Camera Converting Hi8 Camcorder tapes to Digital

sun244

Disciple
Friends,

I have almost 25 tapes. With great difficulty (Win XP based software that was supplied with Samsung camcorder), I tried. I found the filesize to be 1.5GB for 4 minutes of Video/Audio for AVI file format. My questions are:

1. Have any of you undertaken this kind of conversion project? What file format you decided to get best compression without compromising video quality?
2. I have another camcorder (Panasonic) that uses DVM60 tape but no software to convert the tapes. Any software you recommend (open source or low cost) to convert tapes to files?
3. I am planning to buy two cheap large size disks (in case if one fails I can use the other). Any other ideas to store this content? I estimate the size to be almost 50-60GB of converted tapes.

Thanks
Sun
 
1) i do it once a year. i don't touch the frame-rate and aspect-ratio. i just compress video so that it can fit on few DVDs. i mostly use mp4.

2) i've successfully used "windows movie maker" and "VLC player". i recently used WinDV (http://windv.mourek.cz/)

3) i extract the videos and then compress it. you don't have to keep it in original un-compressed condition. i use fresh tapes each time, so i don't have to worry about losing the high quality originals. DV tapes have quite a long life.
 
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