How would you transfer eleventy billion Hi8 tapes to a hard drive...

[thetxstang]

I have a neighbor who has a significant collection of older Hi8 tapes (literally over 300). His Hi8 video cam bit the dust over a year ago. His objective is to digitize each of his tapes to his hard drive so he can edit them and subsequently burn them to DVD.

He wants to tackle the project himself since (1) specialty photo outfits, and even Walgreens, charge between $15 and $20 per tape, and (2) will only convert the tapes directly to DVD.

He would like to purchase, if such a device exists, a stand-alone Hi8 player that can digitize and send the data to a hard drive. He has both USB 2.0 and Firewire connections on his PC.

I offered to lend a hand (he's a real nice elderly fellow), though I don't know the first thing about digitizing video from older analog tapes. Since Google was of little help, I figured someone here would know how to go about this.

If a stand-alone Hi8 player doesn't exist, what other methods would accomplish my neighbor's goal? I would appreciate any assistance.

 

[montag451]

Get a secondhand Hi8 cam with firewire.
Get something like Pinnacle software, or Ulead video studio etc.
Get a couple of those new big 1TB drives!!!
Convert away, then edit after, then chuck the drives in the bin afterwards (or give them to me.)

Bear in mind that a 45min Hi8 tape will take 45min to put onto the computer, then another 1 or 2 hours or so to edit if you do it roughly. (Many more hours if you edit to the frame)

 

[QuixoticOne]

I doubt that a player with integrated digitizer exists, at least in any kind of even remotely affordable / available level. If it exists it is surely an industrial piece of equipment and in the thousands of dollars.

I'd suggest the basic technique of getting a player (whether a deck unit or a camcorder with AC power supply), hooking its output (s-video? or composite NTSC otherwise) into the input of a PC based video capture card with reasonable quality (and possibly hardware based compression if he wants to settle for unedited MP2 files -- other wise use the PC for editing / H.264 compression or whatever).

All he'd have to do is two a day, "hit play, walk away" and he'd be done in several weeks.

Either that or look for a discount / wholesale bulk conversion service; I'm sure there are some to be found either in the US or elsewhere if he's willing to ship the tapes out and risk a third party's handling of them.

I suppose you could check eBay for surplus industrial quality conversion equipment or players for pennies on the dollar, but I still doubt that you'd find a good auto-digitizing unit that's worth using / buying / trying to get working.

If he's willing to contemplate buying an expensive and exotic converter unit, buying something much more modest like a reasonable quad-core Q6600/Q9450 CPU PC with 4GB RAM for $440 or so, a couple of 1TB sized hard discs for $110 or so each, and a video capture card for $60 shouldn't be too bad of a proposition, especially when it could be sold or used for other things afterwards.
With such a system you should be able to capture and encode several tapes per day, perhaps 12 hours worth ; certainly about as many as one would have the patience to schedule to swap / play. You could even do it with an old single-core PC and less RAM if your video digitizing card did fully hardware based MPEG-2 compression and you settled for that, so in that case a $300 PC or an already available one with digitizer and hard disk related upgrades might do.

It is slow but such is life in the realm of audio / video conversions from analog media.

 

[QuixoticOne]

Firewire huh? I was assuming that given the age of the format and the age of the owner that they'd be in an older analog Hi8 format. Do the Hi8 players with firewire digitize the playback of even the older analog format tapes? If that is workable then it'd certainly be a good expedient solution and would eliminate the $60 digitizer card from the solution (at least if the motherboard had a firewire port or one got a $20-$40 firewire card though if one gets a firewire card with MPEG-2 hardware digitizer it'd probably cost (or be) the same as one with an analog input.

 

[corkyg]

Regardless of the technical approach, i.e., hardware, software, etc., there is no quick and easy way to do this. It is a long process and you have to apprach it one tape at a time.

But there is another possibility. There are VHS-DVD decks that will dub VHS tapes to DVDs directly. I have one. There are also Hi8 to VHS adapters. That may offer an alternative, i.e., transfer the tapes to DVD. Then- if you like, copy the DVDs to HDD as desired.

Either way, it is a long term project. Set up a schedule and stick to it. Maybe a tape a day or something.

 

[dblevitan]

Sony's Digital8 cameras can transfer Hi8 to Firewire. Here's a forum link with some more information. The problem is that consumer camcorders won't last very long under continuous use, but its probably much cheaper than finding a D8 tape deck.

 

[thetxstang]

We've purchased a Sony Digital8 camcorder and Pinnacle Studio software. The Digital8 cam plays the older Hi8 tapes without a hitch, connects directly to the PC via Firewire, and we can capture the video feed through Pinnacle Studio. Everything is working like a top!

Thanks to each of you for your help. I really appreciate the assistance.