Hi8 to DV

[Jonathan Jones]

Originally Posted by Adam Gold

....with the caveat that not all Dig8 cams will play Hi8. Make sure yours does. I made this mistake a while ago.

Yep, that's true. There were a lot of different models made over the years, but only a percentage of them were "backwards compatible" in that they had the ability to play back the analogue cassettes. I believe the last backwards compatible model that Sony made was the TRV-480, and I think that has probably been out of production for at least 4 years. They also made the lower numbered 380 and 280 I think around that time, but I don't think either of those models were backwards compatible.

-Jon

[Adam Gold]

Exactly. I bought the 280 to do this without carefully reading the specs, and only later found out that it and the 380 wouldn't play Hi8, only the 480 and above.

[Scott Parcel]

Originally Posted by Robert M Wright

If you want to store footage for future editing, but get each tape onto a single layer DVD disk (dirt cheap), you could use h264 to compress the footage. 2 hours of footage at 4mbps will fit on a single layer DVD. Using a codec like x264 (freeware, and an excellent implementation of h264), you can achieve dang close to visually lossless compression with SD footage, at 4mbps. To edit later, you could convert to an intermediate codec (like Cineform or Canopus HQ) for speed, but with CPUs getting ever more powerful, in a few years a new computer could likely handle the SD h264 footage like butter anyway.

If anyone wants to use x264 to archive SD footage for future editing, I'd be happy to offer some suggestions/more info on compression settings (x264 is very robust with compression options).

Robert, I'm glad I saw your post. This is what I've been thinking about. In fact, it seems like the only practical approach to consumer video archival - I don't know why there are not most postings or similar advise online or even from the video product company web sites. People need a good solution. I have Hi8 footage that I'm planning on loading onto my PC using a Sony GV-D200 player via a DV connection. I was planning on saving as DV Type 2 Native and then burning a conventional DVD and a h.264 DVD. (Saving the 27GB DV files to a 1TB+ disk drive seems unreliable for long term storage, and saving to Blu Ray would cost me over $700). Does all this make sense? Exactly what h.264 format would be best? Can you think of any better approach for reliably archiving home videos with maximum quality for future possible editing and reasonable cost?

--scott

[Scott Parcel]

Originally Posted by Gordon Hoffman

If it was me I would just back up your avi files as they are if you plan on editing it later. Everytime you recompress your files I think you will take a hit in quality which sure won't help you with 8mm and vhs footage.

Gordon

Gordon, I'm doing the same thing, but I don't know a practical way to do as you suggest. One could backup 20 or 30 tapes at ~25GB per video to a 1TB or larger disk drive, but, these drives don't have a very long life, and I've seen lots of posts about failures with these drives. One could use BluRay, but to buy a drive and enough disks for a 30 videos and 30 backups, that is easily over $550. As a consequence, I'm leaning toward Robert's proposal of using h.264 to fit what I can for each video onto one DVD each for archival. Any other ideas?

--scott