Need help tracking down a Betacam player

[artdutra04]

Did you ever visit local libraries and ask to see if they have a Betacam player? Sure, it may be sitting in their basement collecting dust for the past decade, but many libraries will not throw out their equipment - especially if they still have media in that recording format. (At my local library, they still have microfilm machines that are decades old. They still work fine, so they still keep them.)

Also, once you come across a Betamax player, then the hard work is done. All that comes next is the time consuming part: capturing the video to your computer. You can use free software like Virtual Dub to capture video to AVI format. You can then use Windows Movie Maker (which is free on Windows), Quicktime (which is free on a Mac), DivX Pro (which costs money), or any other video editing software to convert and encode the video for posting purposes online. I would suggust the DivX or h.264 codecs, as they usually have high quality and low file size. Don't ever use Windows Media Video (wmv) compression for any sort of official high-quality archives, as this is a very "lossy" video compression format.

Once you have all the videos finished, you should upload them to Google Video if you have permission (if your team does not own the copyrights to the media). That way the video is available to everyone, as well as downloadable in DivX4, iPod, PSP video formats.