!9# Preparing to Transfer VHS to DVD - Testing and Defragmenting

If you have all your equipment and software installed, it is a good idea to test before you actually transfer VHS to DVD.

For most of us, making sure our VHS player is working properly is going to be our first task. So, finding a VHS tape that we can live without is important for testing to make sure our VHS player can handle the job without "eating" the tape. If you can see a beautiful picture with good sound, the test is conclusive. If the picture is grainy, get a cleaning cassette. You may have a hard time finding one.

Now that we know the VHS player is working properly. Let's turn our attention to the computer before we transfer VHS to DVD.

You should have 5 GB of free space before you capture analog video on your computer. Four gigabytes is the space needed to capture 2 hours worth of video of good quality. Windows needs at least 1 GB of free space to work properly. Hence the 5GB free space mentioned.

Now, you need to defragment your disk.

Do you know about disk "defragmenting"?

Here is a simple explanation. You install and download files on your hard disk. You sometimes erase or burn files and the do a little clean-up...Well after a while, your disk has little spots of free space. So when you download something, let's say a 500MB file. This file isn't written in a continuous 500MB file on your hard disk. As a matter of fact, your file is written in space available on the disk. 150MB here, 60MB there, etc. Your file is spread around your disk in many fragments. So when you load this file into memory, your hard disk works harder because it has to get all the fragments.

So, we need to defragment our disk to make sure there is no interruption from the disk looking for free space.

This is especially true for Windows machines. Fragmentation is not a problem for a Mac.

Now it is time to connect the VHS player to our capture device. Be it a USB device or a pci capture card. If you are lucky enough to have a S-video output on your VHS player, you should use it. The composite output is our second choice. You also need to connect the audio output of the VHS player to the sound card on your computer to capture the sound.

We are almost ready to capture analog video. You have to make sure that your software is working properly. In my case I use Ulead Video Studio. Make sure you do a test run of a 20-30 seconds.

Make sure everything is fine before capturing an hour of analog video. You are now ready to transfer VHS to DVD.