Hi8 capture methods

[hoonstein]

Hi,
A friend has a Hi8 sony camcorder with firewire/USB /RCA. What is the best/easiest way to capture to a PC for editing?

By firewire, capture via RCA (to Hauppauge PVR-350), other?


Also, what is the minimum recommended requirements to capture via firewire?


They have an old P3 Cel 700MHz, 256MB PC100, 250Gig ATA100 HDD


thanks for any help

[Revgen]

Firewire/USB would be easier IMHO.
When you say RCA I assume you mean composite, right?

[bb]

If firewire is an option, i.e. you have a Sony Digital8 camcorder, then you should go that way. The analogue Hi8 signal is converted to DV inside the camcorder, so the PC must be fast enough to transfer 3.6 MB/s to the hard drive. The P3 you mentioned above should handle that without problems.

Capturing the analogue way is much more error prone, and much more CPU consuming, too. I'd recommend faster hardware for this process, and you need much more experience to get good results.

bb

[hoonstein]

Thanks for the advice. Will use firewire :)

[DDogg]

Thanks for the advice. Will use firewire :) Assumes your particular brand of Digital 8 is one that will actually play HI-8 analog tapes. Not all will. Sony trs-350 will, IIRC trs-150-/250??? will not. They only use the Video-8 tapes as storage for DV and are not capable of Hi-8 playback.

This was the situation I found myself in this Xmas. A workable solution was finding and connecting an older Hi-8 camera via S-Vid to my sony DV cam which was connected to my PC via the Firewire cable. Worked real well.