8mm cassettes out the wazoo!!

Question

I have about 26 8mm cassettes ranging from the years of 1993-2002, I am trying to figure out the best way to get them digitized and saved, I also have 2 mini dv tapes which went pretty good importing into imovie and saved well, so I am happy with those and think I will hold on to the tapes just to be safe, also my current camcorder is a mini dv and will be for awhile.
I have a 500 external drive that I plan on using to stock edited versions these 2 movies as well as all the 8mm, edited and shortened of course and plan on viewing with my sons ps3 or an apple tv.
I am trying to figure out if I was to import 8mm cassette footage from a 8mm camcorder to a mini dv camcorder with pass through ability will these movies be as big and as good as my mini dv which to be around 15 gig per hour and great quality.
I also for safety will be backing these 8mm tapes not only on external but either dvds (just as a dv file not viewable on a tv) or onto mini dv tapes, if I do this I would import video to the mini dv and make a mini dv tape and then use firewire to capture to computer, only because when I export to tape from imovie, it is bad to say the least.
So is all this fuss really worth it, will the quality of the original 8mm tapes look better and really be in dv format, or should I just use a dvd recorder and burn to dvd?
I have 2 dvds from before and well after opening them with handbrake and encoding the quality seems worse than the dvd.
Please help...I want to save all this footge of my babies as best as I can.
Message was edited by: rwltrz4

Answer 1

rwltrz4 wrote:
.. So is all this fuss really worth it, will the quality of the original 8mm tapes look better and really be in dv format, or should I just use a dvd recorder and burn to dvd?
there's no technical process which will enhance the quality of video by some conversion process (aside some voodoo in C.S.I. ... ) so, best quality is allways accomplished by going 'straight'.. if you own a dvd-corder which allows input from analogue-sources as your 8mm devcie - use that, avoid all that converting stuff..
if you want to edit your old tapes, avoid the inbetween step of creating dvds and import that.. dvds use a playback codec (mp2), which is lossy when it comes to editing.. (e.g. it doesn't store every full frame of your 30 frames per second video.. content has to be 'estimated' = lossy process, drop of quality).
again, for editing, go straight from analogue to dv (using your set-up), edit it, then create dvds.
best long time storage strategy: keep the original tapes and a playback device in some dry place
best long time 'digital' storage strategy: convert to dv, keep .dv files (NOT iM projects) on some harddrives in a dry place .. backup every year, convert to new disk/storage devices every 4 years (anyone remembering 5 ¼ " 'floppies'? just 10y ago ... )