help transfering digital 8mm to dvd or hard drive

bigjimmyauk

bigjimmyauk

bigjimmyauk

Soldato
Joined
23 Nov 2009
Posts
6,038
Location
North Leicestershire
i've just sorted out my old sony digital 8mm camcorder and got some vids of the kids when they were young. What i wanted to do is transfer them to disc i know the easiest way to do this would be to plug it into my dads dvd recorder it record and press play on the camera. But what i wondered is there anyway to get the video onto my computer then edit it/burn it to disc.


i've never done this kind of thing before so not sure what i need the camera has a 1 video and 2 phono lead,a SVHS lead and something called a DV output which looks like a weird small usb plug altho i don't have the lead

Any help or info anyone can provide would be great
 
What camera is it? It might have a firewire output (sometimes i-link or IEEE1394) that you can connect to most PCs and then capture with software as simple as windows movie maker.
 
alexhull24 said:
What camera is it? It might have a firewire output (sometimes i-link or IEEE1394) that you can connect to most PCs and then capture with software as simple as windows movie maker.
Click to expand...


it's a sony handy cam digital 8mm model number DCR-TRV130E

EDIT tbh i think from google it looks like a 4 pin fire wire
 
Last edited:
Manual.

As I suspected, it has a firewire (I-link) connection. You should get a firewire cable and check your PC has a firewire port. A lot of new motherboards don't have them onboard, but come with a backplate extender that you connect to the motherboars firewire header. Some cases also have this for front ports. Beware about what cable you need, there are 4-pin and 6-pin variants of firewire, so you need to make sure you have the right ends on the cable. You can buy these cables in almost any PC store.
 
alexhull24 said:
Manual.

As I suspected, it has a firewire (I-link) connection. You should get a firewire cable and check your PC has a firewire port. A lot of new motherboards don't have them onboard, but come with a backplate extender that you connect to the motherboars firewire header. Some cases also have this for front ports. Beware about what cable you need, there are 4-pin and 6-pin variants of firewire, so you need to make sure you have the right ends on the cable. You can buy these cables in almost any PC store.
Click to expand...

yeah i have fire wire on the front of my case and i have it connected to the mobo. according to google you can get 4pin fire wire to usb cables, would i be better off with the usb version to 4 pin fire wire.

Also once i get this cable how do i capture it on the pc, do i need a capture card or any extra stuff that will cost me more?

P:s thankyou for the help by the way it's much appreciated
 
No need to convert to USB, it'll just slow things down, firewire has lots of bandwidth.

If you have firewire on the PC, that should be all you need. Plug in, turn the camera on in playback mode, and it should install drivers for it. It may have to search windows update. Then you can use software of your choice. Windows movie maker is good for starters, and may even be able to control camera play/pause functions to capture an entire tape automatically.

I just looked - windows movie maker is only on XP. Windows Live Movie Maker may work for vista/7 but I've never used it. I'm sure there is other good software out there, but I can't recommend any now as it's been a long time since I did this. Perhaps someone else can suggest something.
 
I have a DCR-TRV110E and to enable digital output I need to use a dongle that plugs into the camcorder.
A lot of early DV camcorders disabled digital video output to avoid certain EU/UK taxes.
 
I'm back just got a fire wire cable locally plugged it in and windows 7 did the rest i can control the camera from my monitor with the mouse put the whole video to the hard drive. it's awesome i really thank you all for your help.

movie maker is a bit limited is there any free video editing programs out there that are user friendly but quite powerful ?
 
I used Virtual Dub to capture the digital stream from the camera using the FireWire interface. It's a little hard to use and not very user friendly if you're not familiar with how video recording works or how to encode a video properly but it will produce good results if you care about the quality. You can easily create DVD or DivX compatible video from it.
 
Rozzy85 said:
I used Virtual Dub to capture the digital stream from the camera using the FireWire interface. It's a little hard to use and not very user friendly if you're not familiar with how video recording works or how to encode a video properly but it will produce good results if you care about the quality. You can easily create DVD or DivX compatible video from it.
Click to expand...

thx for the pointer the only problem i have now is the video of my kids is 35 mins long this equated to 7.2GB which is too much for a dvd. Now how can i put this to disc for use in my dvd player my discs are only 4.something gb

i don't know a lot about encoding or compression so any help would be great
 
Ah, glad to hear it works as expected!

As above, I don't know of any free ones, but when I was using a miniDV camera I bought Pinnacle Studio and that wasn't bad at all.

EDIT: Pinnacle software had a feature to burn straight to DVD which was cool. Any guidance you're after relating to getting it on DVD will be specific to the program you choose to encode and burn the disc with. Might want to hold out for some more suggestions or give Virtual Dub a shot.
 
bigjimmyauk said:
thx for the pointer the only problem i have now is the video of my kids is 35 mins long this equated to 7.2GB which is too much for a dvd. Now how can i put this to disc for use in my dvd player my discs are only 4.something gb

i don't know a lot about encoding or compression so any help would be great
Click to expand...

The software to make a DVD from a video file usually isn't free as MPEG2 is patented and you may have to pay. There probably are some free alternatives but I don't know of any worth mentioning.

The other option is DivX/Xvid but you'll need to see if your DVD player can play these types of videos. If it can it'll have this logo stuck on it somewhere. You can use a program called AutoGK which is free and user friendly. You'll only need to set up a few settings and it'll bang out an AVI file which you can then simple burn to DVD like any other file.
 
seem to be sorted now windows dvd maker along with live movie maker encoded the file for me and turned it into a 2.8gb dvd with menu and chapter selection. put it in the blu ray player on the 50 inch panny and i was pretty impressed with the quality and sound. I'm now just happier knowing that the movies can at least be backed up as you never know when or if a tape will get chewed up and be destroyed..

Really appreciate all the help from the people that have replied
 
Welcome to the black hole of video editing.

Hope you have fun playing around.

Experiment with music as well as it can make a huge difference when working with video, especially stuff that is... lets say not hugely interesting but someone give's it ... oh you can't get rid of that stuff even though it's about as interesting a watching paint dry
 
For the people that helped me in this thread

just a quick vid i did to test the conversion from digital 8 to wmv and uploading to youtube in 480p

i'm actually quite suprised how decent the quality is for a 10 year old tape camcorder

P:S yes i know the cats face when i zoomed in went blurry but it was just a quick test lol
 
Last edited:
i think a file that size you could possibly use

convert to wmv

then use a software to convert it to dvd compatible then use dvd shrink which is still free this allows you to shrink the 7.2 to dvd size with a bit of quality loss well it did when i use to mess with stuff

you could always try a splitter program then put on 2 discs
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom