What codec for Hi8 tapes using firewire, DVD?
 

I'm starting a project to digitize a bunch of old Hi8 analog tapes. To accomplish this, I bought a Digital8 Handycam and I'm playing my tapes through that over firewire to iMovie 6 on an old iMac. (I know that the general consensus I've read is to use Windows, but I was able to get an old Mac with firewire for much cheaper than I could find a Windows machine)

My ultimate goal is to both 1) convert these tapes into a common, modern video codec and store them on a hard drive and 2) burn them to a DVD. Goal #1 is for archival purposes, goal #2 is because it's a lot easier to hand my parents a DVD that they can watch on the TV than make them go on the computer. In achieving both of these goals I of course would like to keep the maximum amount of quality possible.

In iMovie, at first I chose the DV codec (.dv file) for my project since in my understanding, the VTR takes the analog feed and packages it into a DV format when you play it back. However, I realized that these files are relatively large (a 27 minute tape saved as a .dv was 5.47 GB. Not a huge deal in 2025 anymore but I'm wondering if I can save some space?). Also, because they are all coming from an analog source to begin with, it's not as important that I convert them into DV, right?

The other option I could do in iMovie is MPEG-4. That's a modern, well supported codec, correct? I assume that would save as a .mov container, and I generally wouldn't have any problems play that back.

Lastly, are there any considerations I need to take into account when burning them to DVD? My plan was to just pull in the clips straight from iMovie into iDVD and burn them that way. I really have no experience burning DVD-Video so I figured that would be easiest.

Sorry for the long post but thank you in advance for the help!

There's a nice and free app called "Burn" for Mac that'll encode pretty much anything to DVD whether it begins as interlaced or not and you can choose the bitrate (so in other words how much fits on one DVD, higher the bitrate, better quality, but also less minutes you can fit on one DVD).

https://burn-osx.sourceforge.io/Pages/English/home.html

It's also kind of nice because it converts the files to MPEG2 before burning them so you can preview the quality before actually burning any discs.

DV capture isn't the worst thing in the world depending on the content, it's unquestionably better than the "all in one" capture devices like clearclick or elgato products and it does preserve interlacing. If you are doing all Mac, the next step would be to try hybrid with QTGMC and hope that works - I've had mixed results in getting that to run on a Mac myself, but others say it works fine for them. There's a much older program called JES Deinterlacer for Mac that I've heard works pretty well and couldn't hurt to try, but it requires a pretty old version of macOSX I think. Whatever computer is running iMovie 6 is probably old enough.

Thanks! I should mention that I'm doing the capture and burning on Mac (Leopard) but I do have a Windows 10 machine as my main PC that I can use for encoding stuff.

Also should clarify that I'm working in NTSC.

HuffYUV is lossless so I use that as both the capture and archival codec (after restoring), then I convert from the archival file as needed to other formats such as MPEG-2 for DVDs and H.264 for e-mailing and viewing on PC and mobile devices. Later when other formats become more popular than H.264, I can go back to the archival file and convert again without adding digital generation loss.

It appears though that VirtualDub and HuffYUV are both Windows applications, which I can use my main Windows 10 machine for encoding, but the only way I can capture this is off a 2007 iMac running Snow Leopard (upgraded since my last post since I realized Leopard doesn't support exFAT). I understand that this seems to be a process best done on Windows, but when I needed something with firewire support the local electronic thrift store had these old iMacs for $20 with firewire, but the cheapest XP-era PC was in the $50 range and I don't think the one they had had a firewire port. So unless really necessary, I'd like to do the capture and DVD authoring on Mac.

With that being said, would it be a valid workflow to capture the tapes as .dv, take them over to my Windows machine and encode (apologies if that's not the correct terminology) them using VirtualDub/HuffYUV, store a copy of them in HuffYUV for archival, create a copy in something like H.264 for playback on computers, and create another copy in MPEG-2 for DVD, then take that MPEG-2 back to the Mac to burn the DVDs? (That Mac is my only DVD burner I have)

The Pinnacles in the marketplace on this site work with windows 7, 10 and 11. They capture losslessly through virtualdub. They have Svideo, composite and a FireWire input. They are higher than the prices you are talking about. You already have the Mac and sound like that is what you want to do anyways.

Virtualdub isn’t an encoder. There’s not a benefit to encoding DV to a losslessly compressed codec.

There's not a whole lot of advantage to re-encoding the archive copy from DV to anything else as you won't really save much space, but if you deinterlace it for something like web distribution, it'll be in a different format like MP4. I still think deinterlacing is easier to do on a Windows machine given the variety of options there like staxrip, virtualdub, and hybrid. Hybrid with QTGMC might also work on your mac, or you can try JES Deinterlacer and see what it looks like. For making DVDs, you shouldn't need to actually deinterlace anything beforehand as the DVD format uses interlaced encoded MPEG2.

I’ve had some that needed strong noise and grain filters like temporal degrain2 and KNLmeans CL. They were VHS-C shot in low light. With that footage the filtering when it’s lossless before encoding to a lossy codec helps a whole lot. It’s the same principal as this https://youtu.be/r6Rp-uo6HmI?si=O8mGbXtRuGnzazpv. Just too much random things going on and it messes with the lossy codecs compression algorithms.

It’s best to do post work on a faster computer.

I see what everyone means about this being more difficult to do on Mac now. Thanks everyone for their help, but I think I'm going to give up on the Mac attempt and install Windows 7 on it via Boot Camp. If that fails, I'll either go out and buy a firewire card for my Windows 10 machine, or try and use my parents old XP machine they have at their house.

This whole thing has been a headache because iMovie has a file size limit at 13 GB, which splits my tapes into 2/3 clips. And it saves them as a .dv, which so far I have failed to change into any other container format.

Thoughts on best capture solution for Windows? (WMM, VirtualDub, WinDv, etc.) And best DVD authoring software?

Virtualdub uses direct show which is just for windows and it’s how it gets access to your card. You need a windows PC for virtualdub. Virtual machines or installing windows on a Mac won’t work for virtualdub. Windv is recommended for DV.

Good thing it wouldn't work, because I ran into trouble getting Boot Camp to work!

At this point, I've got a way that I can capture DV streams. I'll start from there for now. I might head back to that electronics thrift store and see if they've got any firewire cards I can put in my PC.

Just a quick update on this project, I think I've got a workflow down now. It may not be the most efficient, or technically speaking the best, but it's finally gotten me 1 DVD burned and 1 H.264 .mp4 encoded.

I'm importing the tapes in iMovie, because every other software gave me issues with either lots of frames missing, weird audio sync issues, or playing back at non-standard framerates. iMovie generates 2-3 .dv files per tape, which I bring in to a copy of Adobe Premiere on the iMac which I use to export to MPEG-2 for DVD, and H.264 for playback on a computer. For the MPEG-2 file, I leave it interlaced and burn it with DVD Studio Pro. For the H.264 file, I let Adobe deinterlace it and export it as a progressive video. That might not be the absolute highest quality deinterlace, but after considering how many times these files will actually be watched, I realized it's probably not worth it to do further processing.

I'll then archive all the files I generated, so I can go back to them at a later time if I want to do more cleanup.

You can fix dropped frames with better hardware. When you try to capture while dropping frames you are trying to download corrupted data. Software will drop or insert and do things to reduce problems. Imovie is creating multiple clips because it is dropping frames. The time sync is off so it throws IMovie off then IMovie starts over.

Adobe de interlacing is bad compared to QTGMC but it could be worse. It’s not as bad as a clearclick or something like that.

JES Deinterlacer is your best bet when it comes to de-interlacing DV video on a vintage Mac.

Beginning around 13:45 in this video I show you how to do it:

Editing & uploading 60fps video on an obsolete Mac PowerBook G4