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  1. As part of a Hi8 conversion effort I picked up a TRV740 Handicam to play my old Hi8 tapes for conversion. Conversion issues aside, I've been surprised by the poor quality I'm seeing even in the camcorder viewfinder. I've attached a video made with my iPhone of the camcorder screen.

    Still objects look fine, and I certainly expected dropouts on old tapes. But I've been surprised by the artifacts around the moving objects.

    Is this about the best I should expect, or is this Digital8 camcorder not doing so well playing back my Hi8 tape? Would I be better off returning it and getting a true Hi8 camcorder for this project?

    Thanks!

    Charlie
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  2. It looks OK to me. Exactly what is it about the image that you think is bad?

    Also, it would help to know how you are connecting your camcorder to your computer in order to do the capture. For Hi8 you can either connect the analog video outputs to a capture box, or you can connect the 1394/Firewire output to the computer's 1394 input and have the camera digitize the video for you. I prefer the latter because it is rumored that most Digital 8 camcorders contain a TBC that can help stabilize 8mm and Hi8 material. I don't know if this is true for your model, but perhaps someone can provide more information.
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  3. I see lots of horizontal tearing and some DV (encoding or decoding) errors. The tearing is expected when shooting a display that's not genlocked with the camera -- nothing wrong with the camcorder, tape, or iPhone. The DV errors might be a problem. But this is no way to evaluate the issue. You'll need a firewire cap.

    tearing:
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    DV errors:
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    [Attachment 55592 - Click to enlarge]
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  4. Yeah, the artifacts I saw seemed like they were caused by doing a screen capture of a old-fashioned "dot-matrix" camcorder display using an unsynced video camera.
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  5. Are the tapes actually HI8 or are they Digital8? If they're Digital8 you'll see the "D8" icon on the screen, and what you may be experiencing is common digital tape errors. If they're HI8 analog tapes, this kind of motion issue surprises me. Either way i'd start by cleaning the heads on that camcorder properly.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KCz59TCy8E
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  6. Yes, I agree with nicholasserra: I don't think I've ever seen artifacts like that from a 1st generation analog tape played via analog connections to a TV set. There has been some sort of digitizing somewhere in that change.
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  7. Hey guys!

    I would like to help some of you out and show you an article that may helps a few of you. The article: https://www.technikhiwi.de/camcorder-test/
    The language is german but with google chrome you can easily change the language and translate the article to an english version.

    I think it helps a lot, because it is full of information and comparisons to different camcorders.

    I hope i could help
    Wenn es möglich wäre, der Menschen Gedanken in einem Video zu speichern, gäbe es noch mehr Gruselfilme ;)
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