Capturing analog footage from 8mm HI8

[EvilKiwi]

Hello everyone,

I am new here on Doom 9.

I have 3 short films all produced a few years ago on 8mm HI8 and VHS.

I am wanting to capture this footage into the computer and have been trying to do this via my MiniDV cam. I have tried digital passthrough and also recording the analog footage on the DV tape first and then capturing it but the footage doesn't capture in the same aspect ratio. The analog footage was shot in 16:9 on the analog camera and plays in the editing software as such but once captured and played back from the library and on the videotrack the picture has been resized. I am using the same capture setting that I normally use for capturing digital footage. I am using Ulead Videosudio 10+ for my editing software. Does analog footage automatically do this and you have to resize it to work with it or is there a way that it should capture as it appears in the camera and also as it plays through the software preview screen before capturing it.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Awatef]

May be it's 16:9 anamorphic? That's a good thing, you don't have to resize, just make sure you check 16:9 anamorphic when you encode to DVD, or if it's a "regular" MPEG4 file, you can use the Matroska Container to specify 16:9 as an aspect ratio.

[Blue_MiSfit]

If you want to preserve the best quality, bypass the mini DV passthrough.

A $50 investment into an analog capture card will give you a lot of flexibility.

Instead of going analog -> DV -> edit -> MPEG-2 or MPEG-4

you can go analog -> uncompressed / lossless -> edit ->MPEG-2 or MPEG-4.

That's one less compression cycle, and less chroma subsampling. I would definately reccommend it. Go for one with S-Video (assuming your Hi-8 has S-Video), and preferably audio too, as without audio you have to use your sound card, which can introduce latency.

Plus, capture cards are just good old fashioned nerdy fun. You can do lots of cool things with them.

~MiSfit