Transfering From Regular Camcorder 8mm tapes (Important)

[zgrm100]

Hello everyone. I have a big question for you. I want to transfer all of my old 8mm tapes to DVD (through the computer I guess). Now I put them in today and the tapes where deteriorating!!! So I have to do this ASAP. Now I am ordering a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150/250 Tuner Card for my HTPC. Will I be able to capture the video from the camcorder using this?

Also will the sound be n sync? I am worried about times where you press "Stop" on the camcorder when recording and then when u start recording again there is a jump in video as you might imagine. Will this cause any problems?

I read about people using the ADVC (cant remember the moel)-100 or something like that saying that it might be better. What do u guys think? Will the PVR 150/250 be sufficient for this? Thanks.

[nelson133]

From my experience, I recommend the canopus DVC 100. Read through the capture card section and do a search through the archives for tons of information and opinion. As in almost all cases in the hobby, everything is subjective, so you need to check out many opinions. Nyah Levi

[hech54]

Can a Digital8 camcorder output Hi8 tapes digitally? I seem to remember reading about that somewhere....I could be wrong though.

[thecoalman]

Can a Digital8 camcorder output Hi8 tapes digitally? I seem to remember reading about that somewhere....I could be wrong though.

Yes, it may vary from model. I know the one my GF had would would play HI-8 and export via firewire which would be the way to do it if you have such a cam.

As far as suggestions for cards I have a ADVC 110 (no external power supply required) and have no complaints so far. It does a perfect capture IMO. There's cheaper canpus pci cards available. The difference bewtween the card and the external box is that it doesn't export video, In other words if you only need to capture your video to your hard drive the pci card is all you need.

[qlizard]

Do you have a digital camcorder?
If so, do you know if it has analog pass-through?
If so, you can hook up your old 8mm to the digital camcorder and pass through to get DV digital output, just like the ADVC.

[zgrm100]

nope it doesnt have firewire unfortunatly. It is an old Canon A-1 "Digital" with no firewire lol. I havent bothered buying a new camcoorder yet. Im happy taking still pictures and using slideshows right now.

Now I did a qiuck search through the archives and most of them mention the cannopus but the winTV pvr150 is relatively new, so I just wanted to know if it is satisfactory what Iw ill be doing because I would hate to get the cannopus make a couple of transfers, and than it will be a paperweight for $200...

[thecoalman]

Trust me the Canopus will not become a paperweight. It just works....... There are very few posts on here about problems with it and the ones you do see are more system realted than canopus problems such as it not being recognized by XP, even those ar few and far between.

I can't compare to the hauppage as I have never used one but they are also highly reccommened by there users. One thing to note is the Hauppage caps only in mpg which is not very good for editing but does save you the step converting to mpg which would be required by the canopus.

[zgrm100]

so I should be okay with the PVR-150?

[rixware]

I use multiple PVR-250 cards in my business. This is a sweet card if you are doing transfers from analog video to DVD. (I don't know anything yet about the PVR-150. It's new and cheap, and I came here looking to see what people are saying about it. But I haven't found anything yet.)

As mentioned above, the PVR-250 won't do uncompressed (AVI) captures. This makes it a bad choice if you want to do any editing. But it captures to 100% ready-to-author MPEG1 filed for VCD or MPEG2 files for DVD, saving a ton of time in transcoding. I bought it originally for this very reason: hardware compression.

Picture quality is exceptional, and you have complete control over the compression. There are some standard presets, but I don't use them because they seem rather arbitrary. I created a preset for capturing exactly 120 minutes per disc. That's the only preset I ever use.

Installation can be a bit tricky. All I can say is, don't let Windows install drivers for you. Cancel out of that and use the setup files provided. Be sure to read the documentation first, and download new drivers and utility software right away from the web site. Don't even bother with the CD in the package. And if anything goes wrong, use HCWCLEAR.EXE to get rid of everything before trying again.

Other than that, this card is a gem.

Hope this helps.

+