Fifteen years ago, I had a nice Sony Camcorder. It used 8mm and Hi8 tapes to record stereo sound and pictures of vacations, birthdays, and children's activities. I still have it and it doesn't work anymore, but I have a collection of about twenty tapes that contain many special family memories.

As we've discussed in this series on digital video, those tapes are degrading every year. I want to convert them to digital video so that I can preserve them and share them easier.

These are analog video tapes about the size of a pack of playing cards. Each one holds between one and two hours of video.

The system you'll need to convert these has three parts:

• A source: This is something to play the old tapes on, in my case, a camcorder.
• A converter: This is something to convert analog video to digital video, in this case a camcorder. Some computers have the hardware for this.
• A recorder: This is something to make the digital video file, in my case, a computer with a 200 gigabyte hard drive. The files get big.

How big the files get is up to you. Some people argue over which file format should be chosen by morally sensitive people, as if it mattered. I can't whip up that kind of an attitude over it. If I can see and hear it, and I know what it's about, I'm usually happy. It's not like I'm digitizing the last film copy of Citizen Kane, these are home movies and very plain ones at that. Still, I hope that you can make informed choices about your own digital video, and in that hope I will say that you can make really big files or little bitty ones.

If you scroll to the bottom of the web page at www.videohelp.com/dvd, you'll see that DV formats can take up to 216 megabytes of disk space per minute of video. Using that quality, a CD would hold three minutes of video, and a DVD would hold twenty minutes. I might want to store a very special family event – perhaps the vows from a daughter's first wedding, or my coronation as King of Satirica in that format, but most of my family memories can be stored, played back, and enjoyed quite nicely at a rate of about one megabyte per minute. What should you do? As they say in recipes, suit to taste. You can control it in the settings for the recorder phase.

What's the Setup?
As I mentioned above, the camcorder that I used to make these tapes doesn't work anymore. It still performs all the functions of a paperweight, but it won't play the tapes. I spare no expense for the education of the readers of RootsWorks, so I went to eBay and bought a Samsung SCL906 camcorder. I won the auction for $150. I don't know how you like to use eBay, but I either “Buy It Now” or lowball and hope. In this case, I tried the latter method, and you got lucky. The Samsung has an “A/V out” jack that takes a headphone plug. The signal starts there. For VHS, I used a plug with a headphone plug on one end. For 8mm, I use one with a headphone jack on BOTH ends.

The other end I plug into the “A/V Input” jack on the Canon ZR-40 camcorder that I borrowed for this project. Now I have signal going from tape to camcorder. One more step will complete the cabling. I used a firewire cable to connect the camcorder to my desktop computer, the same as I used when I converted VHS.

Now It's Connected, What Next?
I use the same configuration of the Canon camcorder as with the VHS conversion. On my computer, I still use Intervideo WinDVD Creator to capture the video into a digital computer file.

WinDVD Creator has a CAPTURE feature that creates an MPEG format file. That's fine for what we're doing, so I click CAPTURE on the desktop. I see a picture of each device that can capture anything, and I click on the Canon ZR-40. Next, I see a capture image.

Okay, I'm ready for a source. I put a tape into the Samsung and rewind it to the beginning. Then I clicked RECORD on the computer, and was prompted for a file name. The MPEG file was created in the My Videos folder under My Documents. I made a subfolder called “Hi8 Archives' and named the file TAPE01. Then I pressed PLAY on the Samsung and made a file.

It's Time fore Me to Change My Mind
I spent a number of words in an earlier article suggesting that you should catalog your tapes first. I cultivated that habit and used it until I had done about five or six tapes. That's when I changed my mind. These tapes have two minutes of a baseball game, fifteen seconds of a dog in the yard, thirty seconds of a daughter at a baseball game, then more dog, then more baseball, and then thirty minutes of a birthday party. It takes me a whole hour to catalog a tape, and I never cared for that wife's dog in the first place. Time is money. I need a faster way to get through this that reduces the time and emotional wear and tear of the task.

Being the laziest person I know has some compensation. I can usually think of a short cut that will reduce the drudgery of whatever I'm doing at the time. Having a short attention span doesn't help, but is does lead me to choose simpler solutions. I realize that I can record a whole one hour tape in about 1.2 gigabytes. I start the recording on the computer, start the tape, and leave the room. I might even leave the house. When I come back, that tape is finished.

This technique requires that I use a feature of the WinDVD Creator program that has a little checkbox next to the words “Stop recording after . . . minutes.” I type in 120 and away we go.

If I am in the room and happen to notice that there hasn't been any video for five or ten minutes, I figure that's all I put on that tape. I can't recall ever saying to myself, back when I was making them, “I think I'll skip about fifteen minutes of tape before I record this thunderstorm.” The tapes cost about fifteen cents per minute of recording capacity, and even a Texan won't waste much of that. The only long gaps that I have to deal with are those occasions when I accidentally put the camera into the bag without turning it off first. I have more than my share of shadowy video of the inside of a bag, where the sound track contains the muffled voices of my family and sometimes the squeak of the bag straps as we walk. People seem to think that's a sign of an uncaring camera owner, but I plead for leniency. The camera doesn't cry out to me from inside the bag, saying “Hey! It's dark in here! And I can't hear you guys!” It suffers in silence, like a man without hope. I say it's unfortunate, but claim it's not abusive, and hope that I'm not the only person who has ever done it.

Anyhow, after two hours I have a file for that tape. I rewind it, put in the next one, and repeat the process. When I'm done, I have the digital equivalent of the whole tape, and I can catalog it much more easily in WinDVD Creator than I could have using the tape.

How Much Easier?
I can slide a cursor along a scroll bar and see the scenes change, in an instant. I can “split the scene” at the cursor, and create a project that has a snippet for each event I filmed. There is still a single video file; the WinDVD Creator project file is just a list of scenes that are found in that file. The process of creating separate files and burning them onto DVD's will have to wait for a future article.

Once the video is in digital format, I can use the one big file to archive the whole tape, and I'll try to make that a pretty high quality format. I can cut the tape into scenes for the parts worth remembering, and those would be pretty high quality too, and put them on DVD. I can also make lower resolution copies of them for the web or emails, using RealMedia format, for example.

More Information
If you want to discuss digital video issues, please drop by the RootsWorks Forums (www.rootsworks.com/forums). Registration is free, and I'd be interested to know what you think.

Beau Sharbrough is an employee of MyFamily.com. His articles contain his own views and opinions and do not reflect any corporate policy or statement by the company. He lives in Provo, UT, where the tulips are gone, the irises have come and gone, and the roses are out. The RootsWorks series of articles focuses on genealogical applications for generic technologies. Please note that he cannot assist you with your individual computer and genealogy problems. Visit the RootsWorks website (www.rootsworks.com) for links to previous articles and Beau's lecture schedule (next stop: IAJGS in Las Vegas, this July).

Copyright 2005, MyFamily.com.