My problem (among my problems) is finding that my analog hi-8 camcorder no longer works. I captured my more-recent mini-dv tapes but now have nothing to play the hi-8s.
Looks like I’ll have to buy a hi-8 on eBay, rip, and then sell on eBay. What a pita.
Maybe I’ll join AARP to see if they have a hi-8 loaner program 
I tried that before wasn’t happy with the results. Found then exporting only some tracks to cassette and reimporting sounded better.
20 bucks sure is an okay price point. Might be able to do better, but really, just look at it. There it is.
Good luck with your ongoing and evolving art project!
Yeah…put it on a seagate drive…that’ll keep.
Seriously, you see these dystopian SyFi movies and books about all knowledge lost…and wonder ‘how can that happen’ …Well…digital media is how that happens.
I have boxes of old photos from the 1920’s…and film movies from 50’s and 60’s. still fine.
What are we supposed to do with all our digital media for generational storage. Will it be a thing you have to hand over to grand kids or relatives to maintain a ‘family back up media storage device’. Because frankly…I can barely trust my nephew to drive a car to pick up a cat from the vet, much less maintain a backup drive forever.
I use old macs with PCI capture cards. The quality was great for the price, but they are often really picky about the speed of the host computer, drive and QuickTime versions, etc. This winter I captured a few tapes - music by Billy Idol and Cabaret Voltaire, as well as tutorials for ancient versions of Cubase and Logic.
A few things to keep in mind:
Signal quality! It is not determined only by using good tape and storing it well. Besides color and light there are also signals for sync and blanking. As well as copy protection schemes which can deliberately screw up the signal quality to be just good enough to watch, but not capture. That’s what time-base correctors are for, they strip away the timing signals and replace them with clean ones. They are invaluable for digitizing tapes. I know because my TBC is broken. (cries) Amazingly rare video dubbed multiple generations can have horrendous sync which causes capture without TBC to fail and leave an empty blue screen.
Capture codec! How much processing is being applied to your video before it become a digital file? And how easy/difficult does this codec make subsequent processing that you might choose to do? The best-looking is uncompressed motion-JPEG, but the resulting files are so huge that only “pro” cards have usually offered this, IIRC maybe 50+GB/hour, but storage is cheap these days. The less transcoding you need to do, the easier it will be to edit your byteage and maintain quality. Proprietary/obscure codecs limit the useful lifetime of the capture device if they are not updated. I try to avoid any capture compression stronger than MPEG2. MP4 or H.264 are modern and great for the final product, but IMO they throw away too much data.
Yeah it’s a long shot (which is why it’s still in the garage). I think a lot would depend on the unit and how good the audio hardware is on it.
I used to use this unit to mixdown to stereo from a Tascam 4 track back in the day, and I was happy with the results then, but that was decades ago and I knew a lot less than I thought I did!
I’ve done a fair number of conversions using my two Nicam VCRs (just lent to a mate so he can do similar) - I even bought a fairly rare BBC VHS (not on DVD or YouTube) recently on eBay just to convert it. I record them onto my PVR (Panasonic) burn them to a DVD-RAM and then copy the ‘big’ file to my PC and rename it to and mp4 - worked a treat. And I’ve just rememebred that historically I used an old ATI 9800 AIW with AV-in
Actually I have many boxes of VHS that I’m working on digitizing through 3 DVR/DVD-Rs I have. There are many TV series that were never released on DVD, plus many televised concerts, and sometimes I like to see the commercials from the 90s.
If you have need for something like this, you might check to see if your local library has the gear to do it- mine does. Might save you some coin in buying the gear yourself.
Damn. It’s two versions out of date: It doesn’t support Windows 9, either.
Would that be the Panasonic with the DVD player/burner and HDD, with inbuilt edit capabilities on HDD? Mine is DMR- E85H. Went through two of them (something on the PSU was alway a weakness, and I made Panasonic UK rebuild one, once, at their expense). A third came from a family member and is still working! At one time quite a few people were advertising repairs 'cos they knew that 99 times out of 100 it was a particular resistor or capacitor or whatever that was always the problem.
I also used to do VHS editing on two Panasonic NICAM VCR’s (NV-FS100) from amateur 2- camera shoots. Put the master on one and you could cut in pretty much almost frame accurate inserts from the tape from camera 2. Happy days.
About to set up a rig with a VCR (one of the 4 or 5 still here somewhere must work!) connected to the Panasonic HDD/DVD unit, to move a load of VHS family home movies to disc, edit to DVD and then burn DVD to PC hard disk and sundry copies/backups. Fingers crossed.
Edited for typoooos
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