Not Fade Away

Not Fade Away. It's a perfect title for a song about your videos.

Anyone who has looked at their collection of VHS tapes knows about what I call The Big Fade. That's when your videos go soft at first and then ultimately start to disappear altogether. Of course, some wont even get as far as even being able to insert them into a machine becase the tape in the cassette became brittle and not usable. Then of course, if it does go in and there is a signal, watch out for all the dropout, which is the tape heads sliding through a section of tape that has lost its information. Your VHS has faded away.

You can cry out in anguish, as in "No! Not fade away!"
You can try to give it a stern order, as in "Not fade away! I command you."

Or you can look at a videocassette transferred to disc and breathe a sigh of relief and say "Ahhh, not fade away."

Each of these statements is very possible and it depends what you do with the VHS's you have lying around. If you do nothing with them, you might as well kiss them goodbye. They will fade and become unwatchable. That's assuming of course that somebody or something hasn't damaged them to the point where you can no longer put them into a VHS machine.

You are far better served by transferring your collection of VHS cassettes to DVD. First off, they will look better. The natural improving quality of DV will make your tapes look better. Secondly, you will make them last for a half century or more and third, you will easily be able to import them into any video creation software and edit parts of it at your discretion.

In many cases, more than one person will want a copy of the DVD. Easily done. You can make several if you need to, including one for your safe deposit box. Plus, as video editing software gets easier and easier, you'll have no problem cutting and recutting the footage to meet a specific need.

It's hard to believe there was a generation, just before my own, where there was little in the way of recorded voices to match the visuals. I've looked at some of those people on films and realized I never heard them talk. I'm lucky in that my parents celebrated their 25th Anniversary at a party in their honor many years ago and we videotaped the daylights out of that event. So, at least I had a vhs of it to hear and see them. But it was the only copy so transferring it to DVD was critical. Now my kids can see and hear their grandparents speak.

The videotape contained in the videocassettes is remarkably fragile. It loses its integrity very fast. But you have a line of defense. Transfer it to DVD and don't worry about it any longer. The children of Baby Boomers have the digital age in their back pockets. It's the Boomers themselves who are stuck with old films, videos and photos. Step one in their revival is to put them onto DVDs.