Archiving old 8mm video to Hard Drive questions

[flyingsolo]

I'm archiving numerous camcorder tapes from two Sony Hi 8 camcorders to my iMac using iMovie 11 & iMovie HD 6. The first camera was non-digital so Hi 8 tapes are analogue but 2nd camera is a Digital 8 (DCR-TRV510 NTSC) which can play back digital and non-digital originals. With the non-digital originals, it outputs via Firewire to the computer so has done the ADC.

Problem 1: Some of the analogue tapes create a periodic 'squeak' in the camcorder that results in irregular, horizontal line artifacts and distorted audio. It seems to be specific to the particular tape b/c other tapes of similar vintage are just fine. What is the likely cause of the artifact & how to correct?

Problem2: iMovie imports the analogue tapes as one enormous, long 'Clip'. I'd like to split the clip into logical segments and assign a corrected date to the segments (iMovie assigns current date to the imports; iMovie HD 6 allows segmenting of clips at tape head but still will assign one date to all the segments of a particular clip)
Are there other, better software that would allow the import, segmenting and reassignment of dates to video segments? (fyi: I'm competent with Linux & open software so suggestions along those lines are fine with me)

Thanks for help!

[aedipuss]

1) a squeaking tape shell is either warped or has some dust dirt in it. you could try ff/rw a couple times before playing, it might loosen things up.

2) no digital time info on analog 8 tapes for imovie to find so there can be no segments. you'll have to do them manually.

[flyingsolo]

Thanks aedipuss.
re#1, I was going to try the FF/REW a few times but didn't want to risk a tape break if there was a more obvious problem, so I'll try that next.
re #2, I realize there are no timestamps on the analogue tape import and that after import, basically iMovie sees one big digital DV file and has assigned it the current date. I was thinking that with the right software I could 'cut' the large DV file into segments and then assign dates to the individual segments. (iMovie does allow reassigning the date of a given DV file but it doesn't allow me to cut the one large file into component bits; if I could do the cutting/sementing in some other software and re-import the segments to iMovie I could then assign the different dates to the individual segments)
Any suggestions of software that might accomplish this?

[aedipuss]

maybe a mac person can think of a program to chop up the DV file. the ones i know of are for pc.

[flyingsolo]

I'm not married to mac by any means though I don't have a Win machine currently available. I do have a linux box (ubuntu 11.04) and was hoping there might be a solution there I could use. Tell me the Win programs anyway as I may be able to get/borrow a machine.

[aedipuss]

if you had an editor like vegas pro it allows cutting at any point and saving as a new file without re-encoding.

ScenalyzerLive would most likely be best to capture with or maybe winDV and manually stopping the capturing while watching and changing names.