Video8 preservation & conversion help

[WorriedaboutHistory]

A couple of questions:

1) What would be the best way to preserve my Video8 home movies? Best place to store them etc so that they can last for a long time?

2) I've read some threads here saying DVDs don't last as long as VHS tapes as a storage medium...How is this possible? I thought DVDs were long long lasting?

3) Any tips on getting the highest quality possible conversion from Video8 to DVD or any other format?

4) A few years ago, we converted some of our Video8 tapes to DVDs at home using our video camera hooked into some sort of conversion machine. The recordings came out OK but I've noticed the video quality came back a little washed out and sort of faded, grainy. But these tapes aren't that old considering--Dating between 1990 and 1998. They had been transferred to VHS many years ago. Could it be because it has been transfered more than once that the colors have faded? Or could it have been because we were using our home movie camera? One day when we were having my girlfriend's Video8 tapes transferred, by a professional, he played them back for us on request BEFORE converting. They looked grainy and crappy and he said it was his camera lens or something which needed cleaning. He did this--cleaned the lens--and the film after conversion to DVD looked brand new. Could a dirty lens have contributed to the grainy washed out images seen below?

5) My girlfriend and I just got her Video8 movies converted for the first time ever by a professional guy. Her movies date from the same general period as mine--1992 to 1996--same format. Yet her films' colors came out very vivid, almost brand new looking. Is this because I used a professional or because hers had never been converted since they were filmed?

To illustrate the washed out color of the home movies I did at home some years back, here is two images taken at the same moment. The first image is from the DVD, the other is a (still) photograph taken with a regular picture camera of the same moment. Last is a screenshot from the DVD captured the same day.

[sanlyn]

The colors don't look "washed out". But they are far from "correct".

Here is one of many articles about VHS/Video8 archival storage: http://cool.conservation-us.org/byauth/wheeler/wheeler2.html . Google will have many similar links.

You asked about the "best way" to transfer these tapes. There are hundreds of threads in this forum about that, the equipment and software needed, and how to repair problems. I can tell you one of the worst ways: record Video 8 directly to DVD. The best way would be to use a good player, have a line-level TBC or tbc pass-thru device between the player and a suitable capture device, record the video to lossless huffyuv or Lagarith AVI on a computer, restore or correct the color and denoise the video, encode to DVD, then burn to disc.

[sanlyn]

The best way to make these corrections is to record your video to a computer, or ntransfer your DVD's to a PC and do the best you can with that format. These are levels/color corrections only. It's difficult to clean noise in a single still images, but you can see tape noise and compression artifacts here. The top image was more difficult. Each image also has several pixels of head-switching along the bottom border. That can be fixed, as well.


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[Cornucopia]

There are a couple things to think about here:
1. Preservation
2. Data Transfer/conversion (efficiency)
3. Data Migration

You want to be able to preserve your "original" as much as possible, because there often arise new methods to convert which are an improvement over older methods, so you want the option to go back to the originals for another attempt.
Most preservation tasks have to do with controlled environment storage and with remedial/maintenance work on the medium to keep it up to scratch for further opportunities.

Your data transfer/conversion needs are to evaluate "is this the best way to get from the original to a Current medium?" I believe I can say in your case that the answer is NO. If you can already see a difference, something wasn't done optimally.
For example, there are a number of methods of conversion where there is NO need for anything to pass through a lens (clean or not). Video8/Hi8 should use an analog->digital converter (digital8, or DV box, is very common and good quality, but not best, option here). Even for 8mm/Super8mm film, methods such as "contact print scanning" of the individual filmstrips, while very slow and painstaking, are much improved over direct-to-sensor telecine methods, which are themselves an improvement over "shooting a projection wall", and they (scanning) require NO camera/lens.

I would SERIOUSLY think about going to a good transfer house that understands all these issues (if they can't describe them as or more clearly and thoroughly as I have, they aren't good enough) and getting your transfers all redone the correct, current ways. The difference will probably be remarkable. However, they can't work magic on everything. If the preservation step hasn't been done, there already could be serious loss. Then you are stuck with the best of what's left.




Data Migration is about understanding the need for you to CONSTANTLY update your media. I'm talking FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE (it never stops, because technology never stops). If you want to see it still in 50 years there are a number of things you have to do:

1. Use a format(s) that is/are as UNIVERSAL in standards as possible
2. Make MULTIPLE COPIES (sometimes in different formats) and store them in multiple places
3. Make sure that the medium/media that you store it on will have a playback/transfer chain that is still available into the future

Even doing your best to follow these rules, you will come upon a time when one or more of those will fail you and you want to be prepared by (in advance) converting to newer and newer formats.

Example: VHS tapes
They may be your originals, but at some point it probably will be prohibitively expensive to find a usable machine with which to even play them on, much less transfer with (and you'd want one that was correctly calibrated, too). Don't convert it to a VCD and then later try to convert THAT to a DVD. Go back to the original, transfer it as losslessly as you can (and at as high a resolution as is practicable, in this case Full SD 601) and then use THAT as your intermediate master and convert that down the road to both newer consumer standards (DVD, BD) and to newer master/intermediate formats (e.g.: .MOV using Animation Codec -> .MKV using Lagarith codec).

Scott

edit: BTW, don't be fooled by the often quoted fallacy that "Digital is Forever" or that "Digital is Error-free". Digital gets errors as often as Analog, just in different ways.
With Analog, EVERY TIME it is played, transmitted, stored, etc to is LOSING a little bit, degradation is ALWAYS there, but it is gradual ("graceful")
Digital, OTOH, by nature of its binary coding, allows for ERROR CORRECTION. This means that for transmit, transfer or storage (or copying) AS LONG AS THE ERRORS AREN'T TOO BAD then the error correction feature should be able to "fix" the error and restore it back to its pristine original state. If the errors never get too bad, then you are good. But if they ever get too bad, then you are in trouble because then the loss is STRONG and NOTICEABLE (not "graceful"). So you always want to take care of that data migration before things get too bad.
Note: I didn't mention processing or "conversion", because in both analog and in digital, any time there is processing/conversion, there is at least some LOSS due to rounding errors (there's often other loss due to the kind of processing, but that varies and is a balancing act between various competing goals)
Also NOTE: Media that is encoded with LOSSY codecs don't hold up as well as lossless or uncompressed media when getting to the point of uncorrectable errors - watch out!

If you ever want to learn more about this, do a search on "media archiving best practices", "future-proofing media" and "data migration".