My experience went like this- I bought one of the "Dazzle" video capture devices, probably in 1999 or 2000. I think my computer was 400 MH at the time; extremely slow by today's standards, and had much less than the 256 MB of RAM than I have on the 1.2 machine I'm using now. I didn't have too much trouble setting up the device, and the software (Ulead) seemed adequate, once you figured it out. The process went something like this. You hook up the VCR or camcorder to the capture device and put the whole tape (or whatever part of it you want to work with) on your hard drive. This will be in analog format. Then you use the software to edit. This can be an extremely slow process, if you're as sloppy with the camcorder and as particular about the finished product as I try to be. This becomes work, not fun; after 8 hours or so. That's why people get $80-$90 an hour (probably more now), to do it. Copying a tape to disk is easy. Once you have the equipment set up, you can go have a six-pack & the computer does the work. Editing, adding graphics and sound bytes are excruciating. So I ended up with something like a half hour of material I wanted to change to DVD format. Not that I could put it on disk anyway, since I didn't have a DVD recorder (but I could play it back on the computer). Anyway, the computer told me it was going to take 8 hours or more to process this 20 minutes to a half hour of stuff I put together. The computer locked up about half way through and I went through the whole process again. This time I ended up with 15 minutes worth. The playback was fine, as long as you kept it in the little 3"X 4" box, which was the default. When you went to full screen mode, the picture quality was lousy. Probably would have been worse on a tv. My camcorder is Super VHS. If you've ever copied VHS tapes much, you know the first copy is usually decent. If you make a copy FROM the copy, the picture quality deteriorates badly. With Super VHS you have a little higher resolution and the picture doesn't deteriorate quite as badly. I think 8MM or Super 8 (Sony) probably also holds up better than regular VHS. The main problem I think was not the "Dazzle" device (which has SVHS in and out jacks); but a slow computer with not enough memory to handle video capture; even though I was assured by the salesman <G> that it would work fine. I should add that I bought the external device that plugged into the serial port (I don't think it was USB). An internal card, Firewire, a faster machine with more memory; all of that should make a big difference. I'll try it again with my next computer (with DVD recorder). I think the results will be much better. The life of a computer for me has averaged 3 years or less (usually less), so I won't have to wait too long. Sam TRPLUS@aol.com wrote: > Hi Everyone, > > I called the audio-visual service I've used in the past to duplicate my VHS > tapes. > > Here's what I was told. They can transfer your VHS tapes to DVD. I didn't ask > what that would cost as there would be many variables (i.e., length of the > VHS tapes, how many would fit on one DVD, and how many copies you'd want of the > DVD). Walmart may even be able to do that for you inexpensively. Would make > wonderful Christmas presents. > > Because VHS has two fields (audio and visual). You can only capture the audio > to a CD (this is what the transcriptionists use to transcribe). > > This particular place I called charges $85/hr to pull still images off of > VHS. They can do about 15-20 images/hr depending on how well organized the > information is that you give them. He explained that if you "zero out the counter" > and then note at what time the pictures appear on the VHS, they can maximize > the process. > > The software I mentioned before "Snappy or Snap It" may have some "motion > jitter or bluriness." I saw a demonstration years ago and although the freeze > frame technology was great, I don't recall seeing a finished snapshot off of the > equipment. The tech I spoke to said they can generally get a better quality > photo than you would get using the software above. > > I hope this information helps some. At least you have some of the industry > terminology to go forward. > > Lois Hetrick Stewart > > ==== MDGARRET Mailing List ==== > Looking for your Garrett County ancestors? Make sure to visit us on the web at: > http://www.rootsweb.com/~mdgarret/index.html