[NOISE] If that was me, and all of that footage was stashed away, and they were on these tapes, and I kept putting off digitizing them, I knew I wanted to do it, and I finally did it.
I'm going to show you how I did it.
[MUSIC].
When I was in high school, I had this camcorder this sharp view cam.
It took these high eight cassette tapes and then when I moved away I brought this camcorder with me I brought the tapes, and then I just put it in a closet.
I just recently moved in, I was going through my closet, and of course I find these tapes and I'm like, you know what?
You just need to do it.
You just need to do it.
[MUSIC]
Before even doing any research I knew that I needed a breakout cable and then another cable that was a via USB There's a ton of hardware and you're not really sure which one to buy.
Some are really expensive.
Some are super cheap.
You obviously don't wanna pay a ton of money.
That was always the excuse that prevented me from actually buying stuff.
I was just worried I would purchase the wrong thing.
[MUSIC]
Another easy option is just sending all of these tapes into a video digitizing service.
There's a ton of them online roughly they'll charge about 20 bucks per tape.
Also if you send in more tapes and Sometimes you get a discount if you just don't want to deal with having to find the right cables.
Maybe you don't even have a camcorder and this is your only option.
So there's definitely services that will do that for you.
[MUSIC]
The highest rated video converter that I found was the Elgato video converter.
I couldn't find it on B&H, Amazon, eBay, it totally depends on what the sellers willing to price it as.
I couldn't find that for less than Then $100.
I spoke to the BNH guy and he suggested the Roxy of video capture USB.
This is about 50 bucks on b&h's website, I think there's a handful of other places that you can get this.
This does come with a disc, but also if you go on Roxy's website, you can download the dmg file which is what I did because I don't have a disk drive.
[MUSIC]
Whoa, what?
I need to tweak my back.
Let's read these directions and by read I mean like skim over and Not really read at all.
Okay, yeah, that's good.
Hopefully this goes into the sharp cam.
Let's see.
Does that fit in?
Yes, it does.
[MUSIC]
Yellow, red, white.
[MUSIC]
I mean pretty good shape so far.
I mean, I haven't even started so I don't even know what shape installed please.
[MUSIC]
I have my camera ready to play tape.
Let's open up that software and see what happens.
[MUSIC]
Come on, come on, come on.
[MUSIC]
It's actually okay.
Take play.
My God it's working.
[MUSIC]
Once you're recording, you just let it run and whenever you're done, you hit stop, and then it'll let you export your file and it's saved on your computer.
And it's done.
Now with the actual video footage, I didn't have any problems with the video quality standard definition so I wasn't expecting to tokenizing But it was fine.
[MUSIC]
I still play that song.
No, I don't even know the name of the song or maybe even the composer know.
So the combination of hardware and physical media that I used Obviously it worked for me but it might not work for you.
You might have to do a little bit of research to see if the same USB converter I used will work with your camcorder.
So that pretty much sums up this overwhelming task of trying to digitize these videos Definitely made it out to be way worse than it was.
And once you actually do it, it's pretty simple.
You just have to do it.
[MUSIC]
I said that once I was done doing all this, I was going to get rid of the tapes.
But I realized now that I'm too sentimental, I'm probably just going to put this Back in my closet, and it'll probably be there on a shelf for the next 20 years.
[MUSIC]
