Help! Stuck at the door of new digital age

[devdev]

hi

i have a sony digital 8 camcorder and ive shot everything on hi8 tapes. i want to convert them to digital. there's a digital output socket (it says 'dv out') on the front but i'm not sure what it is exactly!

would i be right in saying that all i have to do is get a lead and download each of my tapes via my equivilant socket on my pc?

would i then save them as dvavi and edit in a program such as premiere?

Also - if all of this is poss! - What would be file size of 1.5 hrs of hi8?!


I'd appreciate any advice you can give me!

thanks

[Solarjetman]

Well, if it has a DV socket, all you need is a firewire port on your computer and a cable.

Basically what you said is how you go about it. Just have a program capture the video (actually a DV is just a file transfer, but people still use the word capture). Then edit it. If you have premiere you can use that, otherwise there are several free programs that are good like Virtual Dub.

The DV file is going to be about 3.6MB/second so your 1.5 hours will be around 18-19gigs. You will most likly want to compress this down afterwards to an mpeg. I am guessing you want to make a video disk. TMPGEnc is a good encoder (and mpeg1 encodes are free, you will have to pay for mpeg2 functionality)

[holistic]

WOAH ......

..sony digital 8 camcorder and ive shot everything on hi8 tapes..

What is it?
Digital 8 or Hi8 - Hi8 being analog. There is a difference.

Your Digital 8 will play Hi8 but will it 'transfer' it through the firewire port?
If the camera has a built in AD converter you are OK - if not you will need either an analog video capture card or an AD converter (eg: AVDC-100 )

..would i then save them as dvavi and edit in a program such as premiere? ..

Correct

As stated above - DV = ~ 13Gb per hour

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