Thread: VHS to DVD - over 3hours+ per tape?

Hi,

I need to convert 14 VHS tapes to DVD for a client. They are over 3 hours on each tape.

Are there DVDs that will hold 4 hours of footage?

What is the cheapest, more time effective and best quality way of converting them?

Only have FCP (no VCR or DVD recorder - apart from on the Mac).

Kind regards,

FCP?

Dual layer DVDs will hold 8.5 GB of data, although they cost 4x as much as a single layer.

You could squeeze 4 hours onto a DVD by using a higher-than-normal compression. That will cause some video degradation, but I wouldn't expect the original VHS recording to be top quality in the first place.

Warning - burning long DVDs is a hideously time consuming process. The compression of video to MPEG-2 is a very CPU taxing process even for high end hardware.