Videotape capture to External Hard Drive:
Great for DIY Editing - $20 per hour, per tape

Play it Again Video Productions offers video capture to hard disk drive for customers who wish to edit tape based media on a personal computer. Our service includes capturing your videotape to a hard disk drive using a high quality file (usually AVI or Quicktime) which is compatible with most personal computers and editing applications. (Please note: we don’t offer troubleshooting support for your hardware or software. We do offer editing services at our lab for $125 per production hour.)

Questions to ask yourself:

• Does your editing software accept DV AVI files?

• Do you have a USB 2.0 (Hi-Speed) or FireWire 400 external hard drive? Please remember to bring all cables with you.

• How much free space is available on your drive? You need to free up at least 15 GB for every hour of video you want to capture.

• Did you back-up all data on your drive? We highly recommend that you do so. Play it Again is not responsible for any lost data.

Information to Consider:

We set our software to capture individual files that are shorter than 18 minutes (4 gigabytes) to comply with the FAT32 file system found on most external hard disk drives.* This will split a longer tape into multiple files. You should be able to re-assemble these files seamlessly in your editing software. If you want to capture files that are longer than 18 minutes each, then we will accept only a brand new, completely empty hard drive that we can re-format. We need to know which file system to use on your hard drive so that your re-formatted drive will function properly on your computer—NTFS for PC or HFS+ for MAC.

Here is what we need for your transfer:

1. An external FireWire (400) or USB 2.0 hard disk drive, preferably empty.
2. At least 13 gigabytes free space for every hour of video you wish to capture.
3. The power supply and all cables that came with the drive.

* Hard drive manufacturers use FAT32 because it works fully with PCs and MACs.