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Comment by binarydivision | Hacker News Reader

Any tips for digitizing old Sony Video 8 camcorder tapes? I have a whole stash but when I looked into paying to digitize them it was shockingly expensive.

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There are a couple '8mm' tape formats. My suggestion: Put a saved search on kijiji (or craiglist or whatever) for a DIGITAL8 camcorder. You'll find one for under $100. These cams are backward compatible to the 8mm and hi-8 analogue formats. They will play those analog tapes and output digital stream (DV) over Firewire. The harder part is now getting a computer that will take the firewire (you may have an old laptop -- macs had them until like 08 -- or get a firewire-to-usb2.0 cable or thunderbolt to firewire adapter on amazon). Modern imovie/premiere will gladly accept the DV stream/control the camcorder.

You can buy firewire pcie cards on Amazon for $20 that work with windows 10, then use win dv to capture, works great with d8 and dv.

I've heard of d8 camcorders that are v8 compatible but never seen. V8 and hi8 I just use rca.

Blackmagic digital studio capture cards work very well.

No matter what you do all these old formats never look good imo.

I concur, it's the best solution for analog Video-8 tapes. Buy a Digital-8 camcorder with DV. You may get a better picture with some kind of bespoke high-end rig with rebuilt camcorders and studio digitizing equipment, but for mere mortals, it's the best solution.

I can only add, that for me it worked best to capture the tape all in one go, and not try to start-stop the camera with DV control. Be it deteriorating tapes or whatever the cause, but the capture software had problems resuming the camera if it was ever paused.

Agreed - just letting the tape run for the duration is best. It's a shame that it has to be done in real-time. I don't see why (from a technical standpoint) the process couldn't be done at a faster speed. It's just that the hardware isn't made for it and there's not market. The analog-to-digital processing could be done by a faster chip or even software at this point. Something akin to the high-speed dubbing of analogue audio cassettes.

And it leads to that other challenge worth mentioning: Even though DV is technically a lossy format, it results in really large files.

Funny... I've been contemplating a SLOWER than realtime tape digitizer. Something that would make multiple passes and reconstruct the magnetic domains on the tape with very high certainty.

Yep. Especially a hacked VCR could be made to do this. If one taps the data from the spinning head directly, instead of relying on the VCR to process it into a proper composite signal, I'd say it's even realistic to do this.

Just run the tape at half or a quarter of the speed. The spinning helical head should still produce data. Then it's a matter of assembling it in software.

> The harder part is now getting a computer that will take the firewire (you may have an old laptop -- macs had them until like 08 -- or get a firewire-to-usb2.0 cable or thunderbolt to firewire adapter on amazon)

Modern computers with thunderbolt will take a converted fw stream without any problem. I am using several old fw400 sound interfaces with a string of adapters without any problems, on both mac and pc. The mac laptop has tb built in, for my workstation pc (Windows 10) I bought a PCI Express io adapter for 30 euro. Works perfectly.

Sound interface -> fw400 -> fw800 -> tb -> tb3 -> mac|pc

YMMV with video, but I can't think of why it wouldn't work. I haven't tried a converter.

Thanks so much for the advice! I'll keep my eyes posted for a camcorder.

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