Customers often ask us: Should I transfer my video tapes – VHS, VHS-C, Hi8, miniDV – to DVD or to a a Hard Drive?
Here’s the quick answer:
If you’re just looking for the convenience of watching your home movies: choose DVD. If you have any intentions to edit your home videos, go Hard Drive.
The more detailed answer:
If you plan to do any video editing, transferring to a hard drive has two benefits over transferring to a DVD:
Benefit 1: Digital video files can be imported into your Video Editing Software directly.
We can transfer your old home videos to MOV files if you use Apple, or to AVI files if you use Windows.
You can then directly import the files into your video editing software and start editing. Apple has iMovie and Windows has Windows Movie Maker. Either of this software is user-friendly and a good choice for first-time editors, even long-time editors like me.
Bear in mind, video files are large, it may take up to 30 minutes to transfer a 2 hour video file from the portable hard drive to your computer. That though, is time well spent – editing files that reside on your computer is much faster than editing files that reside on an external hard drive.
Benefit 2: Video files on hard drive are higher resolution than on DVD.
Once video files are burned on a playable DVD, they have been compressed.
That’s why you can fit 2 hours of home video on a DVD that’s only 4.7 Gig.
Compare this to a hard drive transfer: 1 hour of video takes up 16 Gig, so 2 hours take up 32 gig. This is because when you transfer to a portable hard drive, the video file is not compressed.
If you plan to edit your video files, you want to start with the highest resolution source file you can get.
We transfer any media to hard drive – not just VHS tapes. Many customers are requesting their film reels: 8mm film, Super 8, 16mm film to be transferred to hard drive as well.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us, our in-house video transfer lab is located in Newton, MA, part of Greater Boston.
