by elviscaprice » Thu May 05, 2011 1:29 pm
Yaht, I hear ya. My first question is, What are your wants?
You may have some interesting videos that I would like, but for me it's as much about quality as quantity. This opens up another whole can of worms, transfer quality, remaster, replacing the sound track on the video. I've spent the last 8 years digitizing and editing so that I can play quality sounding vids from my labtop to any television/stereo, wherever I'm at in the world.
It's more about you and your needs. I have the setup and knowledge to do lossless digital transfers fairly quick, but it's not exactly cheap in cost. Hard drives being the biggest cost and finding a quality umatic player may not be so easy. But once I have it rolling it could go quick. That's actually the easy part. The hard part and painstackingly part is the actual editing/masking/labeling. But at least once the lossless transfers are complete, you can take your leasure time in performing the editing/masking/labeling. I suspect there may be a market in the selling of the lossless transfers to other parties? I wouldn't know what the copyright implications would be but you could always just trade out.
I've just come to the conclusion it's probably better to do something now than wait till my death bed. To hoard and die with the collection does me no good, especially since I couldn't even enjoy viewing the collection at will. If you don't have the time to do the transfer work then your going to need to trust another party to do it for you. I guess the next question would be what do you expect or want out of it, and what would the other party want or expect out of it. Or you could just wait it out, technology and software are making huge advances everyday. Could be an easier solution that you could accomplish yourself will become available (at least cheaper with hard drives getting larger and cheaper) but with analog to digital transfer it's still going to require to play and record at the analog speed. It could be that it becomes impossible with no solution the longer you wait, degragation of material, analog equipement impossible to find in working order.
Myself, I could probably do a quick transfer of your material to hard drives and then over time painstakingly do the editing in Adobe Premeir CS5. But I was planning on heading back out of the country for a year here and would have to complete the transfers here in the U.S, soon. In fact I still have enough material to edit for the next 2 years/ vhs, laserdisc, dvd, lol. But I'm always looking for better quality material.
Elvis
P.S. I got a find a better hobby than this in retirement.