HOW TO TRANSFER DIGITAL8 TO DVDR?

[SIMPLEDVD]

HI TO the forum,its my first posting,and i am very happy i found this forum.it looks very informational and fantastic.
i do pro audio,and i am familiar with some of the video but i consider my self a newbie in the video department.
ok,here's what i want to do.
I do want to simply transfer all my home made movies from hi 8,digital 8
to dvdr.so it could be used on regular home dvd players.
what is the best and ofcourse the economical ways to do it.i am not selling myself that cheap,i can afford it but i do have more than 150 tapes or more to transfer.oh btw,i dont want to do any edditing at all,all i want to do is transfer the tapes as they are,for archiving and viewing purposes.
so please,tell me the best way if you can,it would be better to avoid to dump it to hard drive and just transfer it from the videocam to dvdr.
if you can give me some details as to how to and the best way to go about it.

thanks a lot.

[solarfox]

If you just want to dub the entire Hi-8 / Digital-8 tape straight to disc with no editing, your fastest and easiest solution would be to go buy a set-top DVD-R recorder, such as the Panasonic DMR-E30 (supports DVD-R and DVD-RAM) or Philips DVDR-880 (supports DVD+R(W) ), plug your camcorder into it, and dub away.

If this kind of one-to-one direct dubbing is all you'll ever want to do, then there's no point in your setting up a computer-based solution with a firewire card, editing/authoring software, DVD burner, etc., since it'll cost about the same as a set-top recorder, take longer to go through the capture/author/burn process, and you won't really gain anything for your trouble.

[hkmak]

If you have a Digital8 camcorder which usually equiped with firewire port (iLink in Sony, IEEE 1394 in technical), you may transfer your video content to your PC via the firewire port in your PC (if your PC does not have a firewire port, you may install a firewire card). After the transfer it will store in avi format. You may then convert it to MPEG-2 using TMpgenc encoder. Finally author your DVD using DVD complete and burn it to your DVD-R

[solarfox]

Yes, he could do this... however, consider the specifics of his request:

He has over 150 tapes that he wishes to transfer to DVD-R. This represents anywhere from 150 to 300 hours' worth of material, depending on how many of the tapes are Hi-8 vs. D8 and how full they are.

He specifically doesn't want to do any editing on them; he just wants to dub them all as-is straight to disc.

He also says he'd prefer not to dump them to his hard drive, but would rather go direct to disc.

With these specifics in mind, I continue to maintain that the set-top DVD recorder is the far better solution for his particular requirements. It's simpler, and far more economical -- especially if your time is worth anything. As noted above, he's already looking at anywhere from 150 to 300 hours of time just to dub the material -- with the computer-based solution you describe, even if we assume the best-case scenario that becomes 150 hours of dubbing, plus 40 hours of burn time plus several hundred hours for TMPGenc to compress the .AVI files down to MPEG-2.

[SIMPLEDVD]

YES,thanks for the replies.i tought the dvdr solution would be best,but i wasnt sure if there was other better ways anyway.and i am gone get a home dvd recorder and just pass it from the videocam to the dvdr unit,thats what it looks like the best case.what do you think of the phillips 985 model i believe?it seems like it reads and writes dvd-r and dvd+r if i am not wrong on this.
and most importantly,i would like to know which dvdr media and which format to get.and whats the lowest cost and with quality trouble free media to look for?because its gone more than 150 tapes or so and it adds up.
i realy appriciate and look forward for some answers.specialy on which media concern.
thanks again.

[solarfox]

The Philips 985 does not write both -R and +R; it, like the other Philips units, is strictly a DVD+R(W) device. I don't know of any standalone recorder which supports both "dash" and "plus" formats; at the moment, only Sony's recently-introduced PC drive can do that. (Though I wouldn't be surprised to see others follow suit if Sony's drive catches on.)

As far as best media and format... well, opinions vary, sometimes rather heatedly. All I can say is that I seriously question the format comparison on Philips' site, since anecdotal evidence and serious testing by independant outfits like "Videomaker" magazine puts the compatibility of DVD+R(W) with set-top DVD players at something more like 65%, not 90%...

Personally, I use DVD-R, and have recorded video onto Primedisc, Ritek, GQ, TDK, Apple, Que!, and Pioneer media with no significant problems from any of them. (What few issues I have had are generally set-top-playback related; my Philips 711 DVD player didn't like any DVD-R or -RW discs, while my friend's older-model Sony played DVD-R but tended to "hiccup" for the first few minutes; apparently, it either couldn't track the spiral, or it couldn't spin the disc fast enough to pull 6000Kb/sec off of the inner tracks. And this was on supposedly top-of-the-line Apple media, incidentally. )

If you go with the +R(W) system, TDK, Maxell, and Memorex seem to be big in this area. While I have no direct experience with these, past experience with other types of media made by these companies would suggest that you probably can't go wrong with TDK, Memorex might be OK, and Maxell is dodgy. Your mileage, of course, may vary.