Since you’re on the Legacybox blog, there’s a good chance you’re at least a little bit familiar with conversion services. You know that places like Legacybox can take your original tapes, put them through some heavy-duty equipment, and convert all of your favorite memories into a digital format. The part you might not know, however, is whether you can do it yourself to save cash, time, or both.
The short answer is no, you can’t. It’ll likely take longer and be more expensive for you to convert your VHS tapes to digital files on your own. Here’s why.
How Long Does it Take to Turn VHS into DVD?
Answering this question will go a long way into determining how long it’ll take you to digitize your home videos. In order to transfer your videotapes to a computer, you’ll have to stick the tape into something like a VHS player that’ll play its entirety.
It has to go the entire length of the film at real-time playback speed. This means 3 hours of VHS videos will take 3 hours to convert to digital copies. Add an extra few minutes to burn the DVD.
Analog to Digital Video Transfer Equipment
The VHS conversion equipment that it takes to transfer the videos to your computer isn’t cheap. You can purchase an adapter for your VCR that converts old VHS tapes to digital video format.
If you want a VHS/DVD recorder combo that’ll do everything for you, it’ll run you around $500. To top it all off, you’ll need some sort of video capture program on your computer.
Time It Takes To Burn A DVD Yourself
Legacybox puts all of your digitized movies onto a convenient and portable DVD format. If you want to have your own DVD to share and take to parties, you’ll need to burn them yourself.
Usually, depending on the length of the movies being burned, that can take around 30 minutes to an hour. That’s just for one DVD. As you can see, the hours are really starting to add up. And that’s not even considering...
Downside To Transferring VHS To Computer
Transferring home videos to your computer takes a long time on its own, but then there’s extra work to do once they’re on there.
If you just run your VHS tapes through a machine and onto your computer, you’ll just have a really long, continuous video with no chapters or browsability. Imagine you burned 12 hours of tape and wanted to watch something at the very end of your newly minted DVD. Not so convenient.
Editing your memories once they’re transferred to your computer might be one of the most difficult and time-consuming parts of the entire process.
If you’re not technologically savvy, you’ll have to learn your way around what can be very complicated editing software. This includes choosing the correct file formats like PAL or NTSC and transferring them to MP4 or MOV.
Then, you have to use the storage on your hard drive to save your videos. But, you would be safer purchasing a blank DVD-R or flash drive to store your videos.
My Verdict?
Without knowing how many tapes you have and how long they are, it’s impossible to give the exact time that would take to transfer all of them to your computer. What I can say is that it’s a long, time-consuming process that I wouldn’t personally want to do.
My advice would be to just let the pros at Legacybox take care of it for you. It's the simple, safe, "we thought of everything" mail in transfer service for your home movies, photos, film and audio. Easily watch your old tapes on your computer or DVD player! Get started Now!
