Video Transfer – If you plan on watching your old holiday home movies this holiday season, consider having them professionally transferred to a DVD to make sure that they are still around for years to come.
VHS tapes, like the ones your home movies are on, degrade from both use and time. This means that eventually, the VHS tapes may lose significant amounts of their initial quality or become completely unwatchable all together.
If you have children, you may have found that when they were little they wore out their favourite VHS movies and these movies had to be replaced. Back when VHS was the most common video format, it was easy to find a replacement for these videos at a low cost. But the wear and tear your favourite holiday home movies are experiencing can’t be fixed – these are irreplaceable.
While watching the tapes can cause them to degrade, the time your VHS tapes spend on the shelf not being used can also cause them to degrade. The average VHS tape may have a shelf life of anywhere from 10-20 years, while the tapes’ degradation can actually become noticeable after only five years.
The VHS tape can only become worse over time, due to a number of different things like regular use and how they are stored. They can also become dry or overheat, causing them to become brittle or decompose.
While there are combination DVD-VHS player units still being made today, a homeowner can save space and need much less bulky video playing equipment when they make the switch over to DVD.
DVDs do not need to stored in a special way to retain their quality, and they are a permanent solution to protecting your home movie collection.