hi-8 conversion help

[troykeith]

Hello.. finally getting around to digitizing about 50 old hi-8mm tapes from a Sony Handycam via Firewire. Wondering what software/format/method is going to give me the best possible end result when all is said and done? I have the windowslive moviemaker, Roxio10 (although it's a little quirky) and an unregistered Nero10.

This is a one time operation so I don't want to put a lot of $ into it but I do want the best possible video quality with these old family tapes.


Any suggestions would be appreciated - thanks!

[Brad]

So you already have a Digital8 camcorder that plays Hi8 tapes and converts them to digital through Firewire. What is the model number?

Skip all the software you mentioned and use WinDV or a similar app that is directly targetted to taking in DV video from camcorders. The quality won't be any different between these apps: they just read the bits out of the Firewire cable and put them into a container on your hard drive. The only thing that affects the quality in this case is the camcorder itself.

Take a look at the manual for your camcorder and search for terms like TBC (time base corrector) and DNR (digital noise reduction).

[troykeith]

Thanks for the input.. It's a TRV330 - pretty decent in its day I guess but I only keep it around now for the night vision. TBC/DNR are both currently on. I forgot about windv but I've got that around here somewhere and will give it a shot - It's great to have a digital record of these videos, they're just not the quality I would hope for and was looking for the best way to get the most out of them.

[Brad]

You might try capturing the Hi8 tapes to lossless YUY2 then. Whether you will notice the difference to DV if you compare the two captures? That's up to your personal visual system.

But lossless or uncompressed will let you play around with levels, colors, masking, editing, etc. without incurring generational losses.

You can use the same camcorder for playback and instead of having the camcorder do the conversion to digital, use a capture card or USB capture device to convert the S-Video signal and audio.

[phase52001]

Hello.. finally getting around to digitizing about 50 old hi-8mm tapes from a Sony Handycam via Firewire. Wondering what software/format/method is going to give me the best possible end result when all is said and done? I have the windowslive moviemaker, Roxio10 (although it's a little quirky) and an unregistered Nero10.

This is a one time operation so I don't want to put a lot of $ into it but I do want the best possible video quality with these old family tapes. Any suggestions would be appreciated - thanks!

I'm using an old Sony DIGITAL 8 camcorder (DCR-TRV240E PAL) to convert my library of old analogue tapes (Hi8 included) to digital. (It does an excellent job digitising VHS. I had a purchased tape that I couldn't watch, at all, until I ran it through the camera. It cleaned up the signal a treat). It's connected to the computer via firewire.

I connect the VHS to the D8 using a "3 RCA plugs to a single 4 pin 3.5mm plug" cable. With the D8s "signal convert function" turned on, the analogue signal is converted to digital for capture on the computer. The D8 also plays back Hi8 tapes converting the signal to digital for capture. (A number of my Hi8 tapes have dual audio tracks which can be a problem as the D8 will only play back one track).

I use FCP, (Premiere on the Windows machine), or Quicktime, to capture the footage. I clean up the captured footage in FCP. I add fade in and out, and crop the top and sides of the image. (It looks better on a widescreen TV).

For my favourite recordings I use the NEAT VIDEO NOISE REDUCTION filter. http://www.neatvideo.com/examples.html

It does cost 40 Euros, so you may not feel it's absolutely necessary. It's available for a number of applications, http://www.neatvideo.com/download.html, but sadly not for WindowsMovie maker. It does take a huge amount of time to render depending on the speed of your machine; but I've found the results well worth the time & money.

After that I use Compressor and DSP4 to make the DVD; or Elgato Turbo264 HD to create an M4v file for iTunes. Sorry I can't help with suggestions for making the DVD in Windows. I assume Roxio 10, or one of the free DVD Authouring apps on the site, will take care of that. EDIT: I just noticed there's a free program called "Windows DVD Maker" on my Windows 7 machine. It's available from Microsoft.

So that's how I convert my Hi8 and VHS tapes. Hope it helps a bit.

[sanlyn]

Welcome, and good luck with your project. You are using NeatVideo and other filters and processing on video in lossy compressed format, so -- forgive us -- but few readers here would say that you're getting the highest quality output. I note that FCP is OK as an NLE and effects engine, but I wouldn't use it for cleanup of analog tape source. I use NeatVideo myself, but not in the poorly controlled manner that you describe. and never without some prep work beforehand as there are many analog-source problems that NV won't fix.

Wondering what software/format/method is going to give me the best possible end result when all is said and done? I have the windowslive moviemaker, Roxio10 (although it's a little quirky) and an unregistered Nero10.

Neither WMM nor Roxio nor Nero will improve anything; I'd stay as far away from WMM as possible. That brings up a problem: we know little about your computer setup; I get the idea you have both Mac and Windows. With a Mac you're quite limited. Windows has infinitely more choices and possibilities, and many of those are cost-free.

We see the phrase "I want the best possible result" quite often around here. Most people don't really mean that, because the best results would begin with methods and software that are entirely different from your described workflow. Regardless of whether you capture to DV-AVI (which will set you back a step or two) or to lossless YUY2, your capture should be decoded to lossless AVI, with huffyuv or Lagarith to help conserve drive space. You would repair most of your chroma shift, color bleed, block noise, rainbowing, halo, DCT ringing, etc., with Avisynth (NeatVideo is unfortunately powerless against these VHS villains). Some elements of the simmering foggy gunk and streaks you see with most tape sources can be fixed with several YUV filters. But you'll need NeatVideo to get the remainders of that unique noise pattern, getting from YUV to RGB in the correct manner to put NV and its Advanced Interface to its best and least destructive use.

You would then reassemble your spanking-clean video with an editor that works with lossless YV12 and/or lossless RGB without screwing up the colorspace and giving you a clean YV12 project file to send to a different, better, and entirely free MPEG2 encoder. From there you can use whatever NLE and authoring program you wish, to organize the video and audio for DVD disc. So....if running NeatVideo itself seems a bit slow (NeatVideo v3 gets anywhere from 7 to 15 fps on my pathetic AMD), then the process I have just described will likely seem agonizing.

Your move.

[phase52001]

Your move.

Fine. I intend to igore everything you've written because of the way you've written it.

[sanlyn]

I don't know what's wrong with it. All I quoted was standard methods often recommended here and elsewhere for getting the best out of your transfers. Apparently that's not what you wanted.

[phase52001]

I don't know what's wrong with it. All I quoted was standard methods often recommended here and elsewhere for getting the best out of your transfers. Apparently that's not what you wanted.

And you probably won't like the pro's, either, but give it a try: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video/introduction-record-capture.htm

Yes, thank you.

I was ansering troykeith's question. I was not requesting assistance.
I have a copy of your original post before the offensive material was removed.
And see my previous post.

Hey, I've been a member for 9 years. Go figure.

[sanlyn]

Hm. The "welcome" was for troykeith. I also see that between the time I started typing and the time I hit submit and closed the Netbook I was using, the quote paragraph from your post was overwritten, or otherwise just not there. I hate touchpads. Seems that quote should be before the FCP comment, and actually after the quote from troykeith. So, yeah, I musta hit multiple keys and totally blew it.

I'm not aware of any offensive material...if any was there or came off that way, I most certainly did edit it.

Tell you what: since I royally screwed up the post, and since you've been here long enough to know far more than your post revealed about proper capture and processing, then most of that post is irrelevant. And if you found it offensive, no telling what a total noob would think. So since you have a copy - which has errors I didn't see at the time, and which you don't want anyway, and which therefore makes it misleading and irrelevant.....I appreciate that you re-directed my attention to it.

[troykeith]

wow, look like I missed a lot.. I did some experimenting with windv and the files seem to be about 13GB per hour of video?? I've got the discontinuity set to 0 but there doesn't seem to be much more to this program.

Forgive my ignorance, but is the process to rip at the highest possible quality and then constrain the final movie to fit onto a dvd? If not, then even a DL disk wouldn't hold much more than 30 minutes of video unless I'm missing something in this process.

Most of the hi-8 tapes I'm converting seem to be about 90 minutes long so I'm looking at about 20GB per tape. Can you suggest the best way to get the highest quality end result on the least number of DVD's?

Thanks again

[sanlyn]

Use the free mediainfo utility to get the specs on the video you captured, and post the text from mediainfo in this thread. https://www.videohelp.com/tools/MediaInfo .If you captured to AVI it's likely you captured to uncompressed AVI. If you had captured to YUY2 AVI with Lagarith lossless compression you would get about 3GB per hour, not 13GB.

I don't really know what you did because I don't know what you mean by "rip". I think you mean "captured".
rip: https://www.videohelp.com/glossary?R#Rip
capture: https://www.videohelp.com/glossary?C#Capture

Have you seen this ?: http://www.digitalfaq.com/guides/video.htm

[Brad]

Hourly rates for 720x480i 4:2:2 video

Uncompressed (82.94Mbps @ 30fps): 34.8GiB
Huffyuv lossless*: ~24GiB
Ut Video lossless*: ~22GiB
x264 lossless (4:2:0 downconversion)*: ~21GiB
Ut Video lossless (4:2:0 downconversion)*: ~18.5GiB
DV** lossy (4:1:1 downconversion): 10.99GiB
8Mbps lossy for spinning DVDR medium (MPEG-2, H.264, etc.) (4:2:0 downconversion): 3.52GiB
40Mbps lossy for spinning Blu-ray medium (MPEG-2, H.264, etc.) (4:2:0 downconversion): 17.58GiB

* Lossless filesizes are entirely dependent on the compressibility of the content. The noisier it is, the bigger the file. The cleaner, the smaller.
** This number looks odd to those of us used to quoting the typical DV-AVI hourly rate. That's because this one is without audio.

Sanlyn may have been thinking of capturing a 20-odd minute TV show with his 13GB memory.

[sanlyn]

I didn't consider capturing to DV. Now that analog noise has been lossy-encoded, I'll step aside on this one. Trying to clean noisy analog-to-DV and re-encode to DVD is a waste of time. Whatever the O.P. wants.