Posted 5 hours ago

HI-8 video to digital?

Looking through a box and found a few HI-8 cassettes that were used on an old Sony camcordr many years ago. Still got the camcorder and there are holiday things on there including a visit to the World Trade Centre.
Would ideally like to get these onto my laptop for editing / prosperity.

Seen a few devices on Amazon ranging from £30 to £150+, but do I need something like that? If so, what's easy to use and recommended?

Last time I took thing off HI-8, I had a DVD-RW player that I used to record things from tv and could record directly onto that, but that's long gone.
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  1. TristanDeCoonha's avatar
    Does it have RCA sockets (red, white, yellow)? You can buy RCA to USB leads
  2. AndyRoyd's avatar
    Edit:
    irrelevant Firewire suggestion removed. (edited)
    Pájaro's avatar
    You're maybe mixing Hi8 up with Mini DV. Hi8 is an analogue video format, so capturing via firewire generally won't be possible.
  3. airbus330's avatar
    I have recently been through this procedure converting my miniDV tapes to digital. How you approach it depends on what connections you can make. This is what I did, I have no doubt there are other solutions.
    Easiest Solution. Send them off to a pro who will write them to whatever format you want for around £10 per tape. I did also find some amateurs offering the service on Gumtree for less..
    Elegant Solution. Most miniDV tape and cameras with hard drives used Firewire for high speed transfer to a PC. Firewire is no longer widely fitted and its important to note that a firewire port on a PC is part of a hardware card. This enables the content to be read by the PC. You cannot buy a Firewire to USB convertor off Amazon even though they are for sale, they don't transfer the video in a format that a PC can use. The elegant solution is to have or acquire an old PC that has Firewire on it. They are for sale used on eBay often with WIn95 or Vista. If you have this, its plug'n'play with your videos uploaded as MPEG2 files. Alternatively you can still buy a Firewire card hardware and install it into your PC. I did also note that some less ancient Mac's have Firewire, but didn't investigate this option.

    Non Firewire solutions. I had already used a Pinnacle video capture device to download my VHS-C home movies to PC. No great problem as it is low def to start with, but you do lose even more def doing this. Unfortunately, when I tried this method with the miniDV camera, my PC couldn't handle to data fast enough and ended up with unusable files. There are more expensive versions of video capture devices and the one by Elgato seems to have the best reviews, but I couldn't establish if you needed a better PC than I owned for it to work.

    My eventual solution. I got lucky and was given an old SONY DVD/HDD Recorder. I connected the camera to it using S-Video and Audio and effortlessly transferred all the tapes to the HDD. They are converted and logically stored on the drive and can be connected to a TV for playback. I then burnt all the the recordings to DVD, 2 tapes to 1 DVD. Then ripped the DVDs to my PC and converted them to MPEG4.
    The great thing about this solution was that there was very little loss of quality from the original miniDV recording and you end up with effectively 3 sets of backups from the HDD and the DVDs.
    Hope this helps, its a really labour intensive business and if I'd had only a few tapes I'd have definitely paid to get them transferred..

    EDIT: Should have read OP more closely. I now see u have Hi8 which is analogue, so u only really need the Elgato device or similar to do your transferring. But I'll leave the post in case anyone else has DV video to transfer. (edited)
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