Archiving Digital 8 Tape with minor edits

[New archiver]

I have a bunch of Sony Digital 8 tapes that are at the end of their life and I need to transfer them to DVD. I have a 2012 1/2 MacBook Pro laptop with Thunderbolt. I have the cables and thunderbolt adapter.
What is the best way to save my tapes with minor editing to a DVD disk?
I want to maintain the full quality of video and sound on the tapes. Can iMovie put out the quality and size of movies (up to 60 min)? I don't want to be an expert video editor. Just cut out junk video and save the rest in full quality. I would prefer not to have to buy Final Cut pro as that is $400 I prefer not to spend.
Ideally, I would be able to take the data off the DVD in future to edit further. I am willing to buy some software and hardware if needed.
Thanks for any help.

[ultane]

Welcome.

I think your computer will do just fine. I recently did the same with ~36 Sony analog 8 mm tapes (of my children’s childhood) using Roxio easy VHS to DVD for Mac. The converter came with its own software. I did not use iMovie to edit any of the videos, but it is easy to use. There iMovie tutorial videos out their to purchase (I haven’t done that yet). But you shouldn’t need that Roxio hardware since your videos are already in digital format. My camera no longer functioned (the circuit boards go bad after a while), so I had to buy a rebuilt Sony 8 video player on eBay. Google is your friend on importing and editing, and burning the videos to DVDs, though I’ve read that burnable DVDs also have a life expectancy. In addition, I really didn’t want to buy 150 burnable DVDs, so I simply saved all the videos (67GB) to my 1TB hard drive, then dragged them all to 128GB SD cards (plugged into my MBPro’s built in SD card slot). Now, all 4 of my now grown kids have digital copies of all of their childhood memories.

Good luck.

[Brad]

If you want to create a DVD that you can watch on a DVD player, you will need to convert from the original DV format to MPEG-2. There will be some amount of digital generation loss.

If you just want a data DVD, good software can do cuts without any quality loss. Not sure whether iMovie supports lossless cutting though.