How much would you charge to convert VHS tapes to DVD?

[Red Squirrel]

Someone has asked me to convert VHS tapes to DVD and is willing to pay me. What is a decent going rate for that? I'm thinking 5 bucks per tape. Does that sound reasonable? I'm even thinking 10 but is that too much? The person will be providing the DVDs.

 

[octopus41092]

I would think $10 each if they want just one or two. If you're doing lots of them though, like $5 each sounds reasonable.

 

[gigahertz20]

Someone has asked me to convert VHS tapes to DVD and is willing to pay me. What is a decent going rate for that? I'm thinking 5 bucks per tape. Does that sound reasonable? I'm even thinking 10 but is that too much? The person will be providing the DVDs.

It depends on how much you value your time, but if a friend/relative/coworker asked me to convert a bunch of VHS tapes to DVD I would probably charge $5 per tape or just estimate a price depending on how many VHS tapes they wanted me to copy.

 

[hclarkjr]

i would suggest also if these are older movies that you suggest walmart or some such place that sells them for about $5 on DVD

 

[Phynaz]

5 or 10 bucks?!?

Is that all your time is worth?

Pick up the phone book and call a commercial transfer service. You will quickly change your mind.

 

[bryanW1995]

is that african dollars or european dollars?

I'd charge 1 MEEELION dollars (with my pinkie in my mouth) if I were you.

 

[themisfit610]

Well.. if you're just doing a quick tape to disc transfer, with no special hardware - aka a DVD recorder / VHS combo deck etc... then sure $10 sounds fine. Be sure to add the cost of the tape.

If the people care about quality, they should probably have a commercial service handle a quality transfer, as there are many issues with VHS that need to be handled, like time base correction, luma / chroma separation etc... which consumer grade gear simply can't do a good job of.

Plus, good software based 2 pass MPEG-2 encoding always helps too

~MiSfit

 

[wwswimming]

Someone has asked me to convert VHS tapes to DVD and is willing to pay me. What is a decent going rate for that? I'm thinking 5 bucks per tape. Does that sound reasonable? I'm even thinking 10 but is that too much? The person will be providing the DVDs.

i was thinking $50, if you're set up to do it.

$10 is a very neighborly price. you're doing the person a favor.

 

[JSt0rm]

$150 a hour

 

[Modular]

Well.. if you're just doing a quick tape to disc transfer, with no special hardware - aka a DVD recorder / VHS combo deck etc... then sure $10 sounds fine. Be sure to add the cost of the tape.

If the people care about quality, they should probably have a commercial service handle a quality transfer, as there are many issues with VHS that need to be handled, like time base correction, luma / chroma separation etc... which consumer grade gear simply can't do a good job of.

Plus, good software based 2 pass MPEG-2 encoding always helps too

~MiSfit

I don't know...I used to do this with an older Mini-DV camcorder that I have. I would just link the video out into my Hauppauge PVR-150 and record it into mpeg-2, then rip a DVD of the recording. It's not that hard and doesn't take that much time. You just have to be attentive to change the tape and DVD's every so often. I'd do it for $5 a tape for sure.

 

[garritynet]

I guess it just depends on what you are going to do. If you are just going to run a VCR through your DVD recorder box then I would just do it for free if it was a friend and not at all for anyone else. Does not really take any time if you just do it like that. That way if the quality is not so great(if they expect the quality to magically improve due to the fact that it is now on dvd) or if they just don't like it they can't complain. If you don't just want to tell them "no" but you also don't want to do it for free, then maybe $3 per hour of footage would be a fair estimate for an easy job.

If you are going to do it through your computer, thats a bit more work. A big pain in the butt if you ask me, especially if you start making menus not to mention re-encoding the source for DVD. If you want to start running filters...... None of this is taking into consideration the learning curve required to understand how to restore VHS.

Here is a nice forum to read about it.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/forumdisplay.php/dvd-project-help-9.html?

If you are going to do all that then I would probably suggest just taking a single tape and working with that one. Offer to do it for free and that you will know how much to charge after you know how long it is going to take you.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Think I'll go with 10 bucks. The hardest part is getting the stupid software to work, it's very touchy and crashes a lot. I can set it on a 2:30 hour timer then just burn the whole mpeg to dvd directly. I won't be doing any special formatting to it. I have yet to find a video editing software that can handle a full movie without crashing. I would need a mac if I want to do anything fancy.

I was hoping to get USB working through virtualbox so I can do it in a VM on my server, but no go, so looks like I may have to do it on my PC which sucks as I can't use my PC during that time. That capture software is super touchy. If I look at it the wrong way, it craps out.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

I've used a couple of (simple) video editing DVD software and have been able to record whole discs without crashing. That's weird that yours does. The software I've used are Ulead Video Studio 8.0 SE and Nero Burning ROM 8 OEM DVD maker. Both work well enough to create videos I've recorded from my capture card, but I do prefer Ulead as it is quicker and has better support than Nero.

Ulead was free for me, in that it came with the TV tuner/capture card I bought.