I'm about to start a project in which I'll be dubbing a few hundred 8mm tapes to dvd. I have a few HDD recorders to use; two Panasonics (EH55 and EH50) and a Philips 3576.

I have read that some of you have had similar projects and I defer to the greater knowledge on this forum.

For many of these tapes there will be no editing. Would it be advantageous as far as wear and tear or PQ, to simply dub straight to the final disc instead of the extra step of recording to the HDD, then high speed dubbing to the disc?

Thanks for any advice.

If you are really sure that there will be no editing, then I see no value to the intemediate step of putting it on a hard drive. I can merely say from my dubbing experiences, that I have never made a transfer without needing to edit the content in some, maybe minor, way. If you are using media that sometimes fails to record or finalize properly, then you will have to start all over (time-wise) if the copy fails. If you use the hard drive and the HS dub fails, you are out only about ten minutes rather than the 2+ hours needed to remake the copy.

There are 2 trains of thought on this. One (the way I do it if I don't want to edit) is to use a cheaper standalone non HDD DVDR to burn directly to DVD. A Panny ES-15 or ES-25 works great for this since they "were" cheap and they do a great job burning DVDs and they're quite reliable. If you don't have a situation like that and only have your HDD units then you have 2 choices. One it to burn directly from your 8mm tapes to say your EH-55's DVD burner. This would require say 2hrs laser time (for a 2hr DVD). If you on the other hand recorded directly to HDD and then HS copied to DVD you'd probably only have 10? minutes of laser time. If burner life has to due with laser time you can easily see the second option would be better. I'm glad I don't have to make that choice since I've got other DVDRs w/o a HDD. I save the laser time on my EH-55 altogether and use that for mainly timeshifting and when I want to edit.
The choice is up to you but with only HDD machines I'd probably record to the HDD first.

Thanks for the suggestions, you have given good points to ponder. I want to have good recordings but worry about the wear on the machines. After the 8mm tapes there are a bunch of vhs transfers, too.

Or if you want to make copies to share, one real-time copy to hdd, then high speed dubs to dvd. If only for your use, why bother to put on dvd at all? How many times do you plan to watch them? Just judging by myself, I have 50+ Hi8 tapes I'll probably never watch again, or won't know till I do, whether I'll want to edit them.

You know that with the hdd, you can easily combine segments from any of the titles on the hdd onto one or more titles on the dvd? On the Panasonics, it's called Playlist.

You know that with the hdd, you can easily combine segments from any of the titles on the hdd onto one or more titles on the dvd? On the Panasonics, it's called Playlist.[/QUOTE]

Yep, thanks, got the playlist thing down on the Panny's, and will use it for some of the family stuff like Christmas progression through the years. Still trying to get used to the Philips, haven't seen anything like playlists for it yet, but if it is able to be done, Wajo will have researched it...