Hints: Video Tapes to MP4

Cut down on the clutter by getting your old video tapes transferred to MP4 files, which can be played back on many modern devices, including most modern Smart TVs, games consoles, PCs and Macs!

This method of transfer is becoming increasingly more common her at The Video Copy Company. It involves running the video tape through one of our industrial video players and into a computer, which will then convert the video file into a format that the general public can easily handle, such as MP4.

Before the conversion, we can edit the footage if you so wish, but we would need some clear instructions to make sure we don’t cut something out that we shouldn’t! We can also add titles and music to your video, maybe even brighten up dark bits too. We also make sure there is no “fuzzy/snowy video” at the start and end of your film though.

We can convert the video into other formats, such as MPEG2, AVI, Quicktime, to name but a few. It depends what you want to do with the video and how much storage space is available.

If you bring in HDV tapes, then we can either keep your videos in HD resolution or down-convert them to standard definition.

MP4 is the most common format used as it is compatible with most modern smart TVs, PCs, Macs, smartphones, tablets, video game consoles and so on.

We like to convert videos to a high quality MP4 file as this will be suitable for re-editing in the future and will look great on high quality TVs. For standard definition, we usually convert videos at a maximum of 14mbs – which is much higher than DVD quality. For high definition, we usually convert videos at 25mbs – which is higher than AVCHD camcorders and similar to some Blu-ray recordings. For HD, we can convert to u

p to 50mbs but this can take up an awful lot of storage space.

Once your videos are converted, they can then be copied to a USB device like a pen or an external hard drive, depending on how much footage you have. If you don’t have much footage, it might be possible to copy the files to a DVD, which can be the cheaper option.

When deciding how much storage space is required, one hour of standard definition footage takes up roughly 6GB of space, whereas one hour of high definition footage tapes up around 9GB of space using the quality settings mentioned above.

We always advise our customers to check that their equipment can support the playback of digital video files from their chosen USB device. Some equipment may require the USB device be formatted in a certain way (for example PCs can support NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT, whereas a Mac would need large files copying to an exFAT device).

Some smart TVs will only support USB devices up to a certain size, and if you plug in a larger device than what is officially supported, it may simply not be accessible, it might not show anything stored over and beyond its limit, or it may cause other problems.