Analog Hi8 conversion to digital for about $250?

[CoastVids]

Hello all. I'm searching for ideas on how to transfer a dozen Hi8 analog videos to digital. All of them were captured using my old Sony CCD-TR700 with S-Video output.

Hardware-wise, I have an old Toshiba Tecra R840 laptop with a dual-core Intel Core i5-2520M CPU that clocks at just 2.5GHz.

Are there any options I should consider besides the three below? I don't mind putting in the time to do the work but I'd like to keep the process simple.

1. Using a ClearClick 3.0 to convert the videos to 640x480 (about $200)
2. Using a ClearClick to USB capture device (about $65). It claims to upscale the video to 1080p.
3. Using the Capture service offered through Costco (also about $200)

[Gary34]

The best idea would be to hire that out. It’s only a dozen tapes. The clearclicks make a mess of your video. The deinterlacing on those is awful. With this you can’t just go by marketing. Definitely don’t go to Legacybox. You would be better off with the clearclick than Legacybox because at least when you decide to do it yourself you get to see why certain methods are a bad idea for yourself. Use the search bar on this site. There are plenty of threads about the methods you are talking about. Find someone that uses frame and line TBCs and has a lot of experience. It will cost way more but you will get way more out of it. You do have to consider that a lot of people that try to do this really cheap end up redoing there project and it winds up costing them more than if they would of done it right the first time.

[CoastVids]

Thanks Gary34. Yeah, a hire-out seems like the better option if I can find a capable service; but I've asked around and the local ones just use consumer-level gear.

If that's as good as it gets, then I might as well just get an IO DATA GV-USB2 and do it myself with OBS.

Obviously, I'm wary of LegacyBox and suspect that Capture might be no better.

[aramkolt]

If you want to spend $250 or less and do it yourself, the one component you should upgrade first is the camera to one that does have a line TBC, S-Video output, and stereo sound output - Last I looked those can be had for about $125-$150 on ebay and if they aren't as described, you can return them for a full refund as it's not as described if it says its used and ends up not actually working - even if returns are not accepted.

If you don't want to do it yourself or mess with hardware that may or may not work, I'd match Costco's price to do it using whatever hardware you want as I have basically one of every device for testing purposes and I like the hardware restoration aspect. Would require shipping the tapes and there's some risk there that things could get lost in the mail though. Box stores won't ever give you raw interlaced files as they are quite large and they probably capture using an H264/mp4 hardware encoder so the files are never really that large at any stage (and not properly deinterlaced), probably not too dissimilar to the elgato video capture. PM me if interested. I believe this site also offers transfer services, but I am not sure of the prices, would encourage you to reach out to admins there as well to see if they'll meet your needs.

Vwestlife did a comparison video of some video conversion services and sometime didn't even have the frame rate correct haha.

Worth a watch if you haven't seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSj3RbdhjzA

For what it's worth, in Vwestlife's conversions, I believe he's just doing a DV firewire capture (which doesn't get a lot of love here, but I think is probably better than any of the big box captures you're likely to get and there's never audio/video sync issues as a bonus), or he'll sometimes use a Sony DVD recorder and then rip the MPEG2 files. In both cases, it's an interlaced capture and he deinterlaces later.