VHS preservation and video editing

I have just saved a VHS tape from 1982 filmed at a rehearsal with a band I played in as a teenager. Some time ago I saved my mothers old DVD/VHS recorder, a Panasonic NV-VHD1, which for some reason was going to the recycling, but I figured it will have its use with me instead.

 Second stage was to get a video grabber and I borrowed one with USB from my son that has used it to capture retro game play, a Plexgear Moviesaver 220 VHS

After installing the Plexgear Moviesaver driver and application for Windows 7 and connecting all the cables it was no problem at all to insert the tape in the VHS cassette player and press play and then record in the application. It worked as expected and stored the VHS content as a MPEG-2 audio/video file at the same time as displaying it in the app so it was really easy to manage.

I've had preferred to do it on Linux but I found no luck for this USB device after some Googling around on the subject and I have stopped trying Linux when it lacks support and started to do the right things rather the things right always.

When reviewing the tapes I realized that I wanted to share some of it, but 30 minutes of rehearsal was too much for anyone to watch these days so I picked the shortest song recorded, it was 2 minutes roughly, perfect for the restless era of internet!

But even the two minutes were filled with recording errors such as out of focus passages and pointless pans. Especially when zooming in at the wrong guy during both solos in the song, how hard was it really?! :-p

I had to do something about it and downloaded Blender, a blender for digital content, and in fact the VHS content was digitized, so what was I waiting for? Said and done, I downloaded Blender on both my Windows-7 machine and my Ubuntu 14.04 Linux machine and they worked right off the bat, great out of the box experience!

Except for that I didn't have a clue how to edit video that was.... and Blender just scared the sh*t out of me when I first started it up with its about 2 zillions menus and options. The first I saw was a 3D editor... So I looked around at Youtube and found a couple of guys who thought they knew more than average about Blender.

After screening out the web cam generation, speed talkers and guys with voices I couldn't stand I finally  selected a guy in the thirties that had a long series of Blender video editor instructional videos, like 25-30 of 5 minutes each. I highly recommend Mikeycal Meyers for people who wants to know how to edit video with Blender

I spent some time looking at the fiorst 10-15 videos and then I said to myself that this was easy and dived in. After about 5 minutes I was totally lost, I remembered what I could do with Blender but hardly anything about how! So restart, I rigged my laptop with the instructable videos on the right of my big(er) secondary computer screen and fired up Blender there. Much better! After some fumbling I got the hang of it and after the initial 3-4 videos I knew enough to create my 2 minutes video:

This is a very basic example of what you can do with Blender, just cutting some tracks and arrange them in an arbitrary order. Blender let me copy video fragments from other parts of the VHS recording and put them on top of the poorly shot video during the song. The original video is never harmed! You simply press a button when you want produce the video. Then you are a producer!

If I have had a better memory or more time I would have made a rocket ship with what was tutored in the rest of the videos but that is for another day and another movie, this is good enough and a lot of fun! I am playing the drums btw!