A/V VHS to PC

Hi all,

Looking for some advice. I have been asked if I can convert a VHS tape to a PC for editing (family memories). Now I know my PC is capable. But since I have never tried this I am looking for the easiest, and hopefully not the dearest option for doing this.

Can anyone tell me

1. The basic connectors / equipment I will need ( I have the VHS player that has analogue connectors)
2. I have Vegas pro. Will this suffice?

I have only ever dealt with SD or CD. I think I might actually be over thinking this

Thank you

 

I've never done this sort of thing but I assume a video capture card and some sort of legacy output to capture card input adapter will be necessary.

 

Oh this takes be back. I first mess around with video capture 20 years ago and faded out about 10 years. Yikes :/
Just to confirm:

1. Hard drive space, this is almost not even worth mentioning today, but I working off a 20 year old standard.
2. Processor, anything that will boot. When I first got into video capture, it didn't take much CPU oomph, mind you that was probably because I paid extra for cards with onboard mpeg encoders... That is for capture, CPU power has always been important for post processing, still is.
   
3. Capture device with compatible video connectors as the VHS player. Back in the day Hauppauge made the cards of choice (that might have been due to Linux drivers, rather than quality). I don't know what the current state of the market. A quick google shows a miriad of brands and most are USB. I suspect that there is only one or two with different guts and the rest are all rebrand version. If you plan to process the video afterwards, I recommend you get a card capable of raw capture. It does mean larger files (but it NTSC or PAL so not that large). When editing is done then the video can be transcoded and will be tiny (by today's standards).
   
4. Capture software, not sure if Vegas can capture the video directly. My experience here is out of date, I mostly used either the software that came with the capture card, VirtualDub, or PVR software (Mythbox).
   
5. Video editing software. I have no experience with Vegas so I cannot comment as to weather it is suitable or not. You may wish to search Vegas forums for tips, tricks, suggestion when working with VHS source video files.

This project will be a huge time sink. VHS to PC captures have to be done at 1x speed i.e. 1 hour of video will take 1 hour to capture. Then there is post processing and quality control.

 

Thank you

 

Thank you for taking the time to write this. This little project will hopefully pass some time over the next few weeks

 

I have one of the USB to component video adapters. If you want to borrow it rather than buying one, I'd be happy to post it out to you. It's been sat on my shelves for ooooh, about two years. I planned to embark upon the same project but could never be arsed. I have a huge stack of antique official Isle of Man TT tapes to convert. It's not a high priority!

 

That would be great if you wouldn't mind. I am sitting at work at the moment. I will drop a PM when I get a chance (not meant to be surfing)

 

That would be a high tier purchase for me That is way better than I would have looked at