Automatically drop frames during empty Hi8 tape?
 

Many years ago, I captured Hi8 with (I think) this ADVC device. Those captured were trash compared to the captures I get now, but one thing that was very helpful was that those captures don't contain any "empty tape", i.e. the blank frames in between scenes. I don't know how, but it appears that my setup back then didn't record, or dropped, the frames during these segments. With my current setup, there is a lot of blank screen. Is it somehow possible to have my setup drop these frames again? That would save a lot of time.

If not, what editing software is recommended for editing lossless AVI (Huffyuv) without reencoding to another codec? Does Adobe Premiere work, or LosslessCut?

What you want is actually a bad thing. DV transfer loses footage at stop/start of recordings. It's just a few seconds, but those seconds can be important. Analog capture records every second.

Ah, that's good to know! There were indeed second missing, which is not what I want at all. Thanks :)

What do you use for lossless editing/trimming?

trimming (remove stuff) = VirtualDub, using Direct Stream Copy mode
editing = Premiere Pro

In this case, what is preserving all your frames is your AVT-8710 frame TBC. You likely weren't using that during your previous capture attempts. The AVT-8710 is giving your capture card a proper, stable signal no matter what is fed into it from your camera/VCR.

In between video segments you're seeing color bars, right? That's what the AVT-8710 generates when it has no usable input frames.

When I trim away only a bit at the end of a video (using Direct stream copy for both video and audio), it still looks like VirtualDub is processing the whole video, and it still takes 10 minutes. Why does this happen, if only the designated frames need to be removed from the file?