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  1. Member
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    As title.

    Im wondering whether to capture old video8 and Hi8 tapes as firewire DV (which would mean an extra re-encode to DVD or mp4),

    or capture through its s-video in lossless such as Huffy?

    But I wonder if the s-video would just look the same as DV? Does the Sony camcorder convert the video to dv then to analogue which would still have DV's macroblocking and compression artefacts?
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  2. Member
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    I doubt it. The electronics have to read analog off the tape. Why convert it to DV and then back to analog? The only way to know for sure is to either study the circuit/block diagrams in the service manual or do some test transfers.
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  3. Member
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    Thanks for the reply JVRaines.

    I did try comparing a DV capture and s-video one and couldnt tell the difference, which kind of led me to believe its outputting the same as the DV. What usually brings out macroblocking? Low light? Fast motion? If I notice some on the s-video output then its reconverted from DV.
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  4. Dinosaur Supervisor KarMa's Avatar
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    I capture Video8 footage via a D8 Handycam and have never seen DV style macroblocks in the s-video output. The video quality is noticably better out of my D8 camera than a Video8 machine I have that only outputs composite.

    Old thread of mine on the subject.https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/381533-Video8-Player-vs-Digital8-Camcorder-for-capturing-Video8
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  5. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    In the past, using DV passthrough, instead of straight direct A->D conversion in a card, was a way to use 1 less device, and to streamline the capture process, and so it was at the time considered more consistently reliable than analog capture, even though it was a (likely) lossier pathway because of the chosen DV color subsampling (4:1:1 for NTSC, 4:2:0 for PAL) and DV compression.
    However, DV transfer is no longer the ubiquitous and easy streamlined way of getting your data: there are OS and driver issues, dwindling hardware capture offerings, deprecated DV-related capture software, etc. Now, it isn't a sure thing that a machine would not drop or corrupt frames due to incompatibility (though it certainly is no longer the case of having too little bandwidth), much less not work at all.
    Plus, you would STILL have the lossy artifacts of DV if you went that way.

    So, these day, I would strongly recommend that you go the route of a good Analog Capture card/box that allows you to capture in 4:2:2 or even better, 4:4:4YUV or RGB, colorspace, and with user-configurable software codecs (such as many of the lossless or near-lossless options). This would give you the BEST you could get out of analog SD (whether it is VHS/BETA/8mm/Hi8/SVHS/etc).
    Just don't skimp on your capture hardware (I'm talking to you, EZCap!).

    Scott
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  6. Member
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    Yes the lossy nature of DV concerns me and am tempted to capture through s-video to blackmagic 8bit 4:2:2 or 10bit 4:4:4 (I have the Intensity Shuttle usb3) instead.
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