Converting VHS to digital: overview & storage (Part I)

This guide is where to start if you want to convert VHS to digital. Capturing analog video tapes — VHS, S-VHS, and the rest — sits at an awkward intersection. The tapes themselves are still everywhere; the equipment to play them back well isn’t, and what does exist is second-hand, ageing, and finite. Doing the digitisation well, to a standard that holds up in ten years, takes more thought than plugging a tape player into a cheap USB dongle and pressing record.

This is Part I of a four-part series on digitising analog video tapes. This page covers the overview and the storage side: how big the resulting files end up for each codec choice, what “lossless” actually means in this context, and a top-level map of the ten or so capture paths people actually use. Part II compares those paths in detail. Part III is the buying guide. Part IV covers preparation before the tape goes into the deck.

Foreword

Capturing analog video requires anything from a relatively large amount of storage to a very large amount of storage. It’s generally far more complicated than capturing audio because the technology is older and the buying options of acceptable quality are limited and shrinking. When you get it right, though, it can be genuinely rewarding — and you may find yourself looking for more tapes to capture just for the satisfaction of it.

Storage Requirements

Let’s say you have a VHS tape with one hour of home video recorded on it. The size you need to store the video in digital format will depend on a number of factors. The resolution and number of frames per seconds has a large impact, but luckily for you, these are going to fit into one of two standards for this kind of video source, which for purposes of archiving I will simplify as PAL 576i25 and NTSC 480i29.97 (the “i” meaning frames interlaced, so 50i and 59.94i terms are also common as they denote the fields being displayed on a TV etc).

Bear in mind that lossy video codecs store data based on what’s actually moving in the frame, so the content of the tape makes a big difference to the final size. A scene with people sitting still in a room will compress far smaller than a scene with a panning shot or a crowd in motion. For that reason, the file-size figures below are just rough examples; your real tapes may vary, even with the fixed-bitrate and lossless formats.

Capture quality options / consumed space for one hour of video for 576i25 PAL and 480i29.97 NTSC:

If you’re wondering, PAL is the technically superior format despite its slower frame rate. It has higher line resolution (576 lines vs 480), a higher chroma subcarrier frequency (which means better colour bandwidth), and a phase-alternating colour encoding that’s more tolerant of signal errors than NTSC’s.

Required video space, based on the format you want to store it in, is easy to calculate using an online calculator such as this one.

How to convert VHS to digital

As usual, there’s more than one way to do a task. As outlined in the audience types section on the about page, this guide is written for three kinds of reader — the Impatient, the Libran, and the Perfectionist — with different priorities and budgets. Before getting to the recommendation for each, it’s worth a top-level look at the broader landscape of possible solutions. There are more than three; the three I cover below are just the ones I’d actually pick out of the larger set.

Possible solutions for capturing video

You’ll find a lot of opinions about this topic online, and for some reason video capture brings out a lot of binary viewpoints that aren’t always fun to interact with. These views often forget that not everyone has the same requirements, not everyone needs the best quality, and not everyone who wants the best can afford it or even find the equipment.

There are people who will be happy with a basic Canopus FireWire capture device, and there are people who will only settle for the absolute best. Both are fine. That said, in my experience, most people who see side-by-side evidence of the cheaper devices’ flaws eventually move past the cheapest tier. (“Cheap” here means around $80–150 NZD, so already not that cheap.)

The list below outlines some of the many possible solutions for archiving analog video from sources like VHS — it’s meant to open your eyes to a few more options to consider, not to complicate your life.

* Be aware of the difference between PCI and PCIe — they’re not compatible with each other. Some sites that recommend PCI capture devices are recommending PCI rather than PCIe, and modern motherboards largely gave up PCI slots around 2015. Be careful that what you buy is compatible with what you have.

The options are many, but with the exception of options 1, 2, 6, 9 and 10, they all require hard-to-obtain and potentially expensive second-hand capture equipment. Unless you’re outsourcing the whole job (option 10), every option requires a VHS player. That’s almost always going to be a second-hand unit too, unless you have the kind of money to spring for a premium unopened NOS (New Old Stock) box somewhere — more on that in the buying guide.

A quick word on option 10. About 90% of the places you’ll find in your local street are using either option 1 or option 2. If you want to outsource the job to a third party, read Part II first, then go and ask the shop what their process is and what devices they use. If they know what a TBC is, what a hardware tap is, or what a frame sync device does (and claim to actually use them), you might get a good result. If not, you’re better off saving your money and buying the cheap device yourself — that’s almost certainly what they’re doing, and the quality of your own capture won’t be any worse.

Summary Equipment Needed

The following page intends to help you understand which of these methods is for you and why, followed by a buying guide in part III.

What’s next

Continue to Part II — Capture differences, which compares the ten capture paths side by side and works out which one fits each of the three audience types.