[ErroneousBosh]

If you have a lot of Video8 or Hi8 tapes to digitise, get a Digital8 camcorder. It will most likely play them back quite happily and emit DV over its Firewire port. Digital8 is just DV on a different tape!

I still use DV/DVCAM tapes because I like shooting with old cameras, and I capture the same way I have for about 25 years when I used a VX2000 to shoot DV for a commercial digital streaming company that did all sorts of training videos.

Cheap crappy PCIe Firewire card (back in the day it was PCI, but no-one has that now), and dvgrab to get a raw DV stream off tape, then ffmpeg -i dvgrab-001.dv -c copy whateveritscalled.avi to rewrap it in something the editing software can read. These days I use DaVinci Resolve on Linux, in the olden days I used Premiere 5 on Windows 2000.

Even back then I used to capture on Linux and then bring it into Windows 2000 because only Linux had reliable Firewire support.

[actionfromafar]

Can vouch for this trick - Digital8 cameras with Firewire is perfect transferring analog Video8 / Hi8. The analog to digital path in the Digital8 cameras is way better than what you can likely scrounge up yourself.

Can be expensive to get but if the camera doesn't break during use you can resell them easily.

[icyfox]

I bought a Sony TRV120 10+ years ago, back when I was doing this conversion project for the first time. It's built like a tank and still works today.

At the risk of being smited by professional archivists, I'm willing to wager that 99.9% of people can't tell the difference between a $5k archival rig and one of these higher quality camcorders. At this point it really feels like the biggest inhibiter to good quality digitization is the decaying of the tape versus the archival setup.

That said - for anyone with the time, patience, and soldering abilities I would love a more proper A/B test with RF signal capture software encoding. Something like this:

https://rastrillo.ca/digitizing-video8-tapes-with-vhs-decode...

[actionfromafar]

There be dragons - crazy things like taking several captures of the same tape and averaging the frames and such. :-)

[ErroneousBosh]

I've ended up with three of the damn things, so if you are sufficiently desperate to dub your 8mm tapes that you're prepared to trail all the way up to NE Scotland I'd be happy to oblige.