Family Videos

About a month ago I was looking at what I would do for my mom for Christmas. One of her favorite movies is an old Cinderella. We have it on VHS, but I thought it would be great to get her the DVD. Well, the DVD is no longer made and would cost $100 to buy. Yikes! Matthew found a place that would transfer it to DVD. As I got looking at things, I found some software that I could buy to transfer VHS to DVD on my own. Then I had this great idea that I would transfer all my parents' family videos to DVDs for their Christmas present. Then I thought it would be great to do that for Matthew's parents as well.
I did not know what I was getting myself into!!! It turned into a HUGE project that I will be working on through this next year. It is a lot of work! My parents had about 10 VHS tapes, but they also had about 8 VHSC tapes. The VHSC tapes fit into a VHS for playback. My parents don't know where their VHS tape is, so they couldn't even watch those home videos! They only have 1 VCR player in the house, which doesn't make it very convenient to watch VHS tapes.
Matthew's family had about 18 VHS tapes and about 10 DV tapes. While I was working on this project, the last VCR in their house broke, so now they have tons of VHS tapes they can't even watch.
The first VHS tape transfer was the most difficult. I was learning how the software worked, the VCR I was using broke, the DVD wouldn't burn, etc. etc. It seemed like everything was working against me to keep me from completing the project. For 3 weeks it seemed like all I was doing was working on transfering VHS tapes.
I'm still not done with it, but all I can say is:

I AM SO GLAD I DID IT!!!!

It's totally been worth it! It's definitely been a lot of work and some days were really frustrating with it. It can be a long process, but on good days, you can have the computer do the work and come back later to make sure it's doing it's job. I was more excited for our parents to open their gifts from us than I was to open my gifts. I gave 8 DVDs to Rick and Jeannine, and I gave about 10 DVDs to my parents. It was so fun to see how excited Rick and Jeannine were to receive their home video DVDs. They saw me working on my parents and kept saying what a great gift it was. So they were ecstatic and surprised when they received their own home videos. My parents loved theirs as well. At first they thought I had someone else do it, but then they found out I had done all the work with them. My mom says she can't wait to watch the videos when we're over for Sunday dinners. They are so fun to watch! It is so nice having them on DVD. I set them up so there are chapters for every event, so you can skip to the events you want to see instead of having to fast forward to them. The funny thing I found out was my parents were going to have this done, and they were going to give us the DVDs for Christmas, but I beat them to the punch! Hee hee. We now have over 50 hours of home videos we can watch. My plan is to give copies to our siblings this year for their birthday presents. Perfect! So if you or you know of someone who wants their VHS transfered into DVDs, then I'll be happy to do it for them for a small fee. Matthew says I should make a business out of it....maybe I will.....

These are all the DVDs I did for my parentsThese are all the VHS and VHSC tapes I transferred. The other nice thing about these DVDs are they take up way less space than than the VHS tapes

These are all the VHS I've done for the Henages. I have yet to do their DV tapes though, that's still to come
Yipee for me!