V8 to DVD - no hope??

[frozentax]

Hey all, I'm finally getting around to putting all of my old 8mm tapes on DVD via a standalone recorder (LiteOn LVW-5005). I have two camcorders - a Sony 8mm (about 7 years old) and a Sony D8 (about 4 years old) which also plays Hi-8/8 tapes.

My problem is this: Some of my 8mm tapes were recorded using a very old camcorder that at some point became faulty. When I play these tapes back on either of my current Sony camcorders, the audio is garbled and there is no image displayed on the screen consistently. At times an image will flash. However, if I hit rewind/ff while the tape is playing, the image is displayed on screen while it's rewinding/ffing.

Is there any suggestion you all have to make these tapes playable, or even successfully transferable to my computer so I can clean them up? I tried the built in time base corrector on my D8, but that didn't help. These memories must be perserved on DVD! Thanks.

[fmctm1sw]

there is no image displayed on the screen consistently. At times an image will flash.

Dumb question. Have you tried cleaning the heads? My VCR does that when the heads need cleaned.

[frozentax]

Thanks for responding to my dumb question - dirty heads are not an issue (what a dumb suggestion :P ). As I stated, some of the 8mm tapes were recorded with a camcorder that stopped working correctly at some point, but obviously something was still recorded. My other 8mm tapes play fine.

[johns0]

Sounds like the tapes were recorded with the tape guides coming loose so the only way you can output the proper picture is to adjust the tape guides on a similar old cam so the azimuth matches,other than that you are out of luck.

[fmctm1sw]

Thanks for the dumb response.

No problem, good luck getting help...

[frozentax]

Sounds like the tapes were recorded with the tape guides coming loose

That sounds correct. As I recall, the image while recording looked fine on the viewfinder, but playing it back is a whole different story!

[frozentax]

Well I've figured out a temporary solution. Capturing via firewire on my computer, I hit pause on the camcorder so an image is displayed. I then tap the fast forward button - the video advances 19 frames (0.634 seconds) and goes back to pause. I then hit ff again, and repeat. The whole time the computer is capturing this. After it's complete, I use VirtualDub to cut out each pause, thus the video plays back in full at normal speed. There are, however, bands of noise/tearing throughout at various points. Needless to say this is very tedious, and I've yet to apply this procedure to a full video! But it's better than having nothing, which was the case before. Now I have to work on cleaning up the audio, and then easily adding it to the edited video track, output back to a fresh tape in D8 format, then feed it to my DVD recorder.