linyanti
09-30-09, 12:51 PM
Please move this thread if it is not in the correct forum.
I wanted to give a brief message about a lengthy problem I was having pushing all my old MiniDV tapes onto my home computer. Since prices have dropped I got several TB of disk drive on different computers in the house. I have four active computers (wife and two kids) on a GB network. Everything works great (sort of).
I finally decided to put my miniDV tapes on the computer and then the final idea will be to put them on a password protected online service like Mozy, etc. That way people can watch the old home movies from anywhere in the world. (My kids will wander off to who knows where.)
AVI looks like the best type of file to store on the pc using Vista since there is plenty of room and no compression is needed. The big bummer is that the transfer is in real time. A sixty minute video takes sixty minutes to transfer. Just like the old days of recording vinyl to cassettes.
The miniDV camcorders are awesome since they usually have analog video and audio inputs and then you can put in 8mm tape into an old 8mm camcorder, feed it to the miniDV and stream AVI to the PC.
But here is the big problem and unfortunately I now have about ten hours of redo work. I started with my first miniDV video which was from 2000. I was transferring to the computer using my current Sony miniDV camcorder. Most of the time it would play okay but then there would be interludes of jitter, video shake and clipping. I did not see any missing pixels. I chaulked it up to the fact that data just gets lost.
But for a lark I dug out the old Sony miniDV camcorder that I had been using then. I put the tapes in and they all worked perfectly. My hypothesis is that the old camcorder was not encoding properly but would properly decode the unproper code.
My advice would be to hang onto those old digital camcorders in case you encounter a similar problem.
I just want to preserve the video. I am not interested in editing or using Nero, Vegas, etc.
Here is a very good web page that I am following on transfering the video.
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/3e615a40-6f59-45fd-b1ee-8849f74acac11033.mspx
I wanted to give a brief message about a lengthy problem I was having pushing all my old MiniDV tapes onto my home computer. Since prices have dropped I got several TB of disk drive on different computers in the house. I have four active computers (wife and two kids) on a GB network. Everything works great (sort of).
I finally decided to put my miniDV tapes on the computer and then the final idea will be to put them on a password protected online service like Mozy, etc. That way people can watch the old home movies from anywhere in the world. (My kids will wander off to who knows where.)
AVI looks like the best type of file to store on the pc using Vista since there is plenty of room and no compression is needed. The big bummer is that the transfer is in real time. A sixty minute video takes sixty minutes to transfer. Just like the old days of recording vinyl to cassettes.
The miniDV camcorders are awesome since they usually have analog video and audio inputs and then you can put in 8mm tape into an old 8mm camcorder, feed it to the miniDV and stream AVI to the PC.
But here is the big problem and unfortunately I now have about ten hours of redo work. I started with my first miniDV video which was from 2000. I was transferring to the computer using my current Sony miniDV camcorder. Most of the time it would play okay but then there would be interludes of jitter, video shake and clipping. I did not see any missing pixels. I chaulked it up to the fact that data just gets lost.
But for a lark I dug out the old Sony miniDV camcorder that I had been using then. I put the tapes in and they all worked perfectly. My hypothesis is that the old camcorder was not encoding properly but would properly decode the unproper code.
My advice would be to hang onto those old digital camcorders in case you encounter a similar problem.
I just want to preserve the video. I am not interested in editing or using Nero, Vegas, etc.
Here is a very good web page that I am following on transfering the video.
http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/3e615a40-6f59-45fd-b1ee-8849f74acac11033.mspx