Want Your Home Videos On DVD? 2 Tips To Make Your Videos Look Polished
Posted on: 26 May 2016
Many people tend to have a stack of old home videos on VHS that have not been watched in years. After all, who even has a VCR these days with DVD players being so common? A great way to preserve your home videos for future generations is to transfer them from VHS to DVD. With a personal computer, video capture card, and some knowledge of very basic video editing, it's possible to do this job all on your own as well. Here are some tips that will help make your home video transfers look more polished.
Chapter Cards
Most camcorders back in the day would have the option to time stamp your videos with the date and time in the lower right corner. Unfortunately, this information may not have been turned on or was accurate.
It's a good idea to put chapter cards before sections in your home videos so that you know what you are about to see. If you happened to have the tape labeled with more information, create a brief chapter card before each section on the DVD. It can be as simple as listing what milestone it is, the age of your kid at their birthday party, or what year those Christmas memories happened.
Trim Unnecessary Footage
A single DVD can hold anywhere from 1 to 3 hours of footage on it depending on what compression settings you use. You most likely have many more hours worth of VHS tapes that you will need to separate across several DVDs. Now is a great time to start trimming unnecessary footage from your home videos to condense them to as few DVDs as possible.
As you are capturing your home videos from the VHS tapes, make notes about sections that would be good candidates to cut for your final DVD discs. Maybe it is your child's entire elementary school choir concert and all you care about is their performance. It could be a play that they were in, and you only care about seeing the one scene they were in rather than the entire play.
You'll always have the VHS tapes to go back to if you really wanted to watch those extra moments again, but chances are that they can be left behind on the editing room floor.
These are just a few tips for making home videos look more polished. If the whole digitizing and editing process seems too complicated to you, then you may need to hire a professional to handle this technical job for you.
For video tape conversion services, contact a company such as Prime Time Video Digital Productions.
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