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  1. As my username implies, I’m new to this forum and a total rookie at video technology. I suspect the answers to my questions might be buried deep in the archives of this forum, but I’ll explain my situation and see if anyone has some advice and guidance. I have box full of old 8mm and Hi-8 tapes that I’d like to convert to digital format to enable them to be edited. They contain hours and hours of my son and daughter’s life experiences, ranging from birth to college graduation. I’m retired now and have the time to begin learning the art and science of video editing, but the learning curve from my current vantage point is steep and a little intimidating.

    Unfortunately, a real-world constraint is finances. I’m using a 2010 Dell computer and have Adobe Premier Elements software. In a perfect world, I’d run out and buy a high-end Mac and Final Cut software and have the 8mm and Hi-8 tapes converted to the absolute highest-quality format, but that’s not something I can afford.

    My dilemma is that I’d like to: 1) have the files converted to a format and compression ration that preserves as much of the original resolution as possible, 2) edit the files with a software that doesn’t have a steep learning curve, 3) have the files placed on a media that I can readily copy, 4) not spend a ton of money, but 4) not have egrets down the road that I should have opted for a better quality file format and video editing hardware/software platform.

    When I spoke with several local vendors who do tape-to-digital conversion, they recommend either converting the tapes to DVD or provide them with a 1 TB hard drive and have the files converted to DV AVI format. When I spoke with a professor who teaches video production, not surprisingly, his recommendation was to purchase a Mac Pro and have the tapes converted to either ProRes422 format or H-264 compressed files. He cautioned against having the files converted to DVDs because that format is apparently difficult to edit.

    Any recommendations would be sincerely appreciated.
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    Originally Posted by Videorookie1953 View Post
    Unfortunately, a real-world constraint is finances. I’m using a 2010 Dell computer and have Adobe Premier Elements software. In a perfect world, I’d run out and buy a high-end Mac and Final Cut software and have the 8mm and Hi-8 tapes converted to the absolute highest-quality format, but that’s not something I can afford.

    My dilemma is that I’d like to: 1) have the files converted to a format and compression ration that preserves as much of the original resolution as possible,
    The only video media that retains as much quality as possible for editing is lossless compression (huffyuv, Lagarith, UT Codec, etc..) or uncompressed video. I doubt you have that level of quality in mind, as it is a mountain of work and learning. But almost everything you'd use except the capture hardware is free.

    Originally Posted by Videorookie1953 View Post
    2) edit the files with a software that doesn’t have a steep learning curve, 3) have the files placed on a media that I can readily copy, 4) not spend a ton of money, but 4) not have egrets down the road that I should have opted for a better quality file format and video editing hardware/software platform.

    When I spoke with several local vendors who do tape-to-digital conversion, they recommend either converting the tapes to DVD or provide them with a 1 TB hard drive and have the files converted to DV AVI format.
    Okay, before the DV Fan Club shows up in this thread, there's something you should tell the "pro" guys back at the "pro" shop. One, tell them they weren't listening to you. Next, ask them why they recommended DV-AVI direct conversion for editing and whatnot. It's a noisy, obsolete video format playable only on a PC. Forget sharing discs, forget TV, forget internet -- DV-AVI is PC only. Analog tape to DV is second-rate at best for direct capture, and must be re-encoded at a quality loss for playback in any other media or format.

    BTW, your video professor still thinks it's 1984. ProRes, Mac Pro, FCP -- total overkill for your source, as well as extremely limited when it comes to cleanup of old analog tape noise. I'd hate to think you'd be doing what lots of people do: spend hundreds of bucks for something like FCP but use it like a $50 editor. The prof also seems confused: h264 is just as difficult to edit as DVD. h264 and MPEG are final delivery formats, not editing formats, and stuff like long-GOP h264 is a nightmare to work with. I'd find another professor to talk with who doesn't seem so misinformed.

    Welcome to the forum, and good luck. There are years of capture and "digitizing" threads piled up in the capture, restoration, and editing forums. It's a subject that has been talked to death here and elsewhere. Your best bet is to have the tapes captured professionally to a lossless format for edit and cleanup, and you can archive the originals any way you want. If you need simple software, stick with Mac and iMovie for cheap software. FCP is far to difficult and advanced. Windows is your best bet for the availability of software, much of it free, and for a wider choice of codecs, as long as you stay away from Windows 8 and 10.

    I haven't used Premiere Elements for several years, but there are many members here who are familiar with it and will glad to offer tips and links to other threads. There's also the Premiere Elements User Forum and a ton of free tutorials for such software on the internet.
    Last edited by LMotlow; 16th Aug 2015 at 21:35.
    - My sister Ann's brother
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  3. I'll take the role of DV advocate in this situation for a number of reasons.

    1) First, the simplest high quality method of digitizing Hi8 and Video8 is to throw the cassettes into a Digital8 camera or deck and go firewire out to your computer.

    Yes you can theoretically get better quality by doing an analog transfer through a high quality TBC to a high quality capture card to a lossless Huffyuv or Lagarith file, then process that with avisynth to another lossless file, then edit that sluggishly with Premiere Elements -- but really you're not going to do that, and the quality gain over DV will be minimal with a lot of extra time and expense thrown in.

    2) Premiere Elements was designed around DV. DV can be edited and output with no further loss of quality. It will exactly match what the camera played from the tape.

    3) DV isn't inherently noisy. It's quite good. Much of the noise and softness often attributed to DV is accurate reproduction from the cheap circuitry and pickup systems on consumer camcorders.

    4) DV avi will certainly play on macs -- because DV is DV, whether it's in an .avi container, a .mov container or raw DV.

    5) While I would not recommend anyone shoot original material on DV these days, and while it's certainly past its prime. It still has advantages when dealing with older technologies like Video8 and Hi8, and is required for Digital8. The editing again, is responsive and lossless.
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    I agree 100%. Well, 85% I guess, but 100% when it comes to practical issues. Mainly, I agree that videorookie hasn't the time or inclination for the lossless route. I don't think the DV captures will always remain as DV-only, because eventually someone's going to want to see the videos on something other than a compute screen, so encoding and maybe even authoring comes into play. Lossless would require the same thing, but without a second lossy encode.

    I take issue with the "minimal improvement" one gets from doing it the long way. That depends on knowing what you're doing. Problem is, home analog tapes really don't look so good, and as we've seen in this forum countless times there are, uh, "problems" that pop up when analog gets translated into the digital world. First thing that happens is that users show up in forums screaming how can I correct these horrible boo-boo's? Analog noise and other defects in DV get peculiar when manipulated, often looking worse the more you fiddle with it. So simple NLE's get left behind and something more complicated has to do the work.

    I do wish analog tape owners were aware that this happens all the time. Or someone in Premiere Elements or Movie Studio decides their video is way too dark or too green and makes those "simple" color corrections. Boom, there goes another total re-encode and some more artifacts show up. It's always blamed on nasty old analog tape and couldn't possibly be hindered by starting with a capture medium that wasn't designed for analog source. True, DV itself isn't inherently noisy (well, not as noisy as analog, but mosquito noise is a digital compression artifact, not an analog problem). Analog tape definitely is noisy but poor old DV is just a codec, not a noise filter.

    So I agree with smrpix, and add that it ain't as simple as it looks. There are hundreds of discussions here and elsewhere about these issues. For a lot of folks DV really is the only choice if not the "best", but the best ain't always possible. I'm always leary when newcomers to video type their "highest possible quality" request. Maybe we need a basic guide here about "digitizing" that's more up to date than digitalfaq's decade-old capture guide.
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