Capture settings for Hi8 NTSC Tapes/Adobe Premiere

[alegator]

I have some analog Hi8 NTSC tapes that I filmed with a Sony Hi8 CCD-TR101 Camcorder that I owned. I want to capture these tapes with Adobe Premiere v1.5 and would like to know what capture settings to use within Premiere, namely:
- I would assume I would choose DV-NTSC, Standard 48kHz,, right?
- Lower or upper field first?
- drop frame timecode or non drop?
- 29.97 fps?

I want to exactly match these settings to those of the Hi8 Sony Camcorder. The reason I'm posting is because I'm unsure of the camcorders specs (it was a Sony Hi8 CCD-TR101).
Thanks

[edDV]

I have some analog Hi8 NTSC tapes that I filmed with a Sony Hi8 CCD-TR101 Camcorder that I owned. I want to capture these tapes with Adobe Premiere v1.5 and would like to know what capture settings to use within Premiere, namely:
- I would assume I would choose DV-NTSC, Standard 48kHz,, right?
- Lower or upper field first?
- drop frame timecode or non drop?
- 29.97 fps?

I want to exactly match these settings to those of the Hi8 Sony Camcorder. The reason I'm posting is because I'm unsure of the camcorders specs (it was a Sony Hi8 CCD-TR101).
Thanks

I see from your profile you have a Canopus ADVC-100. So do I. Is this what you will be using?

Yes I would capture at DV-NTSC, 48 kHz, 29.97 at the default Adobe DV settings. (Lower field first, uncompressed, 16bit audio).

This will be the proper digital conversion to record back the miniDV (or Digital8) and sets you up for proper DVD encoding.

Adobe default is drop frame timecode. Changing this setting is only important if you are expecting this tape to be played directly to air. 99.99% of the time the TV station will replace timecode anyway before airing so it really doesn't matter.

If it were me and if this tape is important, I would back it up to MiniDV as well as DVD for the resons I state here in this url.

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=239776

Otherwise keep the original Hi8 tape. Don't erase it.


PS: others may disagree, but I keep all my DV equipment set to 2channel 16bit, 48 KHz. audio unless there is a reason to record 4 channel audio in the field. In that case I upconvert the 12bit 32KHz. pairs to 16bit 48KHz during capture before editing.

[alegator]

Hi,
Thanks for confirming the capture settings.
Yes, I would be using the Canopus ADVC-100 to convert to digital DV-AVI, I consider it's the best solution in my hands to prevent A/V Synch problems. I could also use the Analog-to-digital converter builtin the Sony MiniDV Camcorder, but I guess that the ADVC-100 is more of a specialized device for this purpose.
I would assume that Adobe Premiere generates a DV-AVI file when capturing, right? (about 13Gb/hour of footage?)
Regarding backup I read the thread you mentioned and I couldn't agree more: I would not only preserve the original Hi8 tapes (which anyways I don't use anymore as I don't own a Hi8 Cam anymore), but also I would keep both the original unedited captured footage and the final edited in DV-AVI uncompressed format in an external hard drive (I wouldn't choose MPEG2 or any other compressed format since you lose bits of info) for the time being until DVD's become higher capacity and cheaper (and then I would transfer the original DV-AVI files, the edited and unedited). With regards to the final edited DV-AVI I would also author them into DVD-R's to be able to play them in any home DVD player.

(P.D.: In which cases one has to use lower field and in which ones upper field?)

[edDV]

Yes the ADVC should capture fine to Premiere with the default DV 48KHs settings @ about 13.5GB/hr. If it doesn't for any reason let us know. You will need to start the Hi8 tape preroll and capture start and stop manually with the ADVC. Good Luck.

You will find that DV is a great editing format but since you havea miniDV camcorder, you probably already know that.

[alegator]

Yes, I'll let you know should there be any trouble with the ADVC-100.
Going a bit off-topic with this thread, I have another question. I have both USB2 and Firewire400 external drives (transfer speeds pretty much the same). Is it fine to have Premiere capture the analog video to these drives? I mean, will the USB2 or FW400 transfer speeds be enough so not to cause any trouble? I have burned many DVD's with the source video in these drives without problem.
Also, if I set Premiere to output the final edited video to an external HD will transfer speeds be enough so not to cause any corruption/dropped frames?
I ask this because I read that it's always advisable to have Adobe Premiere in one drive (usually the main OS drive), the source (captured videos,etc) files in a 2nd drive and the final edited video output in a 3rd drive (and I have 2 internal HD's plus one external HD, so I would like to optimize Premiere performance).
Thanks.

[edDV]

Yes, I'll let you know should there be any trouble with the ADVC-100.
Going a bit off-topic with this thread, I have another question. I have both USB2 and Firewire400 external drives (transfer speeds pretty much the same). Is it fine to have Premiere capture the analog video to these drives? I mean, will the USB2 or FW400 transfer speeds be enough so not to cause any trouble? I have burned many DVD's with the source video in these drives without problem.
Also, if I set Premiere to output the final edited video to an external HD will transfer speeds be enough so not to cause any corruption/dropped frames?
I ask this because I read that it's always advisable to have Adobe Premiere in one drive (usually the main OS drive), the source (captured videos,etc) files in a 2nd drive and the final edited video output in a 3rd drive (and I have 2 internal HD's plus one external HD, so I would like to optimize Premiere performance).
Thanks.

Your internal EIDE drives should be the fastest and most reliable. I use the 2 drive setup with XP and the adobe premiere program on the OS drive and the scratch file and capture on done on the second. You can always transfer the captured file to the external drives later.

Unless you have a very sophisticated multiplayback realtime hardware card, there is no need for a third drive. I keep all video on drive 2.

[alegator]

I captured a 2 hour analog Hi8 tape to an external USB2 7200RPM IBM HD using Canopus ADVC-100 and Adobe Premiere 1.5 and Premiere reported no dropped frames, so I guess I'm fine with the config.