I was hoping that maybe someone out there can help me understand how to transfer my home movies (Hi8mm) to dvd's. I have never tried it. I wanted to see if I could get some good advice or tips on how to this easily. According to my DVD Burner I can basically hook up my camera to the burner and transfer??? Can anyone help? This would be great, those little tapes laying around are very annoying and a major pain to replay when you want to watch and enjot!
ive been having the same problem, cept i cant stream stuff from my camera to computer, where i would edit them
my suggestion is, uless you have a good 2 hours on hand for each tape is to bring it on down to your local photo shop and have them transfer it for you, only 5 bucks or so, but your choice, editing and re encoding will be a pain in the @ss though
Thanks for the info. I had no idea that I could that!! Who do recommend? Is there well known, world-wide store that maybe will be in my area NC. But thanks anyway, I will probably just do that and not worry about wasting my time. I have very little anyway! Ha
There are loads of commercial outfits that will do it for you. Even if they are not in your neighbourhood, you can send the tapes by mail and they will return your tapes plus DVD by mail also.
But they will make back-to-back copies, no editing.
If you still want to do it yourself (I did loads of tapes myself, because I insist on editing to avoid having a lot of DVD's that are uninteresting to watch), here's an article how to get your Hi8 stuff onto your PC: http://www.digitalvideoclub.com/basics/transfer.php
If you do decide to convert your own Hi8mm tapes to DVD (recommeded, good learning experiance in my view :)
Hi8mm is an Analogue device, the videos that are recorded on your 8mm tapes are analogue. In order to convert this video to Digital, the signal needs to be converted to a digital one, this is done with a piece of hardware generaly called a "Digitizer", more specifically in or case it is called a Video capture card, (please note this is not the same as a Graphics Card, though rather confusinly some Graphics card have a video capture facility).
You will need to decide on what video capture card you want to get, and they vary in price, due to quality Vs price and as always you will need to make your own choice depending on your requirments.
Generally speaking try to look out for capture cards that capture full resoltion 720*576 if your in the UK/Europe PAL resolution or 640*480 NTSC (America and Japan) because some cheaper cards only capture half D1 or half the resolution of PAL and NTSC.
Once you have a capture card, you will requre the correct connectin between your Hi8 camera and capture card. The Connection requied will depend on the interface your capture card will accept/ or has. Again generally speaking capture cards have two main types of interfaces, namley
any good electrical retailer should be able to get your the right connection, again you have to know what kind of inteface your HI8mm has first!, but usually camcorders come with all the needed cables to connect to your TV/VHS, and usually they are either Composite or S-Video.
As a tip, try to use S-Video if possible as it should yeild better results.
Next up is the software, and again there is many, many software out there, you will need to do your research on which is the best, again this really depends on your needs. Most will do the job, just some will do it better than others.
At some point after OR during capture it will need to be in the DVD format, thus some capure software allows "real-time" encoding, what this means is that as you capture, you actually capture to the DVD format saving you time from having to later convert to the DVD format. As always there is a downside, as real-time mpeg capture is CPU intense you will need a very powerful computer and the results will never really be good as "off-line" conversion.
Finally I would like to mention that there are other methods, these are:
(1) Use the pass through function of a MiniDV camera to capture your Hi8 footage
(2) Connect to a standalone DVD recorder and hit Record (But wheres the fun in that ? :)
Hey thanks Anhar for all that info!
I can go ahead and tell ya, that is alot of work and I am not sure I can get it accomplished. There is a lot more to it than I thought there would be. I will definitely be checking out those places online to do it for me! Ha! Well Thanks so much for your input.
I am glad someone knows what their doing.
