Creating DVD's - A Labor of Love or Beating My Head Up Against The Wall?

I did it! Finally. I kept a promise I made to myself to put our old family movies on DVD, not at all an easy task and most likely to challenge your sanity. I finished it all yesterday. With the help of my wonderful sons, I was able to find 2 computers (out of our 5) that had the capacity to do what I needed it to do.

First, was the task of trying to figure out how to take a very old vhs tape and copy it to a computer. This old movie was taken from 8mm movies that my father had originally shot years ago. (We won't say how MANY years. Let's just say that I remember the signing of the Declaration of Independence!) We tried to copy the footage several different ways. At first, it seemed that it would be an easy thing. After all, I had the cabling necessary to hook up a vcr to a computer. That wasn't enough though. It needed a go-between. So I tried hooking up our old video camera to the vcr. It's too bad that we couldn't figure out where the cables hooked up to the camera. That would have made it easier. But we couldn't, so we used Option #3... using a gamebridge as a go-between from the vcr to the computer. Bingo! That worked, but it took us 4 days of trial and error, and several dozen cups of hot chocolate, and it also put my son, Jason, out of a computer for a few days. If any of you know my son, you'll know that he lives and breathes his laptop and the programming he does on it.

After we had captured the video file(s), we had the daunting task of trying to get the file burned to a dvd. It seems that most of our computers didn't want to cooperate, and that made this even more difficult. The files were larger than the ordinary dvd. I tried several programs to get the files to compress just right and gave up when I found out there WAS such a thing as an 8.5GB DVD disc! After finally getting an imaged burned (again after more chocolate), we had to make sure it would play on a dvd player. Just because you burn a dvd is no guarantee that it's going to play. We had success after another day or two. We copied that dvd, and burned enough copies of it to ensure my sanity in case something catastrophic were to happen to the original. I did the fancy label on the dvd and put them in a case, again with a fancy insert. All in all, a job very well done. I just wish I'd done it sooner. The quality of the vhs tape had gone down considerably with age.

Note to self: Don't wait. Time slips away before you know it and then all you've got is... well... nothing.


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