VHS to digital transfer issues

[Stwlegend]

Decided to stop ignoring the box of VHS tapes I have and get to transferring some of my home and sport stuff to digital.  I am using Elgato and you just let the tape run in the VHS player and play on your desktop and forget about it until its done.  It's nice but I seem to be getting audio out of sync by a couple seconds.  Went through their FAQ and asked around and not much help.

Anyone else do any VHS transferring and have success with Elgato or a different program that isn't too complicated?

[daniel_v]

@adam_777, u have any info on this subject? 

I've never used Elgato- or even done VHS to digital transfers- but with regards to the video/audio being out of sync, if u can't find any other solutions there are other programs you can use. I had a similar problem with the one I used to record the interviews I did with Ian and John this past July. It's called "Debut". After the interviews were done I would play them back and the audio/video would be out of sync. As such, when I would upload them into VideoPad to do the editing I would just separate the audio/video tracks and then move one or the other backwards or forwards so they could be placed back in sync. Admittedly with the second interview the audio was still slightly out of place, but that had more to do with the extra clips I spliced in during the interview moving the video and audio out of place again after I had originally fixed it. For your problem, if all else fails, you could download VP, upload your converted material from Elgato into it and then fix the sync issue from there. 

https://www.nchsoftware.com/videopad/download-now.html

Keep in mind though VP is really only good for short projects (like 20-30 minutes) because the export time from the program once you're done editing can be rather frustrating. 

Edited September 18, 2020 by daniel_v

[adam_777]

I used to do transfers through a fire wire but would frequently have issues like Steve is having.  As Daniel said it can be fixed after the fact without too much trouble by just adjusting the audio track, usually if you can sync it up in one place it will sync up everywhere, of course if there are multiple glitches that kind of process quickly becomes a nightmare.  I always found feeding and capturing directly on a computer to introduce too many issues in the chain, so I went with a more old school setup.  I actually run a VHS player through a dvd recorder and just record the feed directly onto a DVD.  I then rip the DVD to the computer.  It adds an extra step but I've never had sync issues doing it that way and I've been pretty happy with that setup.  

[Stwlegend]

Thanks guys. I'm gonna try Debut and Video Pad on a small section of the tape first. They are of course unfortunately all 4 to 6 hour tapes so I'll see how easy it is on a section of it.  It goes in and out of sync, which I just don't understand. Not even when it switches to something else that was taped, seems like from the same session it was recorded it turns up out of sync.  I have a decently new PC with 12GB RAM so was hoping it wasn't the PC, but maybe that is too much for it.  The VHS to DVD to PC rip is a good idea if I can't get the above to work. That is manageable too. Thanks.

[Stwlegend]

I tried Debut and I think there was more research I could have done in there to resolve, thanks for the suggestion, but I ended up going from VHS to DVD to PC rip due to the length of each segment on the tapes and still running into the syncing issue.  Its more of a pain to add the DVD step but I'm at least getting the results now I wanted as far as syncing.  Had to stop though because I was getting tracking issues.  If I watched the master tape a second time, some of the tracking wasn't messing up, so would have to record all over.  WTF.  Taking a break to build back up my tolerance. I regret not jumping on this stuff years ago before the tapes started deteriorating....