Has anyone backed up their video8 tapes onto DVD or iMovie using Roxio or Elgato?

[LizB from MT]

I am starting on my New Year's Resolution of 2008, trying to save my precious home videos made on Video 8, Video Hi8, some mini-dvd, and even a few VHS tapes. I have been reading about Roxio Easy VHS to DVD (macworld.com/5287) and Elgato Video Capture )macworld.com/5288) and can't find any non-commercial reviews of either. Which one gives the best DVD of these old cassettes?
Then I read the thread started by jrmyeh "Can't find a way to make lossless backups of miniDV tapes using my Mac..." I read through it and got more discouraged. No one makes any mention of these two analog to digital to USB hardware/software.

So, Can anyone give me advice on how to make the best quality copies of "baby first steps" types of old home video X 5?
Thank you,
Liz from Montana

 

[huntercr]

I am starting on my New Year's Resolution of 2008, trying to save my precious home videos made on Video 8, Video Hi8, some mini-dvd, and even a few VHS tapes. I have been reading about Roxio Easy VHS to DVD (macworld.com/5287) and Elgato Video Capture )macworld.com/5288) and can't find any non-commercial reviews of either. Which one gives the best DVD of these old cassettes?
Then I read the thread started by jrmyeh "Can't find a way to make lossless backups of miniDV tapes using my Mac..." I read through it and got more discouraged. No one makes any mention of these two analog to digital to USB hardware/software.

So, Can anyone give me advice on how to make the best quality copies of "baby first steps" types of old home video X 5?
Thank you,
Liz from Montana

The reason you didn't hear about that software is that jryeh is using miniDV, which is a digital format. There's no need to use those video tools because you can just use iMovie to pull off the DV video directly. ( except that he only had a newer version of iMovie that did not permit this at full quality )

You're going in the right direction with your situation which is analog. You can also use a DV camera that supports Analog->Digital passthrough to do this very easily ( if you know of a friend that might have a camera you can borrow ) or seek out a Canopus ADVC-110, Datavideo DAC-1xx, but these 3 options only work if you have a Firewire port on you Mac.

The Elgato device is not preferred because the format it outputs is H.264. If you are wanting to edit your videos and convert them to DVD, this is not the route to go and still preserve quality.
If you were wanting to put your videos on the web or a media device like an ipod, the Elgato would be best suited.

The Roxio device is actually an MPEG2 encoder, and will produce superior quality videos, but not anything that is easily editable ( beyond the features of Rxio's tool ). So is is a very good solution if you are literally wanting to do what the program advertises.... converting your videos to DVD, and that's IT.

It all depends on the flexibility you want after you convert the videos. Keep in mind, as that other thread goes into... DV video takes up alot of space ( 12.5GB per hour ) so you have to plan for what you actually want to DO with your video if you go that route!

Hope this helps!

 

[notjustjay]

Agreed, DV is probably the best way to go.

If you can find a converter (like the Canopus device) or a pass-through on a miniDV camcorder (play from a Hi8 camcorder into the video inputs of a DV camcorder, and then capture that video stream over Firewire into your computer), or find a Digital8 camcorder, then capturing the raw DV stream and saving that to a hard drive is probably the best bet.

As I mentioned in the other thread, a 1 TB hard drive can store about 77 hours of video in full DV quality and can easily be had for under $100.

In fact now that I've typed this out a few times I realize that I need to put my money where my mouth (finger?) is and get to work on this myself, as I too have a stack of Video8 and Digital8 and miniDV tapes that are sitting on a shelf slowly rotting.