Posted by nobody special on 12/20/06 20:23

For this kind of volume, unless you need it done really fast, your most
cost-efficient solution is to buy a playback deck and the realtime
recorder of your choice and burn these to 1-hour DVD-R in your own
place. If you lack the staff you can hire temps or local teens or
elederly or someone from a sheltered workshop to process the tapes into
disks. It is not the kind of job that requires an EE degree or 4 years
of college. You can't transfer umatic any faster than real-time anyway,
no matter what. The only way to go faster is to gang up multiple sets
of machines in parallell, and the costs for that are prohibitive beyond
two sets... Any solution that requires an intermediate step to hard
drive is never going to work fast enough to suit your volume. IMO.

My shop had a similar situation and that's what we have: a temp, a
deck, and a Panasonic DVD recorder buring to DVD-R at the highest
quality setting. Even though it's mpeg-2 it is still better than the
umatic already. He reloads the tapes and disks on the half-hour or
hour, labels and catalogs them, and does other office busy work in
between.

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