does anyone know how I might transfer video from some old style Sony camcorder Video8 tapes, onto a DVD. I know there are bureaux that will do this, but they want $60 to $80 a tape which will turn out quite expensive as I have a dozen or so tapes.
I understand there are some video production programs that will do this sort of thing, but the cheaper ones tend to accept input only from Mini DV type tapes rather than the old style Video8 format.
Any ideas much appreciated. Even if I have to buy a prog, it seems it will be the cheaper option.
Or you could try one of these you can get them from most electronic shops
Capture and edit video from analogue devices
With EasyCap USB video grabber, you can capture high quality video and audio files from your analogue devices such as VHS, V8 and Hi8 directly and transfer them to your computer via USB. You can then save them in digital formats such as MPEG1/2 for easy viewing, sharing and uploading to the internet, or copy them to DVD. Don't let your outdated videos go to waste when you can preserve, share, store and edit them on your PC! Record to DVD, VCD and more!
High speed rendering and real time performance means less time waiting and more time creating. With this package you can copy, edit, create and render your video files and then burn them onto disc (providing your computer has a burner). Includes professional video editing software
The professional video editing software that comes in this pack provides a simple, effective means of editing your video files. It also makes editing your movies as fun as shooting them. The new software helps novice users add polish to their film clips in a few seconds. Share finished projects on DVD, the web and on mobile devices. Features:
EasyCap USB 2.0 Video Adapter with Audio.
Copy video from your VCR to your PC for burning to DVD or sharing.
Turn your analogue videos into digital videos on your PC.
Simple operation via high speed USB 2.0.
High speed rendering.
Copy, edit, create and render your video files in minutes.
Preserve old analogue videos from VHS, V8, Hi8 and more.
Includes ULEAD video editing software.
Share your finished products on DVD.
Includes cables, drivers, editing software.
Includes Ulead Video Studio 10.0 SE DVD.
Hot plug and play.
Supports brightness, contrast, hue and saturation control.
thanks so much for those speedy replies. That's a very helpful site Martin. However, on further inspection, I find I have Windows Media Centre edition, and the pc already has a capture card.
So, I've dug out the old camcorder, connected up and played a tape. Upon retuning the "TV" in windows media centre, I can get a pic, but of quite poor quality, by feeding through the regular 75ohm coax cable. I could record this, but it really isn't great, and I believe an improvement may be possible by feeding the a/v through the a/v red, white and yellow connectors on the capture card. Trouble is, I can't seem to get anything on the screen when I do this.
Does anyone know how to get the settings to look at the a/v connectors and capture what's coming through them with Windows media centre edition?
My son and I have been struggling with something similar for weeks, so, I will unashamedly hijack your thread, Paul . But my questions may draw out useful answers for many people trying to do this.
I have a commercial tape that I want converted to DVD.
(OK, it's the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert - only the VHS edition has the full footage of the concert - not the commercially available DVDs.)
It's in NTSC format which my VHS player is playing fine. I have the EasyCap USB video grabber. I can preview on the computer screen in a variety of programs - good picture, good stereo sound. BUT any attempt to capture and it all falls apart. We have twiddled as many options as we can identify but we get nothing, or a captured picture that breaks up and good sound or whatever. We've tried it on a laptop and on a gaming machine with buckets of grunt so it is not a machine speed/memory problem. We've captured as MPEG and as AVI.
So far, all the searching for hints on the net hasn't helped. We are guessing it is a matter of choosing the correct number of lines (NTSC versus PAL) and a few other settings.
Anyone want to suggest which parameters may be the problem here?
Just in case anyone is interested in doing this for themselves with old analogue style camcorder tapes, I thought I might just make a last post to let people know that the EzCap video grabber for $24.95 from .... www.crazysales.com.au works an absolute treat. It comes with some quite good editting software too.
OK, I have a confession to make, and a question to ask.
As will be evident from earlier posts, I have an assortment of older analogue 8mm tapes that I want to put onto dvds for ease of viewing. I got one tape converted by a proper professional bureau here in Perth for $60, - just so I'd have something to compare my own transfers to.
And I must say that the Bureau produced dvd has a much better quality of video than the two or three that I've produced using the EzyGrabber mentioned in the thread. During the 'grabbing' process, you can of course view the tape contents, which look fine. But by the time you've put the file to dvd, something has been lost in the process and the video quality is noticably poorer than the one from the Bureau.
The s/w that comes with the grabber prices mpeg files, as are the ones on the bureau dvd.
Anyone have any ideas about what else I could dabble with to improve quality. I don't fancy paying 60 buckeroonies a pop for the remaining 11 tapes.
I use a system from Pinnacle called Studio Plus. It came at the time with a HW analog card to plug the old type cameras in there. I converted tones of tapes to DVD from the kids, old weddings, etc.... It works well but it's tedious. You have to play each tape and capture. There's no other way around it. Once it's in digital format then you can do any encoding you wish. The source is uncompressed DV [AVI] ao you have no loss in quality. Any stock Hard Drive will capture without any dropped frames so acquisition is fine.
I have used a number of different video cards to capture my old VHS tapes. The quality of these tapes is very poor compared to the modern digital capture methods. The analogue resolution is normally about 300 lines. If you have the equipment to separate the color recording from the luminance and enhance it before recombining it you can get some improvement in resolution.
If you only have an RF connection to the receiver (un-used TV channel) there will be further loss in resolution. This method is not the way to go
However without this the best results will be had if there is an "S" video connection facility. This does give separate luminance and color (don't forget to connect the sound as well).
Once this is captured and stored on your HDD you can view it to see the end result.
Making a real DVD out of this is a long process with all the DVD making programs I have used (The free type that come with the DVD R/W). It involves adding the pieces you want in the sequence you want into a format for recording with title page etc. A process that takes a couple of hours for me.
However I have used another simpler method that still takes at least the time of the recording. Some of the DVD recording programs have a facility for making a direct recording (good for copying your VHS tapes onto disk).
I have had some of my old 8mm movies 1960 vintage copied (pirated) onto a commercial DVD that is sometimes available from ABC stores. I know the maker and he got them from someone that I had loaned them to. I would have appreciated a mention in the credits but so far it hasn't happened
I can also give you a DVD I made a few years ago from a number of clips I made into a movie. It also has a copy of a 1976 BBC program called "Race to the North". I tried to get a copy from the BBC but they don't seem to know it any more. However this was recorded onto a Phillips tape, then a Beta and finally onto a VHS tape so it lost a lot of resolution (as well as many drop outs). It is mainly to show what can be done with old stuff that has historical value.
The old camcorders (Pre ccd) used a single pickup vidicon with a stripe filter that processed the video into a luminance channel, from all the video, a red channel, the info filtered from the red stripes and a blue channel filtered from the blue stripes. The green channel was had by subtracting the red and blue from the luminance. This was quite a simple mattrix arrangement actually.
The vidicons used had a maximum resolution of around 400 lines which was used for the luminance but seldom achieved. The color component had a resolution of only a third of this 130 lines. Color thus was a compromise. Noticed by the smearing of high saturation color areas.
This process gave reasonably acceptable pictures on small screens but rather poor results on modern large screens.
Commercial firms with expensive digital processing equipment however can do wonders in enhancing the separate output of the color and luminance channels to recover information in the original video that is not visible in the simple analogue versions.
Multiwebb Marc is right, Pinnacle had a video capture that lost little if any analogue - I had two versions from different eras - I'll check and see if the software is still in my archive - I think I still have the hardware but I'm not sure!
OK - I don't have the hardware - but I do have some of the software - would you like me to make you a copy?
This software is probably only useable with win 98 or maybe 2000 - but you may be able to get fixes -
Other than the video capture cards mentioned already, see if you can borrow an old Sony Digital 8 video camera.
I have one and it will play the old 8 mm camcorder tapes (I had one of those as well) and output to digital (firewire in this case). I had thought that they actually do passthrough (i.e. take an anologue signal from elsewhere, convert it to digital and output through firewire) but it didn't do that last time I tried.
The main problem I have had converting old SVHS and VHS tapes to digital format was a loss of sync between video and audio. The only way I could fix this was to use a capture device which had some type of time base corrector (TBC). I ended up buying a canopus ADVC-300 which has a linear TBC and some other options to tweak the video before digital conversion.
This is a costly device so is only an option if you have a lot of work for it do. Any device with a TBC should fix sync problems.
Thanks so much to Marc, Barry, Jennifer, Stuart and Erick for your very kind and helpful suggestions. Since I'm a technical vacuum, I think Stuart's idea of getting hold of a Sony Digital 8 video camera sounds like something I can possibly arrange.
I don't know the technical jargon, but it's definitely something to do with the capture process as when I play the captured video directly from the 'timeline' of the project, - if I put it on full screen display, the crappy quality is clearly visible there on the pc screen. So it's definitely not anything to do with the process of putting it onto dvd.
I'll see what I can manage with the Sony Digital 8 option, and report back. Thanks so much to all who have taken the trouble to offer suggestions.
My son and I have been struggling with something similar for weeks, so, I will unashamedly hijack your thread, Paul . But my questions may draw out useful answers for many people trying to do this.
I have a commercial tape that I want converted to DVD.
(OK, it's the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert - only the VHS edition has the full footage of the concert - not the commercially available DVDs.)
It's in NTSC format which my VHS player is playing fine. I have the EasyCap USB video grabber. I can preview on the computer screen in a variety of programs - good picture, good stereo sound. BUT any attempt to capture and it all falls apart. We have twiddled as many options as we can identify but we get nothing, or a captured picture that breaks up and good sound or whatever. We've tried it on a laptop and on a gaming machine with buckets of grunt so it is not a machine speed/memory problem. We've captured as MPEG and as AVI.
So far, all the searching for hints on the net hasn't helped. We are guessing it is a matter of choosing the correct number of lines (NTSC versus PAL) and a few other settings.
Anyone want to suggest which parameters may be the problem here?
. But my questions may draw out useful answers for many people trying to do this. 
not good Mikey - I'll see if that is the problem.
