan sites that give more details.

If you can find one of the Frame Store decks, and you're prepared to pay what they cost then that'll give you the best chance of a decent source signal from your tape. The other likely candidate is to pick up a WJ-AVE5 off Ebay. These include the ability to fade and mix from another source, do sound mixing, some basic colour correction and they cross-convert from composite video to s-video.

The bottom line is that you can mess about with cheap boxes, digital filters, computer programs and the rest until the cows come home. It won't sort the basic issue. A frame store TBC device will help. Either buy the right gear or give the tapes to a conversion house and let them use their gear.

I have an old wedding video somewhere which was really jumpy because it had been played back too many times, but we managed to make a reasonable quality digital copy of it onto a DVD!

I have a Panasonic DMR-EZ47V that can record on either VHS or DVD, or copy from one to the other.
Last edited by Gary_Wooding : 08-04-2013 at 07:35

My VCR/DVD is a Toshiba; I`ve successfully copied VCR recordings to DVD and even done some in the reverse direction. I think the snag with DVD (as opposed to VCR recordings) is that they have to be `finalised` or some such, or they apparently won`t play on any DVD player other than the one on which the recording was made. I`ve not been too successful in `finalising` - I tried to copy a tape to a DVD fro a cousin but it didn`t play on his machine. Wonder what I was doing wrong - I thought I`d followed instructions meticulously.

DVD recorders are capable of recording in 2 formats only one of which is capable of being played back on a standard DVD player.

VR mode is incompatible with the DVD-Video standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR_mode

Look for a menu option to to record in DVD mode (DVD Video)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD-Video

Generally speaking, DVDs are so cheap these days that there's little point in transferring something already commercially available.

Even a "straight" transfer will probably take some time. Tidying things up and adding chapters, etc. to the DVD will probably take longer, and it still won't look better than the original VHS. Well, not unless you spend a *lot* of time working on it- which is obviously pointless if you can pick up a good DVD transfer for a fiver.

Of course, it's different for stuff that isn't available on DVD (and may well never be), including- of course- videos of your own material. And it sometimes happens that DVD releases are cut or modified for various reasons. It may well be worth it in those cases.

But for run of the mill stuff? Not worth the hassle...