Transfer U-Matic Tapes

U-Matic Video

The U-Matic video tape format is a broadcast quality tape which was first developed by Sony in 1969. The U-Matic was one of the first formats in which the tape was housed inside a cassette. Most formats of the time involved open tape which was spun onto a reel, and then played in a machine that looked similar to a reel to reel audio recorder. The videotape was ¾ inches (1.9 cm) wide, so the format is often known as 'three-quarter-inch' or simply 'three-quarter', comparing to other open reel videotape formats of the same vintage, such as 1" type C videotape and 2" quadruplex videotape. The name U-Matic comes from the way the tape path looks once it's insered into the machine, which resembles the letter U. Betamax also utilized this U loading method. Like with Betacam tapes, U-Matic also came in a smaller format tape, called the U-Matic S. This more compact version was used in situations where a larger formatted tape is not practical.

Combining Multiple Tapes to DVD

When bringing us multiple tapes, you also have the option of combining your U-Matic tapes onto one or multiple DVDs, at no extra cost. Combining several shorter tapes onto one DVD will save you the hassle of having several short-duration DVDs laying around. This can also be useful for combining multiple tapes of similar subject manner, such as transferring all of your children's birthday party videos onto a birthday DVD compilation. The only limitation is that our 100-year archival DVDs will hold up to 2 hours of video, so each combined video must have an average run time of one hour or less.

DVD Compatibility

At DVD Your Memories, we use only the highest quality 100-year archival DVDs for transferring your precious U-Matic to DVD. We are so confident that our video to DVDs will work for you that we offer compatibility guarantee on all of our video to DVD transfers! Never again worry about your old DVD player, or a disc read error! All of our discs are guaranteed to work for your television and your home DVD player.

"Tape-Smart" Pricing Structure

Notice that the pricing structure gives you an extra four minutes on one hour and two hour U-Matic to DVD transfers. This has been changed because most U-Matic tapes run a few minutes past the one hour or two hour marks.

Transferring to Hard Drive Option

Transferring your U-Matic tapes to an external hard drive is recommended if you are going to edit your footage. The file type is NTSC DV AVI, the most standard format across all video editing platforms. Hard drives can be PC or Mac formatted and the file format is AVI DV with each hour of video taking up 13 gigabytes.

If you are going to purchase a hard drive through DVD Your Memories, we will recommend a certain size based on the total length of your video transfer footage. If you are going to bring in a drive, please understand the space requirements and plan accordingly. Also we recommend bringing in a new drive, but if you would like to bring in a drive that has data on, we will ask that you sign a data-loss waiver. We've never lost data on a hard drive, but the possibility always exists.

Video Editing Services

With every order, we will crop out any blank footage found at the beginning and end your tapes. In addition, we will also ask if you'd like us to crop out any television footage if it appears at the end of your tape.

We can also provide additional basic editing services available to all of our video to DVD transfer services. Add an extra touch to your finished DVD by taking advantage of some simple basic edits. We have a few different options depending on the nature of the editing that needs to be performed.

Our basic editing services include small video edits such as pulling out a specific clip in your video, or removing commercials from a recorded TV program of 60 minutes or less. For most basic editing tasks, your video does not need to be transferred to hard drive prior to going to DVD. This is especially helpful if you have long running tapes with only a small section you'd like transferred. With basic editing you can crop out all of the unwanted material, which leaves you with only the clip you want on your final DVD.

For anything more advanced than our basic editing, it will fall under our hourly editing service. To take full advantage of your editing experience, we recommend sitting in with our in-house editor. Prior to editing, your video must first be transferred to hard drive.

Here are some common video editing projects people do:

• If you have several tapes with short clips on each, you can now combine all of the clips you need onto one DVD movie. Our editing service will allow you to pull any amount of footage from your tapes and consolidate them onto a DVD for easy viewing.
• Remove extensive commercials from your recorded television programs. Remove those annoying old commerical breaks from your video tapes, and watch your old programs seamlessly on your new DVD. This is great for special television specials such as sports entertainment, politics, and news footage.
• Combine your video tapes with other media such as film, photos and audio. We can actually take your video tapes and combine them with other types of media to give a much more professional look to your DVD.

Editing From DVDs?

Many customers ask us if they can edit the video footage if we make them DVD movies. The simple answer is no. The complete answer is yes, almost anything is possible if you are an advanced computer user, but for many reasons it is not advisable to do so. The main reason is that you would be working with highly compressed video.

If you transfer the data from the DVD to the computer for editing, the quality is not the same as that of the originally uncompressed video used to create the DVD. It also takes a lot of processing power to edit the compressed video, and although you can fix this problem by converting it to a less compressed video format (such as AVI), you will still see a quality loss. Also when you re-render that video that has previously been on a DVD it will recompress again and you will notice more than a little loss of detail.

• Betacam to DVD
• Betacam-sps to DVD
• Betamax to DVD
• Hi8, Digital8, 8mm Video to DVD
• Micromv to DVD
• MiniDV to DVD
• Mini DVD to DVD
• U-Matic to DVD
• VHS to DVD
• VHS-C to DVD