A digital8 camcorder sounds like an excellent idea to me. And not just
because it's convenient.
The thing about capturing from a video tape is that the frame rate isn't
as accurate as when the video source is some broadcast station. To make
things even worse, the frame rate tends to wobble if there's some kind
of erasure on the analog tape, so it isn't even stable.
Frame grabbers in general (cheap ones in particular) are designed to
capture television, and don't have the necessary mechanism to handle
imperfections in the frame rate. This makes the design simple and cheap:
You have a unit which grabs video frames, another *independent* unit
which captures the audio, and both feeding a third unit, which packs the
data into a video stream. This third unit relies on frames arriving at a
certain rate compared with the rate at which analog samples arrive. The
analog samples rate is derived from a clock created by the frame grabber
itself, and doesn't adapt itself to the video. So as long as the frame
rate is accurate and stable, this works perfectly.
But when the frame rate is slightly off, you'll get bad audio sync and
frame drops, or just anything happens. This, in turn, may drive the
video decoder crazy, and things get even more bizarre.
That's why the camcorder idea sounds so good to me. You know one thing
for sure about it: It was designed to handle analog tapes.
I would even rent one, run through the tapes quickly, and return it.
Even if its video format doesn't work with cinelerra, there will be
plenty of time for transcoding later.
Good luck,
Eli
Sean M. Pappalardo wrote:
On 01/13/2011 06:46 AM, David Koski wrote:
Anyway, I need to capture 720x480 NTSC using Linux of course. I am
trying to
archive some old hi-8 tapes so I want to get a good quality.
Suggestions
would be appreciated.
You'd get excellent quality (as good as the tapes are anyway) if you
can find a Digital8 camcorder with firewire or USB output. (Most of
them can play back analog Hi8 tapes, but you'd have to check.)
Sincerely,
Sean M. Pappalardo
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