Thread: Old 8mm tape to DVD

Hi all, Thanks in advance for your advice.

I have lots of 8mm tapes from back in the day and would like to convert all of them to DVD suitable for playback on a TV using a DVD player.

I have a pretty fast PC (AMD Phenom 960 Quad-core processor, 2300Mhz with 8GB RAM) running Windows Vista 64-bit with quite a bit of storage. I also have a TV media card which I use for a DVR(Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1800 MCE Kit). I believe it will let me download from my old camcorder via the S-video input.

My question here is about maximizing quality. I have some Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 software. There is also Windows Movie Maker software. I want to the best job that I can and do the best quality capture that I can do. I guess that I am not concerned at this point of doing a really great deal of editing. I would need to some of course. I don't need to do anyting fancy with menuing of the DVD. Right now I am focused on quality of capture. Is the software that I currently have adequate or do I need to look at anything else?

I also have quite a few DV tapes from a digital camcorder that records to tapes. Does the same advice apply?

I just had a look at the specs of your card and it seems more than capable of giving you the best possible capture in fact it is going to be a higher bit rate than you actually need, if there is some way of cutting back the bit-rate to about 4500kbps it's all you need for the quality of the 8mm which from memory was the same resolution as VHS at around 240, what you are likely to be capturing on the computer through s-video is 720x576. The computer is fast enough for high definition so will have no problems with what you want it to do. Windows Movie Maker will also be able to edit the resulting mpg that your card will make, so should be all go,
Bryan

Thanks so much for your reply. I am totally out of my element on this. Will windows movie maker be the right software to use for the capture?

Hi Becky it should be fine, it gives you the option of were to capture from and the audio to use, I would have thought that the WinTV-HVR 1800 MCE card would have come with a capture program, it says it can do chase play and capture just like a DVD recorder, but I didn't notice if it had audio capture built into the card, if it doesn't it can be a little tricky to set up as sometimes if you are not careful you can superimpose sounds from your microphone onto the video audio, so always turn of any other audio input except the cameras.
Bryan

Thanks for your reply, especially the tip to turn off the other audio inputs. I would not have thought of that.

The card did come with some very basic software. I don't think any kind of capture software was with it. I had bought two operating systems for this machine and was initially trying to get set up with a dual boot. I was not able to get that working and had to use XP as my operating system due to some software I had to use for some work I was doing. When I bought the card I installed all the software that it came with on XP and was disappointed with what the software would let me do. Basically, it was just a TV viewing window for current TV. There was no way with that software to schedule recording or anything. They recommend a third party software for XP or use Vista. With Vista, they just suggest installing drivers. Since my work had dried up, I removed the XP and installed Vista. Vista has media center integrated within it and I find it does a wonderful job acting much the same as TiVo.

I guess that I will get going this coming week trying to use the software that I have (what comes with Vista and Premiere Elements) and see what kind of results I can have.