[DaGuy]

I have a gazillion digital Hi8 video tapes (yes, I'm a young parent) and now I'm looking for a way to preserve them in a more convenient and more durable format that would also facilitate editing -perhaps DVDs with a navigation menu or something of the sort. Now, just dumping the tapes on DVDs is not the best solution since it will be a headache trying to find stuff for editing purposes: BTW, I intend to use iMovie.

Ideally, I would like to end up with DVDs that have some kind of navigational feature/menu that would allow me to quickly locate and export scenes out to iMovie. That's probably a tall order. Anyway, I'm fishing for ideas and different approaches. All hints and tips welcomed.

[- - e r i k - -]

Your best bet for editing is to convert them to MiniDV.

Digital Hi8? Do you mean digital8? Wouldn't you be able to import from the camera through FireWire?

Importing Video Clips into iMovie Using Sony Digital8

Edit: Apparently you can using iMovie 4

[DaGuy]

Thanks Erik!

Sorry, yes, I meant Digital Hi8. BTW, why MiniDV? Aren't those just a miniature version of the Digital Hi8 tapes?

I can certainly import from my digital Sony camcorder to iMovie but the problem is that I have way too many tapes and navigating the tapes (fast forwarding etc.) is cumbersome to say the least.

The ideal device/software would take the camcorder digital video signal and create a DVD with a menu or scene markers that would allow me to quickly find scenes and then cut or mark these and save them in a directory where iMovie can load them.

[- - e r i k - -]

Well, iMovie will (If I recall correctly) import your clips as separate scenes anyway. And as for navigating and sorting clips, I believe this is one of iMovie'08's big strengths are.

Moving to DVD first would create transcoding issues and lots of headaches. You can import DV directly to Toast, but I believe it won't create the separate scenes for you (using start/stop markers), so you are back to using iMovie anyway.

And no, Digital8 was Sony's failed attempt to establish a competing standard to DV and MiniDV using their old Hi8 standard as a tape medium. I'm sorry to say that you bet on the wrong horse here.

[Chongo]

I have some Hi8 tapes and I use my brothers D8 camera to import them into iMovie. I found that you can't use iMovie '08 with D8, so I used iMovie '06 to import and then send to iDVD