Comments

Former user wrote on 3/7/2008, 12:06 PM
Turn auto tracking off and manually track it. Older tapes generally do not work well with Auto tracking on.

Dave T2
dfred wrote on 3/7/2008, 12:10 PM
If you read any of my other posts, you'll see I am no expert but I'll give you a tip that may help.

Someone suggested answered one of my many posts and suggested that I take my VHS tapes and copy them onto a DV tape using the camcorder. Then use the DV tape and load that into my computer. Unfortunately, my camcorder does not have that capability.

Some of my VHS tapes would show "tracking" when the tapes first started. I chose to load the VHS tapes anyway. I figure even if they are old it's better to have them saved to your computer than to lose them if the tapes become damaged. I have a cousin in his upper 70s. Many years ago he decided to take his old 8mm home movies and have them put onto VHS tapes. When he got his movies out he discovered that many of them were disintegrating.

In recent weeks I've begun a video project for my child's graduation - video clips of his life. My internal hard drive is not large enough to hold all the video (about 100 hours) so I purchased an external hard drive. Although you did not ask about this, if you don't have an external hard drive or some other way to back up your video, consider getting some sort of back up. I also make an extra DVD and send it to someone out of state. In the event of fire or other natural disaster, at least I'll still have my video and pictures.

Good luck. Hopefully others will post or you may post some updates that we can all learn from.

dfred
TGS wrote on 3/7/2008, 2:27 PM
Don't know what you're using to convert from analog to digital. A Time Base Corrector will help if the top or bottom edges are wiggling, especially on tapes recorded at the slowest speed - SLP or EP
Most regular A/D converters that don't have this (TBC), tend to drop a lot of frames, not only at rough areas, but also anyplace on the tape where a new recording starts The TBC will keep this from happening except on a really worn tape.
johnmeyer wrote on 3/7/2008, 7:21 PM
It is VERY important to note what speed the tapes are recorded.

For SP, not much you can do.

For EP, you will find that some decks have a "video correction" circuit (my JVC has this, and I assume Philips does as well). This is designed to compensate for the degradation I think you may be describing, but only on EP (6 hour) recordings.

Now for LP (4 hour), you have a whole other set of problems. This speed was common on VCRs in the 1980s, but disappeared early in the 1990s. Most modern VCRs will play these, but tracking can be a big issue (and forget about any freeze frame or smooth fast motion because modern VCRs don't have the extra heads required to do this in LP mode).

Manual tracking is probably what you'll have to do, but I don't think most cheap VCRs have any way to turn off the auto-tracking.