I want to digitise my Vid8, Hi8, Digital8 & MiniDV tapes to HDD for storage in a lossless format. I have captured a few tapes through Premiere Elements but the resulting .avi seems to be lower quality than the original tape. I've been researching lossless codecs and found Toponoky and FastCodec but I don't understand how these work with a capture program. I don't want to edit these captures, I just want to keep them as the best possible file type for future burning to DVD, Blueray or whatever new disk/solid state medium comes along. I would like to create DVDs for everyday viewing and understand some resolution loss will have to be accepted. But I want the archived files to the same resolution as the original tapes. I know that all the above formats have varying degrees of compression/resolution. I just don't want the capture to lose even more resolution. Any suggestions?? (many thanks)

For your miniDV tapes, simply transfer them by firewire cable using Premiere Elements. This is just moving bits and bytes ... the avi files you end up with on your harddrive are identical in quality to what was on your tape. (This may be the case for Digital8 as well - I've never used it).

For the analog stuff ... huffyuv is a free lossless codec that produces file half the size of uncompressed. Dunno how feasible it is to capture full-resolution with it though - you would need RAID drives to do so. Others will hopefully have better suggestions.

Many thanks Graham

Most D8 camcorders will also play your analog 8mm tapes, so you can capture them that way. There is no better way of capturing your tapes.