Capturing Hi8 tapes with Canopus ADVC100/Need advice

[alegator]

Hi, I'm in the tedious process of capturing about 30 hours of Hi8 analog tapes with the Canopus ADVC100. I already captured one tape and the filesize is about 27Gb/hour. DV-AVI is supposed to be 13Gb/hour. So am I doing something wrong? Or is the Canopus proprietary codec spec 27Gb/hour? If so, is there a way to downsize without quality loss? I have like 30 hours of Hi8 footage and it would require 810Gb of hard disk space to store it!!! Thanks for any suggestion.

[edDV]

First is it 27GB/hr or 27GB/2hr tape as it should be?

Lossless storage would take 13.5GB/hr or a 405GB hard drive or 30 60min DV format tapes.

Next we will discuss minimally lossy storage.

[alegator]

mmm I have to check,since that capture is in an external hard drive, but you might be right, it might be 27Gb/2 hours, I will confirm when connecting Hard drive. It's nice to know I can store the captured video in a MiniDV tape, how would I do that? Can I use the Sony HC3 for this purpose? How would be the procedure?
One more question, I checked the Canopus site for the newer model ADVC300 and they state that it incorporates enhancement technology for old analog Hi8 tapes. So before involving myself in a 30hour capture process, am I fine with the ADVC100 or will the ADVC300 produce much better quality captured videos? Thanks.

[edDV]

I'm not sure if the HC3 records normal DV input from IEEE-1394 to tape. All other DV camcorders will.

The ADVC-300 adds some level setting controls and noise reduction. Otherwise the quality would be the same.

[alegator]

edDV, I could connect the HC3 to the ADVC100 output either using the firewire, S-Video or analog A/V cables? In any case I'd rather store videos in the hard drive, that's the whole idea behind digitalizing them and avoid having them in tape which is a medium that degrades over time.
Regarding the ADVC300, from what you say, then it's not worth replacing the ADVC100 with the 300 for this job.

[edDV]

Hi8 camcorder -> ADVC-100 -> HC3 would work. I Just checked, the HC3 has dual format DV/HDV recording and no analog inputs.

The hard drive degrades over time too or just fails. You need a backup of that drive. This is where data backup to BluRay or HD DVD will prove usefull. Digital tape will age better than analog tape.

[alegator]

Thanks ed, I know that hard drives are not reliable, they can die any time, I keep redundant backups of anything stored in hard drives. I wish affordable flash memory drives with the capacity of current hard drives existed!.

[alegator]

ed, I can also capture the Hi8 tapes using my videocard. Will it produce a better capture than the ADVC100? My guess is the Canopus wins, specially because it prevents audio/video synch problems.

[edDV]

That sums up the main issue especially when you need to do 30 hours.