Rate my Setup - Capturing Digital8 and Analog

[johnmeyer]

If you're in PAL land, little will be gained by using a analogue-lossless process. One of the respected commercial digitising outfits, video99uk, allegedly uses the DV route: playing the V8/Hi8 tapes in the D8 camcorder and capturing the DV. My own experiment showed the two methods yield the same result.

I suggest you do a couple of test runs to assess for yourself.

For the analogue process, yes, connect as per your note.

100% agree. What's more, if any of your tapes are DV or Digital8, then capturing them as analog rather than transferring them as DV will actually degrade the video because DV and Digital8 are already digitized using the DV codec, and the "capture" via 1394/Firewire is actually a copy operation, not a transfer.

Also, when you start with VHS or analog 8mm, the video is so lousy that the DV artifacts are not your biggest problem. What IS the big problem for most people is getting the analog capture working correctly, without screwing up the levels (which most newbies seem to do). The DV digitizing in camcorders does a great job getting that right.

I just helped a woman going through a year-long battle with breast cancer who wanted to digitize all of her videos, just in case, well, you know. They were 1/3 VHS, 1/3 8mm, and 1/3 DV. I set her up with a passthrough from her 8mm camcorder, using her DV camcorder as the encoder, into one of my old 1394 laptops. She proceeded to digitize 50+ tapes of 2-6 hours each. Do the math on that; it was a LONG project.

The key thing: she got though ALL of the tapes without a hitch, with zero capture learning curve. The videos look just fine.

DV capture just works, even for newbies. The same cannot be said of analog capture.

Will analog capture produce a better result? In most cases, yes. Will anyone be able to see the difference? Probably not, especially when starting with 1980s or 1990s consumer video.