Capturing and Archiving MiniDV Tapes on macOS | Hacker News Reader

Capturing and Archiving MiniDV Tapes on macOS

leolabs.org

86 pointss4i31 comments

One suggestion - as DV is an interlaced format, conversion to AVC/HEVC should perform a double-framerate deinterlace. ffmpeg supports yadif, which handles this quite well, pass it mode=send_field (for "output one frame per field) and parity=bff (as DV, whether PAL or NTSC, is always bottom field first). As all frames should usually be considered interlaced, the deint parameter (which can deinterlace only marked-as-interlaced frames) can be omitted.

I see people converting SD video all the time and dropping half the fields because "well, it says 29.97fps!". The only time this is not an issue with DV is if the tape was recorded with a camera that has either a progressive 30fps or 24fps setting enabled.

Edit: Wow, I don't know how to read. I see the author already did this. I'm just so used to people getting it wrong that I overlooked the fact that you got it right. I'll leave this here to take my karma lumps lol

Alternatively you can just encode them interlaced as that's what the camera recorded the video as - AVC supports this, don't think HEVC does. My DV archives are encoded as interlaced AVC and I let the player's hardware or software deinterlacing take care of it.

I haven’t really explored the interlaced side of AVC. While I do like to preserve a properly interlaced version when possible, I also figured deinterlacing to the field rate sidesteps any weird issues with interlaced content that various players might exhibit.

All of the 24P I've seen in DV is done using a 3:2 or 3:2:2:3 pull-down so for that you do still need to get the fields and do the inverse telecine.

You had the right mind to bring it to people's attention - it is such a common issue that gets overlooked.

> Connecting Mini FireWire to a modern MacBook with only USB-C ports takes a few adapters to achieve:

> Thunderbolt 3 -> Thunderbolt 2

> Thunderbolt 2 -> FireWire 800

> FireWire 800 -> FireWire 400

> FireWire 400 -> Mini FireWire

Ummm... Lol yeah I suppose you could do that.

I just used my old 2010 MBP which has a firewire port :)

But indeed older Macs are pretty ideal for this as FireWire is an integrated part of the ecosystem.

What was actually quite difficult is obtaining old versions of iMovie and QuickTime. I still had the old OS images, but Apple makes it impossible to get old versions from the app store. If you look for iMovie it just shows the latest version which is no longer supported for my old macOS (the latest my MBP could run) so it's a dead end.

Eventually I found a link on Apple's site with a ZIP file of the iMovie files, and I needed to do something else to actually make it work (extracting and moving to /Applications wasn't enough). I don't remember exactly. It was a bit of a PITA but in the end I got it.

I'm just using a cheap USB2-to-firewire cable on my Linux laptop. Works well.

Oh does that work ok? I'd have thought it might cause issues with overhead, as USB2 is only 80 Mbit more than Firewire 1. But the protocol for USB has more overhead.

But of course a MiniDV stream doesn't use the whole 400 mbit.

I'll look into that as I don't think my 2010 MBP will live forever and it's the last thing I have with firewire.

DV ISTR is something like 25 megabits a second, 50 if its one of the pro varieties.

Can you provide an example of such a device? I have yet to see any adapter other than those with a firewire jack on one end and USB plug on the other, but no protocol conversion/bridging/etc going on (and likely to ruin your day, given FW power runs at 12V and USB at 5V)

Great work and a good reference. I wish I had this to read when I went through a similar process after growing tired of storing a couple hundred miniDV tapes I had recorded as a teenager. Unfortunately I was not yet skilled enough to dive into the command line and so was using premiere pro and Lifeflix with great frustration. The endless problems (scene detection splitting clips on every glitch, wearing out player heads in multiple miniDV cameras and having to buy more, the ridiculous amount of time required capturing at 1x and being unable to really do it passively because of these issues) caused me to give up and send the whole lot into a digitizing service. For a few hundred bucks I got back DVDs and downloadable files of each tape and was done. I didn’t have as much granular control over the capturing method or codec used etc, but honestly it was a major weight off my shoulders that I had been continuously starting and then putting off for a decade so I consider it money extremely well spent.

After reading this article this morning, I received a phone call this afternoon from a producer friend asking for assitance capturing miniDV tapes. I kind of got shivers from the coincidence of it all. Luckily, this person still has a 2006 MacPro OS X Snow Leopard and FCP7. That also means the firewire is directly on the tower (no dongle chain required). However, the studio deck he has doesn't have firewire. Back to the storage closet, viola. Aja PCI-X interface card with breakout box. SDI it is. No firewire means 9pin deck control cable. Not one to be found in any of the boxes. Anyone wanna place over/under on finding something tomorrow at Micro Center?

So dear author, I feel your pain! I'm starting to think your approach might be more sane than what I'm about to do ;-)

I did this (with the same daisy chain of connectors, without the protector) last year and it worked pretty well.

iMovie actually splits the tape up per segment and even tries to datetime stamp the files. You quickly realize how much people didn't set the correct time on their cameras :)

MiniDV is a lot less fun to archive because the files are already digital. A more fun project is digitizing old VHS tapes. With the right setup you can double the framerate and upscale a little bit and bring a HUGE breath of fresh air to them. Here is the guide I followed:

https://macilatthefront.blogspot.com/2018/09/tutorial-4-sd-t...

Recent thread on doing this with Linux as well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27956874

I found this a bit strange:

> iMovie and Final Cut support capturing from MiniDV and write the data straight to disk without any modification, but they didn't work out for me for two reasons:

> There was no way to turn down the audio while a tape was being imported

When I did a similar exercise (on an older Mac that had a FireWire port), iMovie worked quite well. Since the import happens in real time (a 60-minute recording will take 60 minutes to import), the audio and video are played on the camcorder. All I had to do was reduce the volume on the camcorder to prevent it from being too loud. There was no audio output from iMovie on the Mac during the import.

Tip: If you can get a Mac with iMovie '06 (as opposed to iMovie '08), use that. The older version of iMovie is better (not as much dumbed down) than the newer version.

Acquaintance bought some used minDV tapes off ebay; decided to look at a couple to see if there was anything on them...

Veterinary Endoscope videos.

the story was worth more than the tapes

I find this fascinating. Back in the day - (2004-2009) - I absolutely loved using iMovie, and eventually Final Cut Express - with my G4 Mac Mini - the ease of use of the software and speedy FireWire 800 importing made for really fun times making skits with friends.

The iMovie of that era really was spectacular. It was such a perfect balance between power and simplicity.

EDIT: The story of how iMovie got nerfed is an interesting one: iMovie '08 began as an engineer's side project to build a tool that could put together a movie more quickly. So it did away with the more powerful features. Apparently leadership liked it so much they decided to make it the new iMovie.[1]

[1]: https://youtu.be/LSVJfn-BiYE?t=2168

So he’s the guy to blame for ruining the hell out of one of Apple’s best software offerings ever. Grr.

I think I had dozens of MiniDV tapes? I think I used dvgrab with some parameters. It looks like that was linux-only, and part of the now-defunct kino project. I'm glad I ripped them all a few years ago.

If you happen across an old DVR that burns to DVD the process is much simpler, plus you get a diversified backup that can be read by practically anything.

I was lucky enough to pick up a Sony RDR-HXD870 at a charity shop. It has a firewire input on the front and a one touch system to transfer the tapes to DVD. No muss, no fuss, all the tapes I had of the kids transferred to a NAS by ripping the DVDs afterwards.

I did this over three Christmas holidays, with the hardware I had available each time — Windows, Linux and Mac. The results are pretty much the same.

Is there a lossless format that's smaller than the original DV? The 1.5TB I have is still annoying to handle.

>Is there a lossless format that's smaller than the original DV? The 1.5TB I have is still annoying to handle.

Been a long time since I dealt with it, I converted all my remaining DV at long last start of the decade, so I might be fuzzy here. But IIRC the DV video codec itself was some 90s-era lossy, and the audio was flat out uncompressed. Before doing anything else I'd try doing something at the filesystem level, like putting it on a ZFS fs with big (at least 1 MB) records and a somewhat more aggressive compression like zstd-3 and see what happens. Even though video and audio is normally a very bad match for general reversible compression, for really old partly raw stuff you might get some level of savings for free which maybe would be good enough. Worth poking anyway since it'd be so lazy, I'd try it myself if I hadn't converted it all already.

For actual reencode, if you want real lossless try taking a look at x265's lossless (and near-lossless) modes [0]. Gonna be bigger than even ultra high quality lossy but should still offer improvement over DV. For the audio probably just use FLAC. You can put both into an mkv. If you can be satisfied with visually lossless then of course you can do much better, but that depends on whether you might want to use it as a source for more editing down the road.

Finally, not sure what you mean by "annoying to handle" but 1.5TB isn't actually that much anymore. Are you sure you can't just throw hardware at it? Even a basic 2TB NVMe SSD right now is <$180 (and that's including a premium from the supply chain shortage, I bought cheaper drives last spring). Entry NVMe drives might be 30-50% the speed of higher end ones, but that still equates to gigabytes per second of sequential r/w which is what you'll be leaning on for video. Compared to the value of your time and futzing with it, just putting it on a stick or two might be worth it, particularly if you then back it up to Backblaze or Glacier or the like.

miniDV was around 25mbps with a shite codec by modern standars. going from miniDV to AVC with x264 would save tremendous amounts of space. HEVC would do wonders as well. HEVC transcoding will take you another 3 xmas holidays if you start now ;-)

Is HEVC really the best option for a long term format that will still be readable in a decade or three? Something more open and standardized seems preferable.

I chose HEVC for this article because all modern devices can play it, it’s very storage-efficient, and it can be nicely imported into Apple Photos. However, I’m also keeping the original .dv files in case a better codec is developed in the future.

MPEG-1 and -2 are still largely readable nowadays (even if the OS doesn't always include the codec) and they're a lot older. I don't see AVC or HEVC going anywhere, either. They both have tons of hardware support. Hell, Xvid AVI still floats around the pirate scenes sometimes

Why do you feel HEVC is any less viable than AVC? At this point in time, as long as you have a digital file and a copy of FFMPEG (the Swiss army knife of video), you'll more than likely be able to convert to anything else later.

Will FFMPEG exist in 30 years? Will it still have all the same capabilities it has today? Will it run on modern hardware?

I have more faith in a project like FFMPEG to be around (it's way too embedded in almost everything now) or a viable replacement. Definitely more faith than someone will still be around with a tape deck.

However, that's still not answering why you think HEVC (supported by some puny little company called Apple on all of their hardware) vs any other codec. It's not like they chose Cinepak or something else as ridiculous. It's the most modern codec with the longest legs of viability.

The most modern codec, which is patent-encumbered and supported mainly by one company. If Apple changes their mind about it in 5 years, everyone else might well follow suit. I don’t have concerns like that for open, non-bleeding-edge formats.

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