Digitizing my old tapes was one of the most rewarding side projects that I did over the last year. I managed to get in under the wire (pun intended) of Firewire compatibility on Sequoia and a long daisy-chain of adapters. But it was clear the days of this approach were numbered. I'm optimistic these 3rd party accessories will become more standardized into self-contained cheap boxes where people can easily transfer over their stuff before camcorders degrade.
My pipeline went camera -> dvrescue -> ffmpeg -> clip chunking -> gemini for auto tagging of family members and locations where things were shot.
We now have all our family's footage hosted on a NAS with Jellyfin serving over Tailscale to my parents Macbooks. I found the clip chunking in particular made the footage a lot more watchable than just importing the two-hour long tapes although ymmv.
I am going to finish such a project soon myself, including some old Video8 tapes! Sounds like you're on macOS, Any reason you didn't use iMovie for the capture itself?
The Video8 tapes have already been digitalized via a Digital8 camcorder, but apparently you can get even better quality out of old analog tapes with the vhsdecode project. Let's see if I ever get around to that, but at least it bypass Firewire entirely:
https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decodehttps://www.reddit.com/r/vhsdecode/
Mostly wanted to fully automate the pipeline (auto-rewind tape, scan tape head position, etc) and iMovie is just using the same AVFoundation APIs under the scene that you can call manually. Took some notes here if helpful:
https://pierce.dev/notes/automating-our-home-video-imports
Wish vhsdecode was easier to use in practice! Such a cool idea but a bit too inconvenient to hack your own hardware like this...
Went through a very similar journey recently as well. In my case using a Macbook was a non-starter, as certain adapters are prohibitively expensive these days, if you can even get your hands on one. Thankfully my son has a desktop Windows PC and Firewire PCI cards are cheap and plentiful, so getting connected that way worked out. Much better than an earlier attempt via RCA cables (simple but digital -> analog -> digital is not the way to go).
My pipeline was camera -> WinDV -> DVdate (to extract exact datetimes into srt subtitles) -> Handbrake (to convert to mp4).
If you are capturing I find dvgrab is pretty good. It's what I've been using for about 25 years now!
In the olden days when I got paid to shoot real video on a VX2000 and edit it for people, captured using a PCI Firewire card and dvgrab in Slackware, rewrapped with probably mencoder shading towards ffmpeg when it became more popular (and developed!), dual-boot into Windows 2000 and cut in Premiere 5.0, then back into Linux to transcode back to DV if I wanted to write it out to DV tape.
These days I shoot on a PD150 or DSR500 (and quite often some HDV cameras), capture via a PCIe Firewire card and dvgrab in Ubuntu, rewrap with ffmpeg, and edit in Resolve, without the dual-booting step.
If you use dvgrab it will split the capture up into separate clips on shot boundaries based on the pause/unpause markers on the tape. I have not found a way to extract good/no good from the stream, but if you're not shooting on a broadcast camera you don't have this anyway. Timecode is preserved though!
When you load it all up in Resolve, one of the options in the Cut page is "Source Tape View" which runs all your clips together by timecode, and lets you view them as though they were a continuous tape of your rushes, which is how we used to do basic assemble editing in the olden days of clunky tape decks and edit controllers with big rows of red 7-segment displays.
Edit your old home videos. You can do that now, and they'll be far more watchable.
Any idea how long the tapes will last? I have a bunch sitting in a box that I should probably verify have all been imported already before they turn to dust.
Digitizing my old tapes was one of the most rewarding side projects that I did over the last year. I managed to get in under the wire (pun intended) of Firewire compatibility on Sequoia and a long daisy-chain of adapters. But it was clear the days of this approach were numbered. I'm optimistic these 3rd party accessories will become more standardized into self-contained cheap boxes where people can easily transfer over their stuff before camcorders degrade.
My pipeline went camera -> dvrescue -> ffmpeg -> clip chunking -> gemini for auto tagging of family members and locations where things were shot.
We now have all our family's footage hosted on a NAS with Jellyfin serving over Tailscale to my parents Macbooks. I found the clip chunking in particular made the footage a lot more watchable than just importing the two-hour long tapes although ymmv.
I am going to finish such a project soon myself, including some old Video8 tapes! Sounds like you're on macOS, Any reason you didn't use iMovie for the capture itself?
The Video8 tapes have already been digitalized via a Digital8 camcorder, but apparently you can get even better quality out of old analog tapes with the vhsdecode project. Let's see if I ever get around to that, but at least it bypass Firewire entirely: https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode https://www.reddit.com/r/vhsdecode/
Mostly wanted to fully automate the pipeline (auto-rewind tape, scan tape head position, etc) and iMovie is just using the same AVFoundation APIs under the scene that you can call manually. Took some notes here if helpful: https://pierce.dev/notes/automating-our-home-video-imports
Wish vhsdecode was easier to use in practice! Such a cool idea but a bit too inconvenient to hack your own hardware like this...
A few years ago I did a bit more of a crude flow.
Play the footage on a tv in a dark room. Place a 4k camera on a tripod and record the tv with audio into the camera audio port.
Worked perfectly.
Went through a very similar journey recently as well. In my case using a Macbook was a non-starter, as certain adapters are prohibitively expensive these days, if you can even get your hands on one. Thankfully my son has a desktop Windows PC and Firewire PCI cards are cheap and plentiful, so getting connected that way worked out. Much better than an earlier attempt via RCA cables (simple but digital -> analog -> digital is not the way to go).
My pipeline was camera -> WinDV -> DVdate (to extract exact datetimes into srt subtitles) -> Handbrake (to convert to mp4).
Is it possible to accomplish tagging with local AI instead of Gemini?
If you are capturing I find dvgrab is pretty good. It's what I've been using for about 25 years now!
In the olden days when I got paid to shoot real video on a VX2000 and edit it for people, captured using a PCI Firewire card and dvgrab in Slackware, rewrapped with probably mencoder shading towards ffmpeg when it became more popular (and developed!), dual-boot into Windows 2000 and cut in Premiere 5.0, then back into Linux to transcode back to DV if I wanted to write it out to DV tape.
These days I shoot on a PD150 or DSR500 (and quite often some HDV cameras), capture via a PCIe Firewire card and dvgrab in Ubuntu, rewrap with ffmpeg, and edit in Resolve, without the dual-booting step.
If you use dvgrab it will split the capture up into separate clips on shot boundaries based on the pause/unpause markers on the tape. I have not found a way to extract good/no good from the stream, but if you're not shooting on a broadcast camera you don't have this anyway. Timecode is preserved though!
When you load it all up in Resolve, one of the options in the Cut page is "Source Tape View" which runs all your clips together by timecode, and lets you view them as though they were a continuous tape of your rushes, which is how we used to do basic assemble editing in the olden days of clunky tape decks and edit controllers with big rows of red 7-segment displays.
Edit your old home videos. You can do that now, and they'll be far more watchable.
Any idea how long the tapes will last? I have a bunch sitting in a box that I should probably verify have all been imported already before they turn to dust.
This would have been much nicer than suffering my dad’s 12 year old iMac I found in the loft.
Discussion of prior post (FireWire on a Raspberry Pi): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535249
Oooh! Relevant to my interests :-)
I'll have a shot of this I think.