Digitizing Tapes in 2025
My friend ended up with a big box of vidoe tapes from their childhood spread across VHS, Video8, and MiniDV.
I have been given / volunteered for / chose to digitize these and I’m trying to strike a reasonable balance between cost, quality, and effort.
There is some very interesting work happening with softwared defined decoding in the VHS-Decode project but it’s a little more moving parts and soldering than I want to do right now. Perhaps in a few years when I can buy a single piece of hardware for a few hundred dollars I’ll revisit this.
1. Step 1: Try to get everything via a capture card
Bought a used BlackMagic Intensity Extreme including a Thunderbolt cable which claims to be able to capture NTSC (fun fact, this is literally the first time I have ever touched a Thunderbolt cable!). These are pretty cheap. I read online that this isn’t great but I hoped it would be Good Enough™️.
It wasn’t!! Lots of black frames and stuttering. The video wasn’t watchable.
2. Step 2: Get the MiniDV via Firewire
These should be the easiest. It’s digital data stored on tapes. The camcorder has a Firewire port on it… but I don’t own any devices with a firewire port.
Apple made a Firewire to Thunderbolt adapter which I could plug in to my 2014 MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt (which I have also never used except for Ethernet lol) but they’re pretty pricey at this point.
Going to try another line of attack:
- M.2 NVMe to USB adapter $16
- M.2 M-Key to PCIe adapter $10
- LinksTek 4-Ports 1394A PCIE FireWire 400 card $20
Total cost ~$50. I probably should have just bit the bullet and waited for an Apple adapter to pop up for $100 and avoided this horrible chain of converters.
3. Step 3: Get the Video8 via another camcorder with Passthrough to FireWire
All of this to be continued as soon as I find the right camcorder on eBay…