vhs tapes to dvd with editing capability

D

dodgerluva

Audiophyte
I have about 14 hours of home movies on vhs tapes and want an easy way to create a dvd of about two hours from those tapes. What dvd-combo VHS recorder can do this? I know I can put the 12 hours on my computer hard drive and edit to create a dvd, but I'd like to buy a dvd-vhs recorder and -- as I envision -- play the vhs tapes and record to a dvd while I use a "pause" button on what I don't want on the dvd. Sounds so simple, but I cannot find a dvd recorder (combination vhs) that can do that. These home movie -vhs tapes are treasures , so I'd be willing to spend as much as $600 on the dvd recorder to do it. I actually plan to create lots of dvds from the vhs tapes I have. Help, please.
 
J

joetech

Junior Audioholic
I teach Video Editing in one of my classes at an Ohio H.S. Your right you can't do that. I think they can't make those because people could copy VHS tapes of movies to DVD and not sell any DVDs. You need to copy to your computer Hd and get a sofware NLE (non linear editor) like Adobe Premiere Elements (@$80 discounted or less) or one by Avid not there pro stuff but they have one for consumers that's about the same price. I remember what its called.
You could buy a NLE machine like ones made by Casablanca but I would avoid that. They are very expensive, easy to learn but don't work that well. E-bay may have some cheap but I would still avoid them.
I would buy an external HD for the computer. Even if you have a very large HD internal its better to have an external as well to speed up the process.
At home I use Premiere and an External drive. At school we have the Casablancas. They were purchased before I started teaching there. If I had it to do all over agian I would go with the computers and software vs the NLE machines.
 
avnetguy

avnetguy

Audioholic Chief
I'll second the use of a computer, very easy to convert.
Get an MPEG2 hardware capture card, TMPGEnc DVD Author and some simple DVD burning software.

Steve
 
K

kaltorak1964

Audiophyte
If its just home movies...

I bought a cheap Apex DVD burner and hooked up my old VCR to it and ran thru the TV and recorded about 30 hours of home movies on DVD, then took some editing software on the PC and made menus on the dvd's it can be done . but it is very time consuming
 
Hi Ho

Hi Ho

Audioholic Samurai
If I understand your question right, what you want is certainly possible. You want to be able to pause, find a different spot on the tape, and start recording again? I recently bought a Panasonic DMR-ES15 DVD recorder and I have been transfering VHS tapes. I have paused many times and kept going. Pressing stop will make a new title while pause will keep it all in one. I would have taken this feature for granted.

If you really want to do this and you cannot find a combo unit that will allow it, I highly recommend the DMR-ES15 and a seperate VCR.
 
S

sherchlojo

Audioholic Intern
I would like to second the recommendation on using a Panasonic DVD recorder. I am using the Panasonic DMR-EH50. It has a built-in hard drive.
You can copy the VHS tapes to the hard drive, then edit them, create chapters, etc on the hard drive. You can then copy the finished result to a DVD-R which you can play on any dvd player. You would have to have a separate VCR, though. VCRs are not expensive and I think you would get better quality recordings by using separate components then with the DVD-VCR combo unit. And the Panasonic recorder does an excellent job when it comes to picture and sound.
 
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