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Originally Posted by Artemis399
Hello, so I am new to this whole camcorder thing and I have a ton of tapes recorded
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How many is a ton? 25, 50, 100, more?
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I have the Canon ES8600A, if that makes a difference.
Every since tape we have plays and gray lines appear on the screen, when gray lines appear the audio cuts out. And this happens with all the tapes we have which is at least 20 tapes. Is this a problem with the tapes themselves or the camcorder?
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Having a well-working Hi8 camera is good. (Always verify it really is working before sticking in your most precious tape. Give it something less important first.) But it sounds as if the camera is NOT working. It's unlikely the tapes. You'll either (a) need another one, or (b) use a service. FYI, we do offer this service. A new camera -- a quality one in good condition, stored properly indoors, clean, dust-free, well cared for, smoke-free home, etc -- is often in the $150 to $250 range.
But having a camera is just part of the process. You need timebase corrections between the camera and capture card, otherwise you'll have dropped frames and quality issues. You can't just plug a camera into the computer, and expect quality results.
And then a good capture card is also needed, and that means NOT getting a cheapo $10 to $30 item from
eBay,
Amazon, Best Buy, etc. Those are all based on EZcap/Easycap, referred to fondly as "easycraps". A quality card is about $75, and won't give you image degradation (loss of color, too bright, bad contrast, etc -- and your Hi8 probably isn't great to begin with, can't afford to make it worse).
Also, the analog source is interlaced, leave it as such, especially for converting to DVD. Never deinterlace it, or at least not the master conversion. Make a 2nd copy for deinterlaced computer viewing.
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Will this appear on the videos when I upload them to digital?
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Yes. What you see from the camera is what you'll get when digitized.
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This is the 100% only reason I want them on digital. It is so annoying trying to watch old family videos when you can't hear it most of the time.
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After conversion, audio can be tweaked in something like Audacity (freeware). Fix that low audio right up.
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Also, I have a tape that has a slight wrinkle, the wrinkle makes the gray lines even worse. However, the gray lines even appear on the non wrinkled tapes.
How would the wrinkled tape be if I
Will it have errors? Is there an easy way to fix it without damaging the video?
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This cannot be fixed. The tape is physically damaged. It may somewhat smooth out after being played a few times, but likely not. And it will never again look proper.
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Terms matter. Hard to understand/research the topic otherwise.
You "capture" video from analog to digital. Sometimes referred to as "transferrring" or "digitizing". At the professional level, it's referred to as "ingest".
Never "upload", never "rip", etc - those terms refer to other things entirely.
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I'm sorry for all of the questions but I have been trying to research this stuff for hours and not finding many answers to my problems. And I would just like to know what to expect before spending money to transfer the videos. Thank you for any replies
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Hopefully that gets you on a better path now.
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Originally Posted by HBB360
Hey! I'm not really an expert so what I say may need to be corrected by the "seniors" but I think it could be both from the tapes and the camcorder. I have old VHS-C tapes which were also used in camcorders which barely play and are black and white with almost no audio. So it can be caused by the age of the tapes
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Your observation is probably not correct here. If the camera behaves badly on all tapes, it's not likely the tapes*.
Also understand that VHS-C and Hi8 have little in common, in terms of tracking, as Video8/Hi8 have no tracking. The alignment data is recorded into the signal, unlike VHS/VHS-C. That extends to audio, tracking noise ("gray lines"), etc.
* For the above non-tracking reason, it's ONLY the tape if the tapes were all recorded on a misaligned deck. But it's too early to assume that, and the camera is more likely at fault. The only way to verify this is by process of elimination, ie another camera or giving a tape to somebody like me that can analyze the situation with multiple cameras.
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but also from dirty video heads. On a VCR, cleaning them is simple but I don't have any idea on how to proceed with a camcorder.
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Dirty heads is almost never the problem. Dirty heads almost always presents as slight comet noise, and not whatever ails the picture, audio, or otherwise. Far too many VCRs are damaged by needlessly cleaning heads, especially when following one of the Youtube guides by unqualified and unknowledgeable goobers that use cotton Q-tips. You may as well use sandpaper and a sledge hammer, because you're breaking it.
