A couple newbie questions about digitizing Hi8 films to my PC

[johnmeyer]

I would also vote for 720x480 because it is a DVD standard. Despite the funny "what is a DVD?" comment, DVDs are still my recommendation for the media onto which you should archive VHS/8mm/Beta video.

Why?

Longevity.

Yes, you will have to do an addition encode to MPEG-2, and yes, this will introduce some additional blocking artifacts. However, if you use a good MPEG-2 encoder and use a high bitrate e.g., 8,000,000 bits per second VBR), those additional artifacts will still be swamped by the lousy quality of consumer SD tape-based analog video.

As for longevity, I have read dozens of studies, using accelerated aging, about how long good-quality (and that is IMPORTANT) DVDs will last, but 100+ years is a common estimate, if the discs are stored in cool, dark storage areas.

By contrast, hard drives will certainly not continue to spin for 100 years; and solid state memory is VERY vulnerable to ion migration (where the charged particle migrates up through the oxide layer) and is unlikely to last more than a decade or two. Tape is quite good: I've transferred audio tapes from the late 1940s, right after magnetic tape replaced wire recorders, and they have held up very well. However, the mechanisms for playing home tapes (like VHS or 8mm tape decks) are already starting to break down, and many people are finding that they can no longer play their tapes on the one VHS deck remaining in their house. The helical scan mechanism is pretty fragile and prone to alignment issues, and it is getting very hard to find people who can repair or re-align the decks.

Some people argue that there will be no equipment to play round shiny objects (CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray) in fifty years, but I actually think they will still be quite common. The CD was introduced in 1984 which is 1/3 of a century ago, and I have over a dozen devices withing fifty feet of where I'm typing this that can still play them. The industry has done a great job of backward compatibility (5 1/4 inch form factor, for one), and most modern devices can still play DVDs and CDs.

I can still easily find equipment to play vinyl records, and they are been around since 1950, so some formats do persist for a long, long time.

[JVRaines]

Optical drives will be off the market within 30 years. That's my prediction. Everything is headed to the cloud. We are among the last generations of casual users who can be bothered with local storage.

[videon00b]

Do you think getting a line TBC would help my video8 cassettes more than the built-in TBC? It appears as though I will need one to digitize these VHS tapes. Do you have any youd reccomend? Ive heard some people saying ccd-trv85 TBC's are more of a stabilizer than a real TBC.

I havent had any problems so far but have only used one tape thats just 17 years old, so it probably didnt even need a TBC at all. Thank you

It sure did.

You should know the difference between a line-level tbc and a frame-level tbc. You might be able to get away without a frame-level tbc (until you start seeing dropped frames and bad audio sync, which is common without one), but you always need a line-level tbc for analog tapes. If your player doesn't have a line tbc, use a pass-thru device such as a Panasonic ES10 (https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/319420-Who-uses-a-DVD-recorder-as-a-line-TBC-and-what-do-you-use).

A line-level tbc corrects scanline distortion within individual frames, eliminating wiggles, vertical distortion, and horizontal jitter. A frame-level tbc corrects frame timing for exact video/audio rate and can defeat copy protection.

Oh, thanks for the help. So a line-TBC from a DVD/VHS player is superior to my CCD trv85's built in TBC? I get that I need one for VHS tapes, but how about video8 tapes?

How do you check if your DVD/VHS has a line or frame TBC of if it has one at all? I wouldnt mind buying a frame TBC if itd make my home8 and VHS tapes look even better than a line TBC.

[videon00b]

I see. Should I be capturing my videos in 640x480 for Video8 / Hi8 videos (rather than 720x480)? If I dont need to capture the extra pixels then its just wasted space you know.

I would say "yes" if you intend to archive these videos as computer files. The only reason to use the DV (720) format is if you are archiving as DVD-Video, which uses this format.

I am probably going to keep it on the computer for now, so if I capped in 640x480, couldnt I adjust it to 720x480 later on when encoding? I think capping lossless 720x480 is just capturing spare pixels in a high res format, resulting in wasted data.