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Replying as I read...
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Originally Posted by obiwanozarkmystic
I got a hold of my MiniDV tapes from teenage years in film classes recently and transferred them all to local storage with a Sony HVR-M25U over firewire via WinDV and then onward to my file server. That deck was a delight to use, and what a breeze (and nostalgia trip) that workflow was!
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Yep, DV can be easy, because it's digital source. But what you did for it has almost no overlap with analog ingest/capture. (In fact, DV "capture" isn't even capture at all, the word is misused, it's just a data transfer off the tape, with data placed into wrapper AVI/MOV file on your computer. Not a capture.)
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I was hoping to move through the Hi8 and Video8 family video content that I grabbed from my parents with the same deck and workflow and have just started to learn how out of touch that assumption was over the past few days! 
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Yep.
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My in-laws know that I'm sinking deep into this rabbit hole of capture and have gifted me with a couple more bins of their own Hi8/Video8 tapes, and I have VHS from my parents that I will get to after the 8mm formats, so I'm looking to build a functional setup/workflow.
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When you start to stack up tapes for the project, proper gear becomes even more important. You don't want to make this more complicated than it has to be, fighting cheap gear, trying to find workarounds, due to being too cheap to get the proper tools needed. Not much different than buying a lawnmower to cut the grass, rathe than try to use "cheap" hedge clippers. You pay one way or another, either with time/sanity, or with dollars. Costs are extracted.
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Trying to start with the 8mm, but providing the VHS for context in the hopes that I can just swap the Hi8 camera for a good VHS deck when I get there (I might have a good one to borrow from work but need to check for a model to share next time I'm in the office).
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Your reasoning here is sound. As long as you get a proper frame TBC in the work, then the drop-happy (dropped frames) 8mm format will be easier to work with than VHS. It can break you into seeing how good analog can look, as Hi8 was probably the best consumer format. Quality of the shooting notwithstanding, of course. I refer to quality of the tape, the color retention, etc -- not how good or bad the content was shot.
VHS will get harder, but this ease-in is something I often suggest as well, when a person has multiple formats.
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- If this has line TBC, use it.
- If not, get a better Hi8 camcorder than does have line TBC. You'll need it.
Unlike VCRs and TBCs, you can still find some decent Hi8 cameras on eBay for about $250, sometimes less. Don't buy cheap, buy good. Find a nice camera that is complete (battery, all cables), probably even has the original case and extra lens/filters. Original owners are best to buy from, a few reputable camcorder resellers. Avoid recyclers, the people that sell lots of random crap from garage sales, they're clueless. lots of bad buys from them.
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2012 Intel Macbook Pro Bootcamp to Windows 10 (not needed for any other tasks, not likely to be my best capture computer, but sharing it's available)
HP Desktop PC Pavilion m7650n(RF254AA) Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 2GB DDR2 320GB HDD Intel GMA 3000 Windows XP Media Center
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Either should be fine here.
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This XP desktop is from my high school days and has some unique upside and downside.
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You're still young. Enjoy it while it lasts.
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It comes with a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150 and has an S-Video input on the front panel and on the back on that Hauppauge PCI(?) card. Reading across threads, it looks like that card is somewhat garbage and unlikely to be worth putting all of this work through.
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The PVR-250 and -350 were "fine" (not great), made soft/blurry MPEG-2. The PVR-150 was garbage, hot luma/exposure problems, audio distortion problems. MPEG cards died off long ago, replaced by H.264 PVR cards by the late 00s. The only decent MPEG card is AIW, and it's mostly TV show collectors that still use it. This isn't what you want here.
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I managed to get a preview feed in VirtualDub through this but no video in the captured file. I likely need to read up more on VirtualDub setup for the project as well.
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It doesn't fully work for these Hauppauge MPEG PVR cards.
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I have a Diamond VC500 from eBay en route (shipped for $15 so I thought why not try) and wonder if that will be a good enough place to work from
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Nope, that was a mistake. It has really nasty AGC issues, essentially random brightening and darkening of the image. Everything has AGC, but "AGC issues" are when it's bad at it's. AGC literally has one job, and it fails on some crappy cards.
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I have also looked into AIT AIW options that I have seen in threads here, but this computer is on a PCIe graphics slot instead of AGP as I learned.
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Actually, no, the PCIe are not suggested. The best AIW are specific AGP, PCI, and USB. Very specific, not random. The AGP are safer, get DVI not VGA, 7500 or 9000. The PCI/AGP are more tricky, and sometimes I have both in the marketplace forum here.
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It is also a 64-bit system. Those details seem to mean that I'm sitting in an awkward in-between for a good legacy XP analog capture system and a more modern functioning computer.
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XP x64 was mostly unsupported with everything, not just AIW cards.
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I'm not sure if there is a specific capture card for PCIe or a different USB option that would be ideal and easy to source.
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There is, but it's very OS specific. So you have to decide on "I want to use this", and then ideally "but I'll use this if I have to".
Willing to spend maybe up to a couple hundred to either outfit this system as needed, make the bootcamp laptop work with a lower quality but more streamlined workflow (read: buy Digital8 camera and transfer over firewire if necessary, USB capture card, etc), or potentially build or buy a new rig to handle this specific task.
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Although I think it will be fun to troubleshoot some and then rip through all of this content, I anticipate just doing this big batch and then being done with the capture setup, so I'm less motivated by a more expensive and cumbersome build if I can avoid it; context: I have an infant and a toddler, so background capture is no problem but endless tinkering and troubleshooting isn't realistic right now.
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The opposite is actually true here. By trying to avoid gear, get cheap gear, you'll waste lots of time "trying" to get results, rather than just getting the results. When it comes to quality gear, buy it, use it, resell it. Quality gear holds value, junk gear is yours forever (money pit, sunk costs). The marketplace here works, or you can "fire sale" it (with fees) on eBay.
But I refer to the video hardware here, namely the VCR/camera and TBCs.
The computer can be somewhat trivial, given your current options. Maybe upgrade storage, or upgrade/downgrade OS (XP64 is blah), but that's about it. Even then, that's mostly time, not so much costs.
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I'm a video producer with deep color grading experience (but very little analog restoration work), so I really look forward to getting all of the nicely (fingers crossed) digitized material in hand to play with in my downtime for the rest of my life.
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Ah, good to know, that will help some. You definitely want to pay attention to the capture card chosen here, and I think AIW would be worth reinstall time. AIW will allow capture of illegal colors outside the 16-235 legal range, you will help for color restoration. Other cards, especially almost all non-AIW USB, will clip/truncate legal.
If you have any nostalgic memories tied to your high school computer, then just unplug or remove that boot drive. Insert a new cheap SSD for boot, install XP Integrals (the modern-ish unofficial/community edition of XP) x86, and done. You need a second HDD/SSD, 2tb max, for the captured files. (If using SSDs, be sure to format SSDs in your Win10 Bootcamp instance, not with XP.)
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Should I be able to get some good captures with just the Diamond VC500 if it arrives and works?
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No, and you'll especially hate it with your color grading experience.
Is there an ideal capture card I should be shopping for with my current desktop as an option?
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Anything else I'm not thinking through to get me headed towards a stable setup? Am I asking the right questions at least?
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Time is valuable, money is recoverable. Put proper funds on gear, resell it later. Cheap tools, wrong tools, will waste time, and give bad results (or even no results). Spend time now with your infant now. You can't get that time back later, but you can certainly get dollars back later with gear resale.
But you also cannot put off these conversion projects, as tapes are deteriorating now*. You have to juggle. So juggle wisely. Sometimes good juggling requires good tools bought with good money.
(*Once upon a time, "your tapes are fading!" was just a BS myth to get you to pay whoever said that for conversion work. The "fade" part is actually still BS, non-scientific hooey. But the degradation is real now, even some of my own well-stored tapes have micro-shed. I've long said that tapes had a 35-65 year average lifespan, and we now well within that window, and we are seeing lots of 80s and even 90s tapes having oxide/etc problems. Essentially, tapes are self-destructing now, somewhat randomly, though environment is a factor.)
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Thanks to all of the folks here who have already given me so much to chew on for the past few days! I've gone from not even knowing these 8mm tapes were analog (my MiniDV gen colors showing lol) to knowing what an AGP AIT AIW is and knowing that it won't work on my computer since it's not PCIe; what a transformation.
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We'll get you to your end goal of digital files.
