Hey guys! I hope you are having a great day.
I'm currently looking into getting a camcorder to take on photography trips, as well as to parties.
Since I only do analog photography I feel like it would fit well into the aesthetic and I love filming as much as I do photography but I never had a camera with which filming actually was fun and not a hassel to work with.
That is the same issue I had with photography which is why I choose Analog, to choose the imperfect stylized feeling and also to save about 5000€ in buying a camera (without lenses).
My current idea is to get a camera from the pinned thread in the "Hi8 stereo with TBC and s-video:" section to have a good base for easy lossless capturing.
Getting an actual, physcial TBC is not an option for me at the moment. Especially since I dont want to sink hundreds of Euro into something that I'm just getting into.
What I cant wrap my head around though is which capture card options are open for me.
I've looked around, especially towards the Hauppauge cards since there are a lot of them on ebay here in germany.
Some go as low as 10€ for a 1100, 1200, 1300, 3000, 3300, 4000, 5500 as well as several usb stick types. I read about the difference in them beeing the differences in capability when it comes to PAL and NTSC Formats.
Most of the more modern cards only support PAL and no longer NTSC like the 3300 for example:
Link to specs (EXTERNAL)
Getting a card that only supports PAL might not actually be a big problem. All of the cameras that are currently available here are Sony "E" cards which seems to be the indicator for PAL recording(?).
But are these cards even good? I'm reading a lot about AIT cards and that they are supposed to be superior. But I work on windows 10 and I don't like the idea of having to build a new pc with windows xp just to read hi8 tapes(, at least not yet).
And do these Hauppauge cards, which are probably newer than the 1250, even work with
VirtualDub which is, from what I could gather, currently/still the best software to use for capturing?
I'm well versed in image and video restoration due to a long time of trying to safe the contents of my families dvds (which were captured vhs tapes, done by a local library). I'm just trying to get an easy setup together in which I don't have to start completly from the beginning if I want to dive deeper into the topic.
I have several other consoles for which I could use the capture card as well (for preservation purposes, not for gaming) so even if I should get an old xp machine a good capture card would be great.
I hope you guys can help me with your input, and I have to say I love how much information you guys have curated here. I've gotten extremly far in this topic by just reading through your threads the last few days.
