Capturing footage of your home in order to monitor who comes and goes as well as keep intruders out may be helping you to create a very sizeable collection of VHS tapes. Though some home camera surveillance systems do use a VCR to record residential activity, it is possible to rid yourself of some of the clutter by converting VHS to DVD.
If you have reached the point of considering a VHS to DVD converter, chances are you have accumulated far too many tapes to store. In some cases, homeowners have already tried different ways of economizing film so that they have as few cassettes as possible.
High density VCRs allow for days of recorded video. If there is a motion detector installed with your system, the recording devices will not actually record unless there is a change on the video or someone moves and triggers the record function. However, if you are using an outdoor security camera, you may get a lot of footage without much action due to wind, animals, etc. If there is ever an unfortunate event like a robbery or other crime, though, the home owner and law enforcement officials will have to know for sure what time the event happened or look at a ton of footage to find surveillance of the crime.
Say these alternate measures of conserving space have not worked for you. You will probably be forced to convert VHS to DVD – or use a DVR or PC-based system to make sure your recordings can go directly to CD. The DVR makes a digital recording that can be burned to disc. If you decide to use a personal computer, you can pull from the video capture card and burn it to disc.
If you are stuck with simply upgrading your old cassettes, you may need a VHS to DVD recorder. With the average cost of these devices hovering at around $320, the DVD recorder is not the least expensive route, though it might be the easiest. The other option is to get a combination player and let your tape play while the CD records. The one disadvantage to this is the fact that you will get to do no editing. The mechanism is designed only to preserve what you have recorded.
Deciding to transfer VHS to DVD does not have to be a complicated or difficult process. You simply should decide how much money you wish to invest in the conversion, which process is the best for your timeframe and how long you are willing to wait for the process to complete. Then you will just need to decide how to label and store your new discs.