It started out so harmlessly! I just wanted to digitize my old home movies!

[ctakim]

So I consider myself a newbie, but one who is learning fast. It was such a simple idea, I thought. Earlier this year I decided I wanted to convert all my home movies to digital format to preserve them for posterity. My home video's from the early nineties were shot on a Sony Camcorder with an analog Video8 tapes. But the Sony TR Camcorder had died so I had to get a replacement camcorder off of eBay. No problem, plus by that time I had moved on to a Canon MiniDV camcorder that had analog to digital conversion capabilities. Oops, that camcorder was not working either, so I had to get a newer MiniDV camcorder, a Canon ZR950. But surprise! The newer MiniDV camcorders now lack A/D conversion capabilities! Time to invest in an A/D converter box, so after some research I got a Canopus ADVC110.

Hooked it all up to my iMac, fired up iMovie 09 and started playing my old Video8 analog tapes (some of which were in poor shape mangled by the first camcorder when it started to go bad!), and what's this? Why the jerkiness and frame dropouts? Plus it is not capturing whole segments! Yikes, time to do more online research on this forum and elsewhere. Looks like I need a time base corrector (what the heck is a TBC?). My old tapes were stretched and out of synch and a digital capture device has problems when the frame rates are not in perfect synch. OK, so after more research I buy an AVT 8710, and put that in line with the ADVC110. Sweet, dropouts and jerkiness are gone!

But iMovie 09 is really limiting for editing this mess, time to order Final Cut Express (why not Final Cut Pro? Because I am not a glutton for that level of punishment, yet!).

Next, there are those reels and reels of Super8 film movies from my parents shot in the 60's and 70's! Time to digitize those! Looks like I need to do more research again (and who is this Lordsmurf fellow?).

Anyway, thanks (I think) to this site for being so helpful and enabling. It has been a wealth of information and I look forward to learning more.

[filmboss80]

...It was such a simple idea, I thought...

Welcome to the world of video, where NOTHING is simple. For your parents' Super8 movies, you might want to consider a transfer service like this one: http://wood-land.com. (There are many others; this is just one example of a trusted one that usually does a good job.)

The film-to-video transfers can be tricky, especially with DIY jobs, as trying to simply videotape off a projector screen may result in images that are soft, flickery, and poorly exposed.

[coloradocowboy]

so for ctkim and all ---just a thought would'nt an ADVC 300 - Video input adapter work for the transfer instead of using both
the " AVT 8710, and put that in line with the ADVC110. Sweet, dropouts and jerkiness are gone!" cause it does tbc internally? cowboy

[johns0]

Thread moved to the mac forum where you can get more help.

[lordsmurf]

so for ctkim and all ---just a thought would'nt an ADVC 300 - Video input adapter work for the transfer instead of using both the " AVT 8710, and put that in line with the ADVC110. Sweet, dropouts and jerkiness are gone!" cause it does tbc internally? cowboy

No, not at all.
For starters, it's not the same kind of TBC: What is a TBC? Time Base Correction for Videotapes
Beyond that, the ADVC-300 filters make video look worse.

[coloradocowboy]

Just to make sure we are talking about how we want to convert Hi8 analog tapes to digital- onto a computer then to burn dvds , so we could play them on a regular dvd player for TV so family can watch..

=-=-=-=thanks cowboy

[rumplestiltskin]

re: editing

iMovieHD (v6) is vastly superior to the newer versions of iMovie for editing SD footage. I recently pulled in about 45 VHS tapes through a Sony DVMC-DA1 using an app called "recDV" (freeware) because the Sony is no longer recognized in iMovie/Snow Leopard but recDV had no problems importing the tapes in 2 hour chunks. I dropped them into iMovieHD and it worked perfectly. If you need iMovieHD, let me know. Apple lets you download it if you already have any of the newer versions of iMovie on your computer.