As for your questions, Bruce, copying to a digital camcorder should give decent results, similar to what you get by recording from turntable or tape to your computer and then copying to CD. You shouldn’t get the generational loss you would by going to VHS; then of course once it’s digital it can be edited without degredation. You’ll be able to tell the difference between it and video shot with modern equipment, but it won’t look any worse than your original source. I did some editing earlier this year with some video shot in the 1970s and the results were acceptable. I wouldn’t call it excellent, but my source was pretty poor. Strangely enough, when I re-output to VHS and played it it didn’t look as good as when I used the miniDV camera for playback.

The majority of what I’ll be doing is shooting video onto miniDV, then editing it, then transferring it back to miniDV. I’ll be doing one project with DVD as the source (we’ve secured the appropriate permissions). I don’t have any current plans to do anything with really old footage though.

Uncle Dave, let us know how it goes. You might have another revenue producing career. 🙂

I am looking forward to hearing about your results with the Pinnacle gear and video set-up.

I am especially interested in how well it will capture DVD quality video at the proper frame rate (I don’t know enough about video to use all the right jargon).

I would love to be able to convert all my old tapes (VHS and 8mm) to at least VHS quality digital video and ultimately store them on VCDs or eventually DVDs.

I have heard that one can get a digital video camcorder that has analog inputs and simply record the old VHS and 8mm tapes to the digital video tape in the camcorder and the quality will be very good. Then it would be a relatively simple matter to move the digital video to the PC via the incluced firewire port on the digital camcorder.

What experience or thoughts do you and your readers have about that?

Thanks,

Bruce

But it could be worse. I could be forced to use Apple Pro Tools on a Mac. At least I’ll be dealing with a crash a week, instead of a crash a day, and for about 1/3 the price.