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Answers here for 8mm video capture
I should probably mention that I'm a network engineer with 10+ years of experience--I also work with audio/video equipment as a hobby. I am just now getting a chance to combine the two. I am no rookie by any stretch, especially with the PC side of things.
After three months of troubleshooting, cursing, and staying up late at night, I finally discovered the truth--converting video from analog 8mm (8mm, Hi8, Hi8XR) to the PC, and ultimately to DVD is much easier than it is made out to be. I went down the road of using external devices, one made by Adaptec and the other was a DCS-200 made by Dazzle. After several weeks of research, I discovered that hundreds of people were left stranded with this device because Pinnacle Systems purchased Dazzle and took over the DVC-80 and DVC-150, but not the other products. This left me with no support and a product that only captured sub-par quality and a software app (MovieStar) that couldn't produce more than 3 minutes of video w/o crashing on a very high-performance workstation with a fresh OS installed. Hundreds of people online reported the same symptoms. Circuit City was gracious enough to take the unit back after it was three months old.
After a little research this week, I determined that the best way to convert my old 8mm tapes to DVD might be to get a new Digital8 camcorder that could play the tapes. I was intrigued when I looked at the units that the newer models have USB2.0 outputs as well as FireWire. Working with Sony video equipment for the last 15 years or so, I bought a DCR-TRV350 camcorder. After several hours of tweaking and cursing at the quality, I determined that capturing the video using the USB2.0 port was also marginal quality and many frames were dropped. As I mentioned, there were plenty of system resources (P4-3.0GHz, 1GB RAM, 73GB 10,000rpm SCSI hard drive). My system did not yet have a FireWire port, so I picked up a card today along with an i-Link (Firewire) cable.
The difference was astounding. I was able to play ALL variations of my 8mm tapes and capture the video with Adobe Premiere at 720x480 DV resolution and then transfer it to DVD with minimal (if any) quality loss.
The bottom line here is that if you are wanting to transfer analog 8mm video, only use a capture card or external device if you DO NOT care about the quality. Pick up a Digital8 camcorder that is capable of playing analog 8mm tapes (not all of them do this) and use firewire to capture the video. The TRV350 I bought was just a little over $400--pennies when you consider the amount of time it took for me to come to this conclusion. My first capture with this method was a little less than two hours from a Hi8XR tape. It consumed about 25GB of disk space as an AVI -- converted to MPG for DVD it took about 1/3 of that much.
Other perks: (1) With the camcorder connected via firewire, the software controlled the camcorder functions, i.e. play, stop, rew, etc. (2) I can feed video into this camcorder and it will do a pass-through to the firewire and capture video at this resolution, so it totally replaces any capture device with MUCH better results as far as I'm concerned. It is also not proprietary technology like the Dazzle and many other capture devices are, so I can use it with a multitude of industry standard software packages. If I want to use the cheesy Windows MovieMaker for something quick, it comes right up and works great. If I want to use something powerful, it also fires right up with Adobe Premiere.
Hopefully, this will help those out there trying to do the same thing and keep them from getting misled by making the task more difficult than it is, which is what I did.
After three months of troubleshooting, cursing, and staying up late at night, I finally discovered the truth--converting video from analog 8mm (8mm, Hi8, Hi8XR) to the PC, and ultimately to DVD is much easier than it is made out to be. I went down the road of using external devices, one made by Adaptec and the other was a DCS-200 made by Dazzle. After several weeks of research, I discovered that hundreds of people were left stranded with this device because Pinnacle Systems purchased Dazzle and took over the DVC-80 and DVC-150, but not the other products. This left me with no support and a product that only captured sub-par quality and a software app (MovieStar) that couldn't produce more than 3 minutes of video w/o crashing on a very high-performance workstation with a fresh OS installed. Hundreds of people online reported the same symptoms. Circuit City was gracious enough to take the unit back after it was three months old.
After a little research this week, I determined that the best way to convert my old 8mm tapes to DVD might be to get a new Digital8 camcorder that could play the tapes. I was intrigued when I looked at the units that the newer models have USB2.0 outputs as well as FireWire. Working with Sony video equipment for the last 15 years or so, I bought a DCR-TRV350 camcorder. After several hours of tweaking and cursing at the quality, I determined that capturing the video using the USB2.0 port was also marginal quality and many frames were dropped. As I mentioned, there were plenty of system resources (P4-3.0GHz, 1GB RAM, 73GB 10,000rpm SCSI hard drive). My system did not yet have a FireWire port, so I picked up a card today along with an i-Link (Firewire) cable.
The difference was astounding. I was able to play ALL variations of my 8mm tapes and capture the video with Adobe Premiere at 720x480 DV resolution and then transfer it to DVD with minimal (if any) quality loss.
The bottom line here is that if you are wanting to transfer analog 8mm video, only use a capture card or external device if you DO NOT care about the quality. Pick up a Digital8 camcorder that is capable of playing analog 8mm tapes (not all of them do this) and use firewire to capture the video. The TRV350 I bought was just a little over $400--pennies when you consider the amount of time it took for me to come to this conclusion. My first capture with this method was a little less than two hours from a Hi8XR tape. It consumed about 25GB of disk space as an AVI -- converted to MPG for DVD it took about 1/3 of that much.
Other perks: (1) With the camcorder connected via firewire, the software controlled the camcorder functions, i.e. play, stop, rew, etc. (2) I can feed video into this camcorder and it will do a pass-through to the firewire and capture video at this resolution, so it totally replaces any capture device with MUCH better results as far as I'm concerned. It is also not proprietary technology like the Dazzle and many other capture devices are, so I can use it with a multitude of industry standard software packages. If I want to use the cheesy Windows MovieMaker for something quick, it comes right up and works great. If I want to use something powerful, it also fires right up with Adobe Premiere.
Hopefully, this will help those out there trying to do the same thing and keep them from getting misled by making the task more difficult than it is, which is what I did.
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