The DIY way to transfer your old home videos to digital. What's going on, I'm Rich Dmiro, this is Rich on Tech. Okay, take a look around your house. If you're like most Americans, you probably have a bunch of old video tapes lying around. We're not talking about Hollywood movies here, We're talking about the old family memories. Yeah, the ones that were recorded probably on some sort of camcorder, whether it's high eight, VHS, VHSC, whatever you got, mini DV.
Think about it.
These tapes have now been around for maybe ten twenty thirty years. Those are analog tapes, and the memories and the images on them will not last forever. So I'm going to show you the easy way to transfer them to your computer and do it all on your own. Now here's the thing. If you are comfortable with sending these tapes out to a third party, then.
Go do it.
But to me, I don't like the idea of my videotapes, which are mostly my family's tapes, leaving my hands because guess what if something happens in transit, something goes wrong, they get lost, there.
Is no getting them.
That's why I'm going to go through the process of doing it yourself, which, yes, takes a little bit of time, it takes a little bit of effort, it takes a little bit of equipment. But I think you'll be very happy knowing that your tapes are safe and sound in your house. And it's kind of fun to watch these things go to digital because you do find some moments here and there that are really fun and interesting and things that you kind of forgot about that happen in
your life. Here's what you need to go from tape to digital. First off, you need your old tapes. These could be in a variety of formats, VHS, VHSC, Mini, DV, high eight, whatever you got. You can play them and you can digitize them. You also need a captured device. I'll explain that in a moment. You need a computer, and then you need a safe place to store your digital files, preferably online and also somewhere that's in your house.
You also need a way to play your old tape.
So if you have saved your camquorder or VCR, give yourself a pat on the back, because guess what, so many of us threw these things away many years ago or sold them at groad sales. If you have one, you are in luck because that's going to make this process so much easier. If you you don't have one, well, it's gonna be a little bit tough because there are replacements online on eBay and things like that, but they are expensive. People know that people want these things to
digitize tape. So you're talking, You're not gonna find a VCR for fifty bucks. You're gonna find it for maybe one hundred or two hundred dollars.
So if you.
Can, I recommend pinging your friends and family, put a notice out on Facebook saying, hey, does anyone have a high eight cam quarter or does anyone have a VCR I can borrow because that's gonna be your best bet. And then maybe it'd be nice for the person that lent you this thing. You can do a tape or two for them and then show them how to do it and they can do the rest themselves. All right, So once you have everything in place, you can begin.
Now.
The thing I haven't talked about yet is the capture device. This is one of the key parts of the process. So I tested several of these things. I tested two that worked really well. One is the El Gato Video Capture for Mac and this one sells for about eighty dollars on Amazon, and it's the best. El Gato makes the best equipment for Mac capture and it says it works for PC as well. I did not test it on PC, but it does work for me and it is perfect.
It really is a great device, even though it is a little pricey.
The other one I tested is the Roxio Easy VHS to DVD three for PC, and this one is very similar, very similar equipment. The software is different, but this one was about forty dollars on Amazon, maybe forty five. And this worked really well on a PC system. And here's the thing I did find with the Roxio which was kind of weird. They put the software on a disc, so you need a disk drive on your computer to install the software. And you're probably thinking your head, oh, Rich,
I'll just go to their website and download the software. Well, guess what, they don't really have the software on their website to download, so I had to do a workaround, which involved basically hooking up my disk drive to my Mac computer, copying over the entire contents of the Roxio CD, and then transferring all that stuff via flash drive to my Microsoft computer my Windows computer and then installing the software that way, and then I had to download a
patch for Windows ten from the Roxio website. So yes, it can be done, but just be prepared. If you you don't have a disk drive on your computer. On your PC, it will take a little bit longer to do that. Now, buyer beware, there are lots of cheap models of these video capture devices on Amazon. You can get them for US cheap as like fifteen to twenty five dollars, but do not get them.
Just skip them.
I did order one on Amazon for the Mac and it was such a pain to set up the software. Everything was messed up. So just don't do it. Just stay away, go with one of the recommendations, either the Elgato or the Roxio, and you'll be a lot happier because you will skip all the frustrations that I had in trying to get one of these cheapis to work. Okay, So now that you've got your video capture device, you have to connect that to your computer. Usually it's through USB,
and then you connect your player to this device. So if you have your old camcorder or your VCR, you're gonna connect it and you're gonna use those composite cables. Remember those Those are the cables that have the yellow, white, and red breakout cables. You're gonna connect those to the player and then also to the video capture device. My recommendation, if your player can handle S video, use that for
the video portion of your cable connection. So you'll still have to connect your red and you're white for your audio, but then you'll use the S video. That way you can get the clearest connection. Believe me, these videos are not gonna look so good because we're so used to HD and four K. These videos are gonna look pretty bad compared to what you have, but it doesn't matter. The memories on them are so worth it that it
doesn't matter how bad they are. You will forget about all that stuff because once you see the memories on these things, you'll still love them.
Okay, so now you have everything connected. Now for the fun part.
You pop in the tape and you press record on your computer using the software that they provide while the tape plays. And keep in mind, this transfer is going to happen in real time, so this is the longest part of the process. So if you have a ninety minute tape. It's gonna take your computer ninety minutes to record that tape to its hard drive. Also, keep in mind you need to have sufficient hard disk space before you begin. These things are going to take up a
lot of space on your hard drive. We're talking gigabytes here. Make sure you have either an external hard drive or a lot of space on your internal drive so that you don't have any sort of problems in the middle of your recording where your hard drive runs out of space.
And then you have to start over again.
Once the tape is finished recording, the software will give you the option to edit it or just keep it as is. So what I did basically is I didn't worry about editing these tapes as I went along. Once I had them on my hard drive, all I did was use the little sliders at the end to kind of clip off the beginning and the end. Because sometimes you might just have a blank screen at the beginning, or let's say your tape only ran thirty minutes, but
you're recorded for an hour. Because you don't want to miss anything, you can just use the little handles on either end of the software that they provide to kind of clip the blank video off of the end, and then you save the file to your computer. So basically, at this point you now have a digitized tape on your computer's hard drive.
And the next step is crucial.
You have to back up that digitized tape in a safe place. So I recommend Google Photos for several reasons. First, you can store as many any videos as you want there for free. Google Photos lets you store videos for free up to ten eighty so HD. None of these videos that you're saving are gonna be HD, so basically you can save all of them for one hundred percent free, as many as you want. Second, Google Photos does this really cool thing where it actually identifies the people and
places inside your videos. So that means that you will see a list of all the videos that contain your mom, your dad, your uncle, earl. You can search for things like Christmas in your videos. Google Photos will slice and dice all the data is sees inside your videos. I know it's pretty amazing and that alone is worth using
it just to store these videos. So to upload your videos to Google Photos, what I want you to do is navigate to the website photos dot Google dot com and then drag and drop the file from your computer to the website. Now you might be saying, rich, oh, I've got a sync program on my computer, I don't need to drag and drop.
I want you to drag and drop it for a big reason.
The way Google Photos Sync the desktop app works on your computer. If you delete that file in your hard drive, there's a chance it could delete that file out of Google Photos. And you do not have that problem when you drag and drop the file on the website. So I want you to use the website photos dot Google dot com, and that way you know that your video, once you put it in there and you upload it,
it's going to be there forever. The other thing I want you to do is that once you upload all these videos that you digitize, I want you to add them to an album. That way they don't get lost among all the other photos and pictures that you're taking in real time. Because this way you'll be able to find all of your digitized videos later on. The other way you can store your videos is on YouTube. You can do this for free as well. When you're uploading them to YouTube.
Just be sure to pick the unlisted option, not the public option. This will give you more privacy and.
Basically means that someone on YouTube can't search for your video, but you can take that same YouTube link that you're used to send it to any of your friends or family and they can view the video without logging in. Now, if you really want to be private, you can use the private upload option. This is the most private way you can be on YouTube because you can share the link with anyone, but even if they click it, they
will not be able to access the video. They have to be pre approved, You have to add them to a certain list, and then they have to log in with their YouTube account to access it. So I don't really recommend that for friends and family because it's going to be a pain for them to access your videos, but it is the most private, So if you're looking for privacy, that's the way to go. I've noticed a couple things about the way we used to record compared to today.
What we used to do is have.
A sixty minute tape and you'd have a bunch of different family functions on there. So the first ten minutes would be a birthday party, the second ten minutes would be you know, day out on the farm, you know, petting zoo.
The next ten minutes.
Nowadays, we have all individual clips, so if you want, you can go back and edit all of your videos and make them into individual clips, which I've been doing, but again that takes a little bit of time.
I've been using QuickTime. If you have a Mac computer, it's super easy.
You just open it up in QuickTime and you can literally trim the clips. That way, you don't have to use final cut. But if you're on a Windows computer, probably want to use the software that rocks you provides you to edit that as well.
Now here's there's the other thing.
You need to make sure your videos are backed up in two different places before you chuck those old tapes.
So once you have.
These things digitized, there's not really a reason to keep the old tapes around, but you have to have them uploaded and backed up in two different places. So that can be a combination of an external hard drive along with Google Photos. It could be Google Photos along with one edrive. It can be iCloud along with Google Photos. But where whatever you do, you need to have these videos in two different places. That way, if one place goes down, one place gets corrupted, you still have them
in a second place. I don't want you coming to me in a year and saying, Rich, I lost all my videos because I digitize the tapes and.
I never back them up. Please, I don't want to ever get that email. All right, there you have it.
It's a time consuming process, but I have been enjoying this. My family has been enjoying it. It's so easy and realistically, the only thing that it takes of you is your time. So put the time in, digitize those old tapes, and have a lot of fun with it. If you have any questions, you can email me, or you can tweet me,
or you can post to my Facebook page. I'm happy to answer them because I've been doing this process now for the past couple of weeks and I've definitely figured out what works and what doesn't work.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you like this podcast, be sure to take a screenshot of it and post it to social media and tag me so I can see the love. I'm Richdmiro, Thanks so much for listening. You can find links to everything I talk about here on my website. Just go to richon tech dot tv, or I'll post them in the show notes.
I will talk to you real soon.