[typhoon]

I've got loads of Hi-8 videotapes that I wish to edit (in iMovie), and am looking for the most practical way to do this.
I was thinking that instead of FF and REV the Hi-8 camcorder to find the right clips all the time (which will create a lot of tear and wear on the tapes and also take a lot of time) it would be more practical to either transfer them all over to a hard drive, or burn to DVDs.

Now, I am about to buy an external hard-drive (around 300-500 Gbytes I think; I've got the Firewire enclosure, but haven't decided on a drive mechanism yet), but I still don't think I'll have enough space for all of those tapes and in addition be able to edit, so I assume an overall better approach would be to burn them to DVDs. Since I'm very new to video-editing, iMovie and the Mac as well I have some questions:

I want to preserve the quality of the original tapes as much as possible of course. Is this possible when burning to DVDs, or would I get some loss? (I am of course comparing to feeding the Hi-8 tapes directly into the computer and storing it on the hard drive).

Although I've never done it before I believe I have two ways of digitizing the Hi-8 tapes:

a) Via my (Sony PC-120e) Mini-DV camcorder.
The Hi-8 camcorder's S-video output would go into my Mini-DV camcorder's S-video input.
The Hi-8 camcorder's audio outputs would go into the Mini-DV camcorder's audio inputs.
The Mini-DV camcorder's Firewire connector would be connected to the Firewire-400 connector on my G4 Powerbook and record the Hi-8 videotape.

b) Same as above, but instead of connecting the Firewire output of the Mini-DV camcorder to the computer I would connect it to my Pioneer DVR-630H DVD-recorder unit.

Now, I've played around with iMovie a little bit, editing a short home video (importing a Mini-DV tape), then burning the DVD with iDVD. The latter part took ages to process, and I assume that using the Pioneer DVD-recorder would go a lot faster, being a dedicated DVD-recorder, though I really don't know.

Any thoughts on this?

[SWFan]

Personally I would rather import the Hi-8 into the computer and work on it there. Though going to a DVD recorder first is an okay solution. The main problem with going to the external DVD device is that it will encode your Hi-8 to mpeg-2 and depending on the length of the tape the compression could get to the point of being noticeable.

Is there no reason why you couldn't just import a couple tapes, edit them in iMovie and output the final product to whatever medium you like, then delete the large DV stream you were working off of and start over with a new set of Hi-8 tapes?

[typhoon]

Yes, as I said it would be a lot more convenient and cause less tear on the original Hi-8 tapes. Besides, transferring and storing all my Hi-8 tapes to a hard disk would demand an awfully large hard-drive (or rather, several hard drives).
And I wouldn't be pre-editing anything either, but would need everything from the original Hi-8 tapes to work with (I'll probably use the same source tapes for several different edited videos).

I've never recorded any DVDs on the Pioneer DVD-recorder I have (I've just used the built-in hard drive for recording from TV), but I have noticed that there are several quality options available. I've only used "SP" mode for TV recordings and I haven't noticed any difference from actually watching TV. But there are at least 2 higher qualities above that: XP and XP+. I assume they compress the material less, but also demand more disk-space.

Since the Pioneer DVD recorder can record to dual-layer DVDs I could use those even if they're a lot more expensive than standard DVD-Rs (as far as I know, I haven't really seen them in that many stores), but in any case it would be a lot cheaper than having to buy yet another hard drive to be able to permanently store those Hi-8 videos (I also worry about the age of those tapes).
So that's why I want to transfer them over to removable media of some sort.

OK, having gotten that out of the way I have a few additional questions:

1) The Hi-8 tapes have date and time information stamped somehow (I'm talking about the ability to display date and/or time or switch it off when playing back the tapes). Will this information be transferred over to the DVDs or to the computer if recorded there?
Actually I could ask the same question concerning my Mini-DV camcorder.

2) If I do end up transferring the Hi-8 tapes over to DVDs (or dual-layer DVDs) using my Pioneer DVD-recorder, how do I import them over to the computer so I can use them as sources for editing with iMovie? Is this where "ripping" comes in?

3) How do I import clips from different sources in iMovie? The little I've played around with iMovie I've only understood how to import video from a camcorder using a Firewire cable, or working on a previously made iMovie project. Is it possible to import video data from say my Mini-DV camcorder, DVDs, video files in various formats etc?... or do I need to buy Final cut express for this?

[QuadG5Man]

ok, my two cents....

1) The timecode 'stamp' would probably pass over from the Hi8 source (since it's analog), so make sure the date/time is off when you transfer it through your DV camera to the computer . This would not happen with just your DV camera since firewire is 'smart' enough to just transfer the video.

2) DVDxDV - this program works for converting DVD video to editable DV files for iMovie or FCP/Express.

3) I don't use iMovie, so I can't help you there, but it sounds to me like you should forget about iMovie and buy FInal Cut Express if possible.

For hard drive space, 10 minutes of video is roughly 2 gigs (it's more like 250 megs a minute), so if you buy a 200 gigabyte drive it would store almost 1000 minutes of digital video.

[typhoon]

Originally Posted by QuadG5Man

ok, my two cents....

1) The timecode 'stamp' would probably pass over from the Hi8 source (since it's analog), so make sure the date/time is off when you transfer it through your DV camera to the computer . This would not happen with just your DV camera since firewire is 'smart' enough to just transfer the video.

Bummer. I've always found this timecode information useful, being able to check at any time when I shot a particular clip. Is there any way to transfer this over to the digitized recording?
( I guess, if I really wanted the time and/or date to be displayed in a particular clip I could press the time/date button on the Hi-8 camcorder when playing back, while digitizing the contents through the Mini-DV camcorder, but then that would of course become part of the actual video and can't be removed again).

On that note, how about when I capture digital recordings from my Mini-DV camcorder over to the Mac? When you say that Firewire is smart enough to transfer just the video, does that also mean that there's no way to transfer this data even if I want to?
I've always found the ability to record the time/date along with the video, but not a part of the video to be very useful.

2) DVDxDV - this program works for converting DVD video to editable DV files for iMovie or FCP/Express.

Interesting. I've downloaded it and will give the 30 day demo a go when I get started. However, I'm a little confused about the functionality. I don't know too much about video editing (yet), but I've gathered that there's basically two different main formats:

a) the "raw", original video which I get when "capturing" a video from my Mini-DV camcorder over to iMovie on the Mac using a Firewire 400 cable.

b) The compressed (?) format which I get when transferring my iMovie (uncompressed?) video via iDVD to a blank DVD-R.

Correct so far?

So.... from having read SWfan's reply I assume that anything transferred to DVD (in the DVD-viewing/video format) would be of lower quality than the "raw" quality that comes out of a captured mini-DV tape with iMovie, right?

I've heard of programs such as "Mac the ripper" and "Handbrake" which I understand do the same thing: extract the audio/video from a DVD into a suitable format for the Mac (so I can edit it there), so what makes "DVDxDV" different?
Wouldn't there be a loss to begin with on the DVD, or am I misunderstanding? Perhaps the compression on the DVD is just like creating a ZIP file of something: you ZIP the original source-material so it'll take less space on the storage media (a blank DVD-R in this case), then un-ZIP it before it can be used (I assume a DVD-player will "un-ZIP" the DVD's contents on the fly)?

Is any of this making sense?

3) I don't use iMovie, so I can't help you there, but it sounds to me like you should forget about iMovie and buy FInal Cut Express if possible.

Well, the idea was to get started with iMovie, see where it'll take me and only if it won't let me do what I intend to I'll look into buying Final cut express. No need to fork out that cash without knowing what I already have can do

For hard drive space, 10 minutes of video is roughly 2 gigs (it's more like 250 megs a minute), so if you buy a 200 gigabyte drive it would store almost 1000 minutes of digital video.

Not bad! But I really don't see a hard drive as a permanent form of storage media, but rather something I do my editing work on. And when you think about it, even 1000 minutes isn't that much. Fifteen 1-hour tapes would be around 900 minutes and I would still want some additional room for editing and probably "swap" space as well.

Another thought... if 10 minutes of raw, uncompressed video takes around 2 GB, then 1 hour should take around 12 Gbytes. That certainly wouldn't fit on a single DVD-R (4.7 GB), or even a dual layer DVD-R (8.5 GB), but if there would be a way to split up the video-file into suitable segments, perhaps I could fit them into several DVDs, (e.g. one dual layer DVD-R plus one DVD-R would give: 8.5 + 4.7 = 13.2 GB).
Would that be a better solution (creating a data-DVD) than creating a video-DVD?
Or wouldn't it matter?

[QuadG5Man]

DVD video is MPEG2 compression, which isn't that great, and is the last step if you want to stay away from any generation loss (which occurs by changing from one video format (ie. compression or codec used to compress the video data) to another.

Your MiniDV camcorder is DV compression, which is the format you would edit with in Final Cut or iMovie. After you edit the DV video you would create the DVD via iDVD, DVD Studio Pro, etc.

The key is to get the video into your mac as DV first, and that applies to your analog Hi8 footage that would pass through the DV cam to your mac.

[typhoon]

I see. Thanks for clearing that up, QuadG5Man.
I didn't know that any compression was involved with the actual Mini-DV tapes, but obviously this is of a better quality than MPEG-2.

So I should stay away from using the Pioneer DVD-recorder in this case then, and import directly into iMovie instead.?
That takes care the digitizing/importing, but what about storage?

I want to transfer them over to some form of removable media, and it looks like DVD-R is the most practical way for the price to do it. But what about the file-splitting which I obviously need?
I've found out that an iMovie "project" file is in fact a folder containing several files, so I'm sure that simply splitting such a project would cause problems. Perhaps I need to turn that folder into a single file first (which a compression program would do, but would probably take ages to finish with such a lot of data, so I'd avoid it) -any software that can do this? Freeware if possible.

[mikeini]

how do you go from Hi-8 to the computer. My buddy has a sony ccd-tr608 and it uses usb to usb and imovie wont recognize the camera ... from waht i've found im pretty sure its cuase it isnt in the firewire slot ..

any suggetsions? i dont have a miniDV camera to do what was suggetsed above.

mike