And so you know, it will also attack SD memory cards. Thus, I had to make file transfers today using old 3.5” floppies. I was burning DVDs from VHS tapes, this time with an eye to the process rather than the results. I hate to report a boring day and I’m usually okay for not having them all that often. So I was planning ahead, and here are the details.Dave-O is thinking of starting a business. As the laughing dies down, here are some of the ideas he’s come up with. Renting waterjets to sailors in Miami. His theory is that they all want to go to Ft. Lauderdale (no reason given) and don’t want to take the freeway. Or scooter rental. Dave-O is a strange mixture of informed thinking and lack of experience. He understands the allure of a cash flow business and how the tax department monitors such operations. Yet, he still wants to open one.
That’s what got me looking at the tape transcribing business. How does that old saying go? It only takes equipment, software and brains. I have the equipment and the software. My normal price is $16 per tape, considerably less than others and that is part of my point. There are no others. The guy who used to burn disks on Young Circle was part of the many “character businesses” that bailed downtown when the rents skyrocketed over the past three years.
With the added incentive of friendly competition from Dave-O, I’m carefully computing my true costs and potential income. I say that if I did this tape business, I will make more money than Dave-O investing his $120,000 insurance money. Time and motion shows I can burn three tapes per hour at a leisurely pace, five tapes if I push it. My total outlay will be for the analog-to-digital converters, which are around $70 apiece and a bank of used VHS tape decks from the thrift stores.
Words of caution, folks. Yes, you can go down to Tiger dot com and buy all this stuff yourself. And you’ll be sorry. None of the software does what it claims without screwing around with it for endless months working out the bugs. I literally had to build my own computer to get Pinnacle Dazzle to work. When I finally got results it was with CPU speeds and RAM that were unheard of at the time the product was first sold. There are fifty things that can go wrong that require deep experience to work around. Anyone, even a rank amateur, can produce a short tape--provided nothing goes wrong. I allow for errors every step of the way.
For example, I had a series of DVD disks that would wait until the last moment and jam my computer with a “burn error” message. The last moment means a wasted two hours. It took days and fifteen wasted disks/thirty wasted hours to find the problem. Turns out that these Memorex disks could not be overburned (this is a technical term with a specialized meaning). The Pinnacle software would lock up if it was set to 120 minutes even if the total recording time was much less. So it was a problem at the Memorex factory solved by switching to TDK blanks.
My consumables amount to the blank disks and jewel cases. The disks I get in bulk for 26 cents each, the plastic cases are anything I can scrounge and I always seem to have a few hundred on hand. In a pinch, I use those stupid paper envelopes. As far as wear and tear on the machines, that is a judgment call as I do all the maintenance myself. However, let’s assume my cost of burning a 2-hour VHS tape to DVD is 75 cents.
I have a five tape minimum, which I’m doing right now. Sixteen times five is $80 at a cost of $3.75 at three tapes is a gross profit of $45.75 per hour or if five tapes it is $76.25 per hour. On paper. I can certainly tell you about which business would be easier to run. With a rental shop, you can’t exactly take a day off when you please and at any given time, look at the phenomenal amounts of money you have tied up at any moment, all of it at risk. My risk amounts to what? A bad hair day? Anyway, do the math and a full year of 40 hour weeks would produce a gross profit of $158,600. But if there was that much business, I’d have fifty computers in operation right now.
The other downside of a rental business is that the busy time is on season. The off season is this unbearably hot weather. Also, you can’t leave such a business alone for a week. You can’t just close up for a month whenever you feel like it.
[Author's note 2015-08-22: in the end, I decided against the video conversion business. The main reason is that to justify doing the work, you have to be running up to five tapes twice a day. This requires that you spend enough time and advertising to keep such a work flow happening and increases customer wait time up to a week. And they don't like waiting.]
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