Archiving Hi8/ Digital 8 tapes

Hello to all,
What's the best way to archive hi8/digital 8 tapes? thru Imovie6 or Imovie8? I do have tons of these tapes. If I saved these at an external drive thru I movie6, can I export them to Final Cut Express? I know it's easy to browse them at Imovie8 but i'm not a big fan of it.
Any advise is greatly appreciated.
Thank you

What is your ultimate goal with this video footage? You can import into iMovie from a digital 8 camcorder, and you can probably get the Hi8 tapes imported also if the digital 8 camcorder can play them.
See this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6256392&#6256392
But, movies take up lots of drive space. An hour of iMovie in DV format will take up 13 GB, before you do any editing. Most of my iMovie 6 movies are close to 2 hours long, and can be anywhere from 20 to 60 GB, depending on how much editing, how many audio and video clips, etc.
You can easily see that about 10 edited iMovies quickly fill up a drive. Considering that you will probably want to do a bit of editing of the raw footage, you will be importing all of it, and will also quickly fill up your drive, before you get 'tons of these' into it. Why not just keep the tapes as they are until you are ready to use them? The tapes are small, easy to store, and as long as you keep the digital camcorder to import them, you will be fine.
I am getting close to finishing putting all our family photo and videos on DVDs, chronologically, 26 years' worth of video! I have last year and this year to complete, then I need to go back and do a couple of DVDs with some really old photos and some slides.
Much of the earlier video footage was on VHS tapes. Those do seem to degrade over time, so I wanted to get those in digital format quickly. I chose to copy each VHS tape to several miniDV tapes using my miniDV camcorder connected to a VCR and TV so I could view it there also. This way I could preserve the VHS videos and not worry about them worsening before I could get to them in my iMovie-making. Also, occasionally I need to import some footage again into a different movie, and it is nice to have those DV tapes ready to go.
I also had some Hi8 analog tapes, and I did the same with them because I don't have a digital 8 camcorder. The Hi8 tapes are still great and had no degradation at all.
Now, to make all my DVDs, I import the DV tape footage, using my miniDV camcorder, into iMovie. I import about an hour's worth depending on the particular events.
Sometimes I can get an entire year's photos and videos in one movie, and sometimes I need to make several movies for a particular year.
Because I don't want to fill my external drive with video footage, nor with finished iMovies, after I burn them to DVDs, I export the finished iMovies back out to DV tapes and save those. I am a bit paranoid about losing my movies, so I have my all of my DVD projects saved as disk images....on two different hard drives. Because I have the ability to burn any of my projects from its disk image, and I have the entire edited iMovie on tape, I can safely delete the original iMovie and iDVD projects, saving a lot of drive space.

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  • Hi8 and digital8 tapes to DVD

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