A lot of our old footage and work from the 90s rave scene was stored on hi8 video tapes. We have a large collection of our work and just random footage recorded during those times. In order to restore or convert this old archived footage we need a hi8 camcorder capable of digital transfers via firewire. At first this seemed like an easy tasks, find a camera that has firewire capabilities and use it to convert the tapes. In reality this turned out to be a bit more difficult primarily due to the fact that not every digital8 camera equipped with firewire is capable of hi8 playback. There lies the problem. Fortunately Wikipedia has a list of digital8 cameras that support such playback. Ebay is of course full of digital8 cameras, so it seemed a simple enough task to find one that supports hi8 playback and had a firewire port. The reality is that many listing out there are inaccurate; folks are not looking at the model number underneath their camera when posting an auction. As a result of this we ended up with a camera that was not the right model, although the seller listed in the description that it was indeed a model that supported the features we desired. Back to the seller it went and our search continued.
We finally found a nice hi8/digital8 camera that supports digitizing via firewire and we are the proud owners of Sony DCR-TRV510. We also purchase a cheap firewire card for our PC and the fun begins!
So what is the best way to actually bring in footage via firewire into a modern PC? well of course a very old piece of software that surprisingly still works and works pretty well. Plus it is free…. WinDV made in the Czech Republic works great. It is very simple, no fancy bells and whistles, it just does the work. We’ve used it successfully to digitize close to 50 hours of video footage (including some old family videos). We did encounter minor issues with the PCI-E firewire card as it sometimes would disappear from our system but seemed to “re-appear” after a quick reboot of the system. Probably a driver issue.
One thing to note is that hi8/digital8 resolution is pretty bad by today’s standards. There is not much you can do about that unfortunately. I know some folks spend considerable time upconverting 400 NTSC lines to modern resolutions but it will never look HD, not even close. On the other hand it is probably worthwhile to work on noise reduction and cleanup if the quality of the footage is bad. Luckily in our case we use the best quality tapes back in the day and never re-used nor re-recorded footage multiple times. Now that all of our video is in digital format we’ll convert some of our work and upload it to YouTube in the next couple weeks.