The Problem
You have one or more VHS or 8mm videotapes someone shot with a camcorder. Selected scenes need to be edited into a program and duplicated for distribution. You can't do this yourself because you don't know how and don't have the equipment.

You can't give the job to someone else because you have no way to tell him or her what parts of the video you want to use. The counter on most VCRs is just an index number, which is completely different on each machine. Even the better VCRs, which have hour, minutes, and seconds, lack accuracy and lose count if the cassette is removed from the VCR.

You could take the job to a production company and sit with the editor, pointing out the footage you want to use and making all your decisions on the spot. Because of the time and equipment involved, costs add up quickly, killing a low budget project. If you could provide the editor with a list that positively identifies the scenes you want, it would save an incredible amount of time and money. Kern Video Productions has an inexpensive tool for you- window dubs.

Window Dubs
Professional videotape formats have a feature called time code. Time codes assigns an hour, minute, second, and frame number to every single frame of video. It's recorded on the tape so it normally doesn't appear in the picture but is easily read by the VCR and the editing computer it's connected to. VHS tapes cannot have time code added, so we copy them to DVCPRO, a professional digital videotape format with time code. At the same time we make the digital master tape, an additional VHS copy is created which has the time code visible at the bottom of the picture. This is called a window dub, as the time code appears in a window at the bottom of the screen. In addition, each reel is given a unique name to prevent confusion about which reel contains the scene.

When this process is complete, you get your original tape back, along with the window dub copy. Kern Video Productions keeps the master tape for use in the rest of the project.