Capturing video from old Hi 8 tapes

[Alan Henderson]

I went through all this last year.

Not all Sony Digital8 camcorders can read a Hi8.

Get the Sony TRV120.

It was the cheapest I could fine.

Sony.com has a list of which camcorders are compatible.

Got mine off of craigslist.com.

I went from the Digital8 -> MiniDV -> then to DVD.

alan

[Charles Papert]

I'm about to go through this with a zillion hours of Hi-8, 8mm, SVHS and VHS. My plan is to dub to DVCAM for archival purposes (I'm going to use the large Panasonic AMQ 3 hr tapes which will deliver 2 hours of DVCAM) and also capture onto hard drives to edit down selects on FCP.

I'm concerned about timing issues however--when I hit breaks in the control track on the original tapes, will that cause a time code or sync break on the DVCAM which will slow down the capture process. I've had trouble with this before.

I'm thinking that the best way may be to black all of the DVCAM tapes first, then dub the footage onto them via a video/audio insert which will preserve the control track and timecode. Not sure if this will still satisfy FCP and keep it from getting thrown by bad sync/control track breaks in the original stuff. I'm going to test it shortly but wondering if anyone else has gone through this and has suggestions. I think the only way I can make it through the ingest process is if I can capture the complete reels without having to supervise--it will be too much effort otherwise.

[Mauritius Seeger]

Originally Posted by Dearl Golden

Take a look at these from Canopus.....

http://www.canopus.com/products/ADVC110/index.php

http://www.canopus.com/products/ADVC300/index.php

i am just going to add my two cents to an already confused thread:

in my experience all the USB capture devices and low cost consumer PCI capture cards out there will end up giving you a huge headache - if you can get them to work at all. typical issues are: drivers flakey, require special software for capture that is written by a 5 year old, won't capture full res or full frame rate or both. captures in weird proprietary codec or captures with massive compression artefacts. so in conclusion stay well clear of these 'solutions'.

what i would recommend is the capture boxes mention above and also the ADVC55. or even better a cheap DV camcorder with video input and digital pass through. the latter is probably your best bet. i found that the canopus boxes drop frames when digitising poor quality video (old video 8) - the ADVC300 excluded since it has a time based corrector (but i haven't tried it)

[Allen Plowman]

I use a trv340, it is d8, reads hi8, firewire connection, and passthrough.

[Marty Mankins]

I am ready to start my Hi8 to DV project here this year and all of the suggestions were good.

I am going to be using an older Hi8 camcorder to get all of this off, basically just take it into iMovie as raw footage then go back and do the editing at another time.

I purchased from eBay a device from Pinnacle called MovieBox DV, which has both firewire in/out and analog (RCA and S-Video jacks) in/out.

I've not used it yet, but it appears to be pretty simply to plug and play.

If the older Hi8 camcorder doesn't produce the results I want, I may end up getting a used Hi8 deck or getting a D8 with firewire port and importing the analog footage via that digital connection.

Either way, I'm trying to make this as painless as possible. Some of the Hi8 tapes are almost 17 years old and I know the life of them, how they have been stored and other factors will be reduced.

[Alessandro Machi]

Originally Posted by Richard Alvarez

Alessandro
The plextor box is simply a transcoder, which takes analogue or digital feeds and transcodes them to either Mpeg1, 2 or DivX files. It seems to be aimed at Mac owners. There are similar devices for PCs. It is 'rare' only in that it appears to be specifically FOR the Mac platform.

Note, it does not say it 'records it' to your MAC. It says it sends it to your Mac. You will still need some way to RECORD on the Mac. iMovie at the very least... some sort of NLE/Capture program. Though I suspect they may include a rudimentary capture program with the box.

Then you must send the signal, BACK out to your DVD recorder. (Or burner if your computer is so equiped)

It ends up as a video file on the mac, however it seems to be stuck as an "eyetv file" and when I change it to mpeg it transcodes again and that second transcoding is a killer.

Although I do agree that as soon as someone turns their video into an mpeg file it will never be anywhere near as good looking as the original video.

[Alessandro Machi]

Originally Posted by Marty Mankins

I am ready to start my Hi8 to DV project here this year and all of the suggestions were good.

I am going to be using an older Hi8 camcorder to get all of this off, basically just take it into iMovie as raw footage then go back and do the editing at another time.

I purchased from eBay a device from Pinnacle called MovieBox DV, which has both firewire in/out and analog (RCA and S-Video jacks) in/out.

I've not used it yet, but it appears to be pretty simply to plug and play.

If the older Hi8 camcorder doesn't produce the results I want, I may end up getting a used Hi8 deck or getting a D8 with firewire port and importing the analog footage via that digital connection.

Either way, I'm trying to make this as painless as possible. Some of the Hi8 tapes are almost 17 years old and I know the life of them, how they have been stored and other factors will be reduced.

I discovered that my camcorder would get head clogs from certain older Hi-tapes. The camcorder still works fine to this day but I stopped using it as a player for capture and instead acquired a digital 8 clam shell.

[Marty Mankins]

Originally Posted by Alessandro Machi

I discovered that my camcorder would get head clogs from certain older Hi-tapes. The camcorder still works fine to this day but I stopped using it as a player for capture and instead acquired a digital 8 clam shell.

I ran into that back when I used it. Had a couple of decks (the EVS-3000 worked best) that I used for playback.

[Pedanes Bol]

Originally Posted by Marty Mankins

I am ready to start my Hi8 to DV project here this year and all of the suggestions were good.

I am going to be using an older Hi8 camcorder to get all of this off, basically just take it into iMovie as raw footage then go back and do the editing at another time.
...

iMovie captures digital footage by converting it to Apple Intermediate Codec (not raw) which creates large files in the hard drive. One hour DV footage is approximately 12GB which turns into ~ 24GB when converted to AIC by iMovie. If you have many tapes to convert, storing them as iMovie files will fill your hard drive very quickly. In that case, it might be better to record the digitized footage on miniDV tapes (or on Digital8 tapes) for storage rather than capturing into iMovie.

P.

[David Sholle]

Originally Posted by Pedanes Bol

iMovie captures digital footage by converting it to Apple Intermediate Codec (not raw) which creates large files in the hard drive. One hour DV footage is approximately 12GB which turns into ~ 24GB when converted to AIC by iMovie. If you have many tapes to convert, storing them as iMovie files will fill your hard drive very quickly. In that case, it might be better to record the digitized footage on miniDV tapes (or on Digital8 tapes) for storage rather than capturing into iMovie.

P.

Pedanes, I think you are confusing HDV capture, which iMovie does convert to AIC, with simple DV capture which is essentially a straight file transfer, with no increase in file size. (I am using iMovie HD 6.0.3.) For the purpose of transferring Hi8 tapes to computer files, there would be no reason to use HDV, as DV would do the job just fine.

I am in a similar situation. My old Hi8 tapes aren't that important, but I did want to make some sort of backup. What I did was to use a stand-alone Panasonic DVD recorder, and record the Hi8 tapes to quality DVD-R's at the XP speed (1 hour per DVD). This isn't perfect, and for some of the footage that I don't really want to lose, I'll record that footage to hard disk via iMovie and DV.

For my extensive miniDV tape collection, I am currently in the process of copying the tapes with two backups. I record them to a DVD-R using a stand-alone DVD recorder, and simultaneously I ingest them onto a hard disk via iMovie. Since hard disks are becoming so inexpensive, I may do an additional backup of the files from one hard disk to another.

For my current HDV work, I am immediately transferring all of the HDV footage to hard disk via AIC and iMovie. I of course will also keep the tapes, as I never re-use tapes.

[Pedanes Bol]

David Sholle, you are right. I thought that iMovie converts DV files to AIC as well, but now I looked at one of my iMovie package contents and as you said, the footage is stored there as DV files.

Sorry for my mistake...

P.

[Bill Rankin]

I've found that sometimes the Hi8 tape may need to be played/captured using the same camcorder originally used. Sometimes the tape will not play back properly.

Just my two cents worth of experience.