Capturing from digital 8

settings:

you need to make sure that your capture preset is set to "non controllable device", and also you are going to need some way to get the footage into digital so you can load it on your computer. youll either need an analog to dv converter which usually run around 150 - 300, or youll need a video camera with a firewire connection. you hook your hi8 into the digital video camera, via RCA or S video, and hook the digital video camera into your mac, via firewire. your digital video camera is now acting as a analog to dv converter. also, sometimes old analog tapes get glitches in them, or become out of sync, or have a warped signal, and in that case FCP will hiccup when importing the footage, causeing glitches in your captured clips. a way to get around this is to buy what is called a time base corrector with a frame synchronizer. this will take in the crappy analog signal, and in essence re-write it into a clean analog signal, and feed that clean signal into your dv camera, and into FCP. Most times these signal warps just cause a slight band in the footage, or cause some small part of the screen to warp ever so slightly, but for the most part the footage is still perfectly viewable. so this device rewrites the signal, and what you capture is exactly what you see, warped bands and all. This is nice becuase it doesnt mess up a 20 minute tape that has 20 seconds of glitched footage, FCP will keep on capturing, and instead of hiccuping, it will go right through and record whatever its sees, because now it is receiving a clean signal from the Time base corrector.

I convert a crapload of home movies to DVD, and the TBC is very useful when trying to capture footage unattended, this ensures that everything is captured, and that FCP wont glitch when I am away. hope this helps.

alright crap I just re read your question and saw that it was digital 8, which should have firewire, no? if it doesnt, use the steps, if it does, just import using "FIREWIRE"

- Ryan