I am here because I used imemories and nearly all the VHS tapes have this static tracking, unclear picture, and just overall making me shake my head and ask "the original quality wasn't really THAT bad was it?" Problem being I don't have a VHS player to look at things. I am so glad I found this video because I was like others and just accepted, oh well, that must be as good as it gets. THANK YOU!

Following you for a while now and I learn a lot from you and others! Thank you for that. As someone who owns a small home-based professional transfer business/studio I 100% agree with you regarding looking for store front businesses. As someone who does it out of a home office, I lose out on a ton of potential businesses. I get hundreds of location and direction hits on my google profile and you can tell I don’t get that client because of my home. It got to a point, where I removed my address and changed it to a service area where I pick up from clients instead, and if requested, I have them come to my home office if they wish. Hopefully next year, I’ll be able to move into a brick and mortar!

Do you want to avoid those kind of problems with clogged heads? Just use a old VCR crappy one and play the tape 1 or 2 times on that without capturing the video and then use your good machines to transfer the tape. Those 2 or 3 runs without capturing on a low end machine will clean the most of the tape and then you reduce the chance of clogged heads on those good machines.

I have a sony vhs vcr find out that I have to clean the heads every 2 tapes played.

Do you have a system of keeping track of everything? Looks to be 25 or more computers transferring videos at once and I'm sure one customer's videos are playing on multiple laptops to be as efficient as possible. How do you get a clients videos all back on one folder? Thanks in advance for answering!

I got a tape that becomes slowly grainy and blurry and picks back up, also with those speckles you showed. It wasn't like that on the previous film. It slows down every 10 seconds, sometimes it goes black as well. Any ideas?

Great video! 11:55 - I'm having the exact symptoms on tapes I'm capturing! No matter how much tracking adjustment I do, it doesn't seem to help. I don't have another player at this time, but would you suggest the tape cleaner as a first line of defense?

I had the tracking problem while converting and now I get a black “no signal” message on the screen. Any advice?

What do you do if your tapes play audio completely, but the video randomly drops to black screen for a couple seconds? I can’t figure it out be of course I only have one VCR. And I did try different VHS tapes.

Do you transfer tapes for other people? If so, how much do you charge? Thanks.

Do you only use Elgato capture cards? If so, any reason why and which one? My HD60S does not like anything from VHS. It jitters but other capture cards work fine.

I found out that when I press the pause button, the tracking problem some times get fix

Great info! I have an Elgato dongle but I needed to keep files to 30 minute chunks for a client who asked for that. So I am using OBS Studio to do the capturing which allows automatic file-splitting by size or time. A few setup tweaks needed but now working well. Do you run into file size problems with 4 hour tapes etc.?