I record some family vacation stuff on a Hi8 camcorder. With blu ray winning the format war, what is the best thing to transfer the video to now??

Am I best to just transfer from the Hi8 tapes to DVD and at least BDP's will convert it?

One way to future-proof yourself is to get it onto a computer in uncompressed format. That way you'll be able to burn it to whatever you want.

Quality response, Peter.


What is the resolution of Hi8, or is it a film base? If it's film base you might consider Blu Ray. But Blu Ray blank discs are pretty expensive these days, as are players. DVD quality is, as I am sure you know, pretty darn good. Blank DVDs ridiculously cheap these days. Put it on that. In addition, given that Blu Ray players can all play DVDs, it is "future proof" as you can get today.

Hi8 is an analog format with 420 lines of luma information and 30 lines of chroma information.

In other words, the colour detail is about as good as VHS, and the luminence detail is about twice as good.

Transfer it to whatever's hip right now, but keep the original tapes for the next format... you wouldn't have thrown out your vinyl after "upgrading it" onto compact cassette, would you?

Bren R.

Thanks for the info. For some reason I thought it was like DAT back in the day and the format was digital.

I'll probably put it onto DVD for now and keep the tapes as suggested. But once its been put on DVD in a digital format, I might try and keep a digital format of them on my hard drive too.

Kind o sappy, but wanna keep the family trip to Vancouver Island and Florida around.

Hi,

BrenR is correct about Hi8. Back in the murky days of standard VHS, Hi8 looked pretty good by comparison, but it's still analog video and no amount of processing is going to add resolution to it or make it look like DVD or HD. If you ever saw the old laserdisc format, Hi8 was comparable. Nowadays, laserdisc looks quite grotty when you compare it to digital formats like DVD, let alone HD. Despite being read by a laser, laserdisc video was analog. Late in its life, the laserdisc soundtracks went frequency-modulated (FM) analog to Dolby AC-3, a digital audio format, but the video was always analog.

So go with standard DVD, which should remain compatible for years to come. At least it will preserve all the resolution that Hi* was capable of. It's entirely normal to want to archive old video of family and loved ones. I have some Hi8 video of my son when he was about 7 or 8 taken on a sailboat I owned for years.

Regards,

Alan