I've been working on this lately and am passing along my learning in the hope that it will help you.

I had a box full of home movies and another box of home VHS tapes. I had lost any way of playing the movies and I realized that the VHS tapes were deteriorating with time. Plus I had only the one copy of these and I wished to share them with my sons and siblings in DVD format.

I did not find a good and cost efficient way of DIY digitizing of my home movie film so I paid a local shop to do that. It was not cheap!

Once the film was digitized and on my hard drive, I used the software Adobe Premiere Elements (APE) to edit them and fix them up. You can find a version of this software on e-Bay at a reasonable price. The software comes with almost zero documentation, though, so I went to Amazon and got a (used) copy of Adobe Premiere Elements for Dummies to help me figure out how to use it.

Chances are, the Dummies book will not match your version of APE, but you'll be able to figure it out.

I used APE to edit the good stuff together and get rid of the wasted film. It also helped me brighten up some good stuff that was too dark. And, when you are done, the software helps you burn the edited version to a DVD.

For the VHS tapes, I bought the Honestech VHS to DVD Deluxe via e-Bay. This is a software and hardware bundle. The hardware connects your VHS player to a USB port on your computer. They also sell a regular version that has no hardware, but I needed the hardware.

I found the Honestech Deluxe great for capturing my VHS tapes on my hard drive, but terrible for doing any editing or cleaning up of the captured footage. The good news is that it is easy to move the captured stuff to APE where you can edit it,fix it and burn it.

It took me quite a bit of time to research and test out all of this. I hope this post will help you. If you go at it and have questions, just post them here.