Comment on What should I do with boxes of old photos?

• aramis87@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Back in the 80s, my uncle paid some company to convert the 8mm to VHS; they overlaid some music over the video, I didn't remember what. I borrowed the tape sometime around 2002 and converted it to DVD.

  Around the same time, my mom had a bunch of reel-to-reel and audio cassette recordings she asked me to convert to CD, which I did. One of the audio tapes was from a family reunion in the mid-70s, where they'd played the same home movies and everyone was discussing them. So I converted the tape and then synced the audio to the video; you can play either one the music or commentary track.

  There's one thing I meant to do back then that I didn't have the energy to deal with, which was to provide a transcription of the audio, so people would know who's voice was who's. Voice-to-text should make that fairly easy now. I think there's too much over-talking to do a decent set of labeled subtitles, but I might be able to swing something.

  Re: your VHS results: if it's not at the front of the tape when you start working on it, then fast-forward it to the end and then let it rewind; that'll give you a better tension on the tape. Depending on the tape, it's quality and it's condition, how it was stored (temperature/humidity and whether it was on it's end or on it's side), and when they thought it had been played last, I might try fast-forwarding and rewinding it anyway, as doing that would reset the tension and make sure that the tape wasn't sticking to itself when I was playing it and reducing the risk of the tape getting eaten. The trade-off was that doing that could pull some of the magnetized bits off the tape, increasing drop-outs. Whenever I started playing a tape, I was always recording the output, regardless of whether the video had started or the tracking was off, just in case the tape got eaten.

  If your tape does get eaten, you can try to iron out some of the wrinkles to get it to play through that section; or just rotate the spindles past the wrinkled bit and resume converting. If a tape gets eaten, I'd clean the heads on your vcr, just in case any debris got in there, and I'd clean it after any particularly dirty tapes (stored poorly, or lots of drop-outs) as well. (If it's a vcr from a thrift store or something, I'd clean it anyway, and make sure the that the first tapes I played were commercial tapes I didn't care about in case there were issues with it.)

  If the spindles on the tape get jammed, you can unshell the tape and spindles and re-shell them into a new case - I have some old VHS movies I keep on hand for just these situations.

  If you're using a standalone DVD recorder, given the option, use the RCA connections instead of coax for a better picture. If you're getting unstable brightness or color, try hooking up your cables to the front input instead of the rear inputs; sometimes those recorders pick up DRM-style signals on old tapes and interferes with the recording, except they assumed the front inputs would be used for camcorders and often put less DRM detection on those ports. If you still get unstable brightness or color and think that's wrong, see if you can find something called a video stabilizer or signal enhancer - that's what the copyright busters used to be called, and they also helped sharpen the image a bit too.

  If you're having issues with tracking, there are vcrs that let you do manual tracking adjustments, and you might want to see if you can find one. Many of my old Sony vcrs had that ability, and I really liked that. My old Sony vcrs also had the ability to move back and forward frame by frame, which was also nice: I could start the tape, get the tracking nice and settled, then back up to the first frame of the recording and start converting from there, thus avoiding the whole "tracking" notice on the screen without missing any of the recording.

  I dunno, I'm kinda babbling, sorry. Are there specific issues you were having with your tapes, or just "this was a cheap tape recorded over multiple times, the recording I want to save was made at EP, it was stored on its side on a hot and humid environment and I'm lucky I managed to get anything off it"?

  source