Digitizing Analog Video Through a Digital Camcorder | Hacker News Reader

Digitizing Analog Video Through a Digital Camcorder

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15 pointsingve7 comments

Hah! I've done this exact thing with this exact setup, only for digitising Video8 cassettes. Worked like a charm. Shout-out to this amazing tool:

https://linux.die.net/man/1/dvgrab

I've still got a Formac Studio DV which is the perfect device for doing this as well. It's got S-Video and Composite inputs, a Firewire connection for video, and doesn't require any drivers for normal use. I think it's even powered by the FW bus. (It also has a built-in TV tuner, but that required special software. I'd rather use my HDHomeRun for grabbing OTA stuff these days.)

I think I bought all of this back in the mid-2000s when I was thinking of digitizing some video, but the it never happened. All my tests of it went great, though.

Old 2002 overview of the device: https://www.synchrotech.com/support/fomac-notes.html

An excellent summary. I've used this method on whole libraries and it works great. And it makes a good excuse for hanging on to old hardware (a Sony DCR-TRV17).

DCR-TRV33 here ;) unfortunately I got a tape guide roller loose so I can't digitise the MiniDV tapes themselves using that camera at the moment x)

It's ironic reading methods I used back in my elemtary/middle school days as new material nowadays.

It also makes me want to pick up an older imac and older camcorder just to have the proper filter, call me nostalgic but the old 480i videos have a sense of magic to it that todays 4k/8k videos lack.

I just picked up another FireWire card and built a new capture and AI upscaling rig to reprocess the Hi-8s I transferred on a Digital8 a while back (2011ish).

All Linux workflow, of course, so I know I won't have any problems with compatibility with the formats or hardware.

Unlike both Mac and Windows where I've had to either join private trackers or scour archive.org and ebay to try to gather all the odds and ends to recreate a functional environment - and still occasionally failed, like with the captures from a mid-2000s security cam NVR - getting back up and running is as easy as executing a single shell script on Debian.

no mention of Time Base Corrector here...?

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