Converting 8mm videos to digital

[Rich52]

Well I have two different systems so I gues that never occurred to me. I still have my old XP/xeon, at the time the cats rear end, and real time card that allows me to capture and burn automatically. Along with about 800 gigs of SCSI, and 6 terras of FW-800, for both editing and storage. My game system is fast but my only DV add on to that was Vegas 10 and a FW-800 external "turns out I never bothered with gaming videos".

I never did HD. I have two Canon XL2 mini-DVs still sitting here for when I quit events, "fracking marriages were killing me". But for just a plain jane transfer the DVD recorder is probably the best option. Two pices of advice. Always make a copy of your DVD copy. And remember analog tape has a shelf life so dont wait for your kids to do it.

[Shuffler]

You make some good points, Rich52...

I made my recommendation based on my situation, and it was a few years ago.. before firewire was a standard..

The OP mentioned he had a ton of tapes to convert.  That tells me it's not going to be a sit-down a edit each tape for content through the whole collection.    I would envision the approach to get it all digitized, then play with them.

One of the things that make you truly appreciate the speed of 16x write capability is when you're converting the tape at 1x speed.  A 2 hour tape needs 2 hours to convert.  

This is where having an external dvd recorder comes into play, as I sure as heck don't want to tie up my computer for hours on end just converting video from one format to another.  I would set the system up, start the copying process, then go login and pad some AH fighter jock's score with my cartoon victim.  With the CPU horsepower that video seems to devour, I wouldn't have been able to do that if I was using the computer to do the conversion.

Things may be different now with the new machines, but that's still how I'd do it with my current hardware.

Many have multiple machines.... I have 5 online as we speak. When I do video I do it on one machine only. His first task is to get all of it digital. He can come back as time allows and edit it down some. Later he can make nice movies with the edited down items.