Nobody cares. All that work on comments and nobody uses it. Oh well. I didn’t start doing this in the first place to be popular. I just did it so I’d have a convenient place to put my stuff.

Conversions

So, a couple weeks ago, I was in Logan to do some work and I had lunch with ”the gang” and an associate of mine had a plastic bag full of 8mm video tapes and he wanted to give them to Chadd so Chadd could copy all the video onto VHS tapes. I said, “Hey, I can transfer those to DVD if you’d like.” He liked that idea and gave me the tapes instead.

It took me a few days to find time in my schedule to start on this project, but I got started recently and worked out a pretty good procedure for converting the tapes to DVD video. Because 8mm is only slightly better than VHS quality to begin with, I’m capturing the video at 352x240. If I wanted to, I could put between 165 and 300 minutes of video on one DVD in this format. I’m just doing one tape (up to 120 minutes) per DVD.

In light of my interest in some kind of “menial job” that could provide me with a little extra money on the side, I got wondering if I could do these home movie conversions for profit.

Looking around briefly online, I see conversion priced on a per-tape basis at about $8-15 per tape. My understanding is that it’s based on an unattended process- digitize all video to one DVD track.

With this recent video project, I captured each event to a DVD track/chapter and included a simple menu so you have random access to all video on the disc.

I think I would charge $20/tape for that.

Anyway- if you have some home movies you want preserved digitally, let me know.