MPEG2 Capture vs. Digital8 Transfer

[Dinu Bandyopadhyay]

Recently my 6 year old Sony analog camcorder parted my company (stolen to be exact), leaving me with 11, 8mm tapes. Fortunately, in recent months I managed to capture these tapes in MPEG2 format on my 1.7 GHz P4 PC, running Windows XP. For capture I used ATI AIW capture card, MMC 7.1 set for best quality:
Type - MPEG -2
Video: 720x480, NTSC(525), 8.0 M Bit/sec
Audio: 22.050 KHz, 16 Bit Stereo
The capture was performed with < 1% packet loss. The quality seems great. Using Pioneer A03 DVD writer I saved the raw MPEG2 files on several Verbatim DVD-R disks.

Now here is the dilemma.
Should I replace the old camcorder with a digital8 (e.g. Sony TRV740) or take the plunge and buy a miniDV camcorder. With digital8, I would have the opportunity to digitize these 8 mm tapes again and save them using FireWire link. I would only do so, if the quality of digital8 transfer turns out to be better than MPEG2 capture. These tapes are very dear to my heart, so saving them with best quality (as good as the original) possible is my goal. I would greatly appreciate of comments comparing MPEG2 capture and digital8 transfer from the same source tapes.

[Mavrick]

What kind of camera you get is up to you. I would go with a DV camera personally.

As far as your capture quality goes… Capturing directly with MPEG does not work very well. You get a lot of loss in quality and can produces blocky images.

If you want to end up with an MPEG files that as good as the original Hi-8 tape. Capture to an uncompressed AVI file, then render it to a high bitrate MPEG2 file. This will give you the best quality in the end.

[PigOnWing]

I don't know anything about MiniDV, Digital8, or cameras per se, but I would still recommend you not to buy your next video camera according to 11 tapes you want to transfer to digital medium.

Transferring the tapes is a one-off process. If playing the tapes through a Digital8 camera and transferring it to PC via Firewire will give you better results (and according to the little I know, it indeed will), you could always borrow or rent a Digital8 camera for this one-off process. Choosing what Digital format to get, after all, stuck with next, shouldn't be affected by current media which, after all, you want to transfer to another media, and not necesserily continue to use the original media it was on.

-- Piggie