How much for Analogue to Digital transfers?

[EDV]

We all know software has come a long way since the VHS days. Practically anyone with AVIs can freely produce DVDs or quicktime MOV files for internet delivery.
BUT... you still need to do the Analogue to Digital transfer... which involves hardware based capture. Even though this process is simple, is extremely time consuming, ie. a 3 hour VHS tape capture will take 3 hours! If you want to take specific sections out of that 3 hour tape, and compress those, you will need to do a "quick" cut and render, which may be another hour if you have several clips in mind. Finally, you need to compress the clips to quicktime MOV files, H264 or DVDs, which again may be another hour.
The pro-software and hardware involved is not cheap, so what's a fair price to charge for this service? Are people actually willing to pay $100 for a VHS transfer? Are post production pros willing to spend a whole morning doing something for $30?

thanks in advance,

EDV

 

[Demistate]

It's a difficult market to be in. Most VHS tapes need a lot of cleaning up to be acceptable quailty for broadcast. That means writing a good avisynth script and using some good de-noising plugins.

Getting it onto DVD is easy, and people don't see much value in that. I would attack it from the angle of "digital restoration" You'll be able to clean up older analog tapes for digital broadcast/archive. Businesses want to pay for that. Most people don't want to transfer their wedding tapes, or old HI-8 home video recordings for more than 20$ a pop.

Also there are sites out there that do this automated for $9.99. It seems like you might want to go this route instead of buying hardware to complete the chain and then charge a surcharge to your customers.

http://www.imemories.com/microsite/transfer/vhs/?_kk=VHS%20to%20DVD&_kt=13a175b8-8f60-445a-beef-800211cf731f&gclid=CJeIv9n0_6QCFYdc2godiDd8Bw

 

[JeganRX]

Demistate pretty much said it all. I worked in a dupe house for a bit and the refusal of many customers (regular consumers, not pros) to pay exorbitant fees for simple tape duplications or transfers was more than understandable. I *thankfully* wasn't directly in the dupe room, but I often heard or dealt with the business end of it.

That's the thing about dupes and transfers though: you're ONLY selling time, not really service or quality. Let's face it, for most people, dupes are a simple procedure (and they are, for us), so additional hardware processing - that most consumers and even many professionals don't have access to - such as PAL conversions, restoration, some editing, etc, is a much better way to market the service.