VHS to web?

[americanhome]

hi,
i'm interested in knowing how to convert the stuff i record on VHS to something i can use on the web. i know i need to invest in a digital camcorder, but i still have a lot of already made tapes that i wanna take clips from and use on my site. any ideas/experience?
thanks
art

[ctarabians]

After you buy your digital camcorder - you will be able to capture VHS to your digital camcorder which can then be converted to whatever format you want. I bought a Canon Elura and have
used it to not only capture some great action shots and digital movies, but have also used it to transfer VHS to digital.
I subsequently created short FLASH5 clips out of the VHS tape using the Elura.
You can see a VHS clip that was done like this on a website
I built - www.adonisbey.com on the Heritage page. ( hosted by
powweb) The original VHS was real fuzzy and I was able to use
some software to clean it up before converting it to a Flash5 swf
file. (Please no comments on the dark background, this was a custom design website specifically built to the client's specifications.)

The elura has come down substantially in the last 2 months from the price selling on the internet. The local Fry's was selling it for $500.

[fcsnc]

Well, you don't really have to have a digital camcorder to digitize your VHS tapes. A $175 PCI capture card by Osprey, Winnov, etc. would do the job. Plug your VCR into your capture card, and off you go. With the Osprey, you could even create compressed Realvideo files on the fly with the free Real Producer.

Remember that video takes an enormous amount of disk space (> 1MB per minute) even when compressed. A 10-minute AVI file, for example, can be 2GB (the maximum file size for 32-bit Windows and most Intel-based Unix machines). And on Powweb's servers, you can post no file > 10MB.

At http://fcsnc.com/wsw/ you can view some "stinky shorts" encoded in Realvideo directly from an analog tape using a $26 capture card. I could have added sound, but I like silent movies ;)

Remember, the better it works, the better it is...regardless of price. And if it's free, and works, the price is definitely right.

- Tom

[Rick_E]

Bring the video into your computer through your capture card and encode to streaming video it with the free Windows Media Encoder 7.1. Info and download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/technologies.asp

[VBman]

I previously had an ATI All-In-Wonder that had this ability, but I sold it. I have missed the TV-IN ability that it had so I just bought a ATI TV card for $40 ($20 after rebate) and it does the same thing. So you can buy a TV card or usually any graphics card with a TV-In option will work, and then you can make clips of your VHS tapes.

I have been using the Divx codec which makes the video files really small without loss of quality.

[Atomic-Design]

In my school's tech lab they have WinTV installed, and a VCR. Then they have another peice of software (Adobe Premier) to take the movie files. With Premier you can edit it, and do whatever you need to your VHS movie. It's expensive though.