“Hey Ken, did you ever buy that video capture card?”
My buddy Hench was looking at transferring some old VHS tapes to disk and wasn’t about to pay a professional studio $30 per tape to do it.

“Bought it, but never installed it. You want to buy it off me?”
“No, I was just hoping I could do the transfer over at your place. Besides, you’re the right guy to work with videos, with all your creativity and good ideas.”
In addition to being a networking Einstein, Hench is a master manipulator, but it always works with me. Within thirty minutes, we were taking my case apart and installing my Adaptec Videoh! card in one of the two remaining PCI slots. It went in fine and, after putting the case cover back on, I paused for a second to admire all the new ports that were now part of my rear panel’s landscape. A geeky thing to do, I know, but you feel a certain kinship with your PC when you’ve assembled it from the ground up with your own two hands. The guy down the street loves his ‘66 Dodge; I love my PC.

After we loaded the software and made sure the drivers were up to date, Hench was getting antsy. This is typical of networking types who spend their days installing hardware and running tests. Nothing too exciting ever happens at work, so they get a huge kick out of things like video capture and image editing, particularly when it’s saving them $30 a tape.

Hooking the VCR up to the Videoh! card wasn’t much of a challenge. In fact it was easy. Too easy. We started Sonic MyDVD, the software that came with the card, and clicked “Capture,” but nothing happened. No timer, no video. From my video projects at Microsoft, I remembered that it took a strange combination of cables to convert an analog tape to digital format, but I couldn’t remember what it was. We disconnected the legacy red, white, and yellow cables and tried the SVideo line. Still nothing.

“What do you think the problem is, Ken?”
“No idea. This is closer to networking than to video production. You got any ideas?”
“Maybe it’s the software. Let’s try Movie Maker.”

We tried all four cables this time and clicked “Capture from video device” in Windows Movie Maker. This time we were half successful. We got the timer going in the program, and we heard the audio, but still no image.

“That’s strange,” said Hench. “Between the yellow video cable and the SVideo cable, we ought to see some kind of image in the Preview screen.” Frustrated, we pressed Stop on the VCR. But then I noticed that Movie Maker had created a media file that showed a still image of Hench’s son, Zach, as its opening frame.

“So Hench, I haven’t seen this video yet. Is Zach in it?”
“Well, yes, but without the picture, you can’t really call it a video, can you?”
“Double-click that media file.” Hench did, and Zach sprung to life on the PC screen.

“Hey, pretty good!” he said.
“So why can’t we get it to show up when we’re recording?”
“That’s the question, but as long as we know the media file is going to end up with an image on it, seeing it during the recording isn’t all that important to me. Let’s just copy the tapes lock, stock, and barrel.” There’s something reassuring about hearing a high-tech networker like Hench turn an old western phrase like that. Years after a term like “writable DVD” becomes passé, people will still be saying “lock, stock, and barrel.”

That day, we copied the rest of that tape and one more. It took us six hours in all, and that includes multi-tasking (we caught back-to-back episodes of “Seinfeld” while the second tape was transferring.)

Over the next few days, we (translate: I) converted six more Hench family videos to digital, and Hench is now figuring out how to do post-production editing and special effects.

All in all, it was a long but productive process. I’m glad I went through it using someone else’s videotape, because now I know just what to do when I want my own VHS tape converted to digital: pay a professional studio $30 per tape to do it.