Is there a point in using QuickTime Player's 'maximum' quality for streaming Hi8 analog tapes?

Thank you for all your input, but you're operating at a knowledge level that makes it hard for me to understand much of what you are suggesting, and at a level I have no desire to attain. I'd like to say I'm a novice at all this, but even that would be exaggerating my abilities. I'm just looking for an easy way to get all these tapes on my computer as .mov files. Once I get that done, my daughter is going to take care of editing and burning DVDs (on a PC). I have about 30 8mm tapes. About 1/3 are analog Hi8. The rest are Digital8. I have a Sony TRV-350 that was used to record the Digital8, but is also capable of Hi8 playback, so that's what I'm using right now. Right now I've got things working in a reasonable streamlined manner. All the parts are working, I understand the steps to take, and in the end I'm producing the needed .mov files. I'm willing to tinker with choices like codecs (that the finder will present to me) and choosing "high" vs "maximum", but tbh I'm not willing to go much beyond that.

I've been down this path a few times before since 2003, and usually get frustrated over the amount of time spent and throw in the towel. I recently stumbled across some "DV movie" files on an old hard disk. I eventually concluded there were from an old attempt in 2003 to get these tapes digitized on the computer. This attempt was done using G4 (Quicksilver 2002) which I still have running. You can find more on that adventure here: QuickTime Player can't open old "DV movie… - Apple Community

I could play the "DV movie" files on the G4, but not my current iMac, but found out that they could be played and converted on another iMac I have running 10.13. Anyway, that roped me in to trying to get all of these tapes digitized again. I was recently talking to my daughter about just having them sent to some service that does it for you, because she's been bugging me to get them digitized. I know that would be easier, but I'm not sure what I'll end up with, so I'm taking a stab at this again. If it proves to muchof a PITA, then I'll send the tapes out instead.

I'm not sure exactly what I used to get the "DV movie" files generated on the G4. It was back in 2003. The G4 does has a firewire port, so I probably went direct from the camcorder with it's i-LINK cable, but on the software side I don't know what I used. There currently is no version of iMovie installed. I do have iMovie 5.03 from a iMac G5 I got after the G4. That iMac died, and I pulled the drive and saved it. But like I said, there is no iMovie on the G4, and I can't imagine I ever de-installed it. Is there anything else (that OSX automatically installed) that I might have used?

In any case, I don't think I want to go back to using 23 year old hardware and software unless it is going to make some significant improvements. These are old analog NTSC format tapes, so not that great of quality to start with. The only issue I've seen so far is there are few lines of pixels at the bottom of the screen that don't display properly, but I think that is the fault of the camcorder's digital converter since it appears with both the old G4 generated "DV movie" files and the new files I'm generating with my iMac going through all the adapters.

The old .dv files are about 12 GB/hour

The "DV movie" files I have are about 25gb per hour of video.

So I'd recommend FCP import for the quality I am used to, although that

must be deinterlaced for computer playback unless longer shutterspeed

was used making the footage essentially progressive.

FCP is an expensive product if I recall. Wasn't it $1000 at one point? In any case, what you say above is the type of path I really don't want to go down; getting new software with a steep learning curve and tinkering around with video imports and conversions in a way that takes a lot of time and eventually leads me to give up.

I decided to followup with the discussion link you gave me:

Transfer from Mini DV video camera has gh… - Apple Community

Lots of discussion of using VLC there, so I gave it try. That just sent me down frustration alley. None of the online help for VLC seems to apply to OSX. The instructions on how to capture from a camcorder quickly go astray of what my menu and dialog options look like. I did figure out (on my own, not via any help) that I need to start with "Open Capture Device...", but actually configuring it and getting it to record didn't work. It did seem to be streaming in the video (in a very chopped up manner, only refreshing the screen every few seconds), but didn't actually record anything.

If the old Mac with built-in Firewire works, you might try the oldie and goodie QuickTime Player 7 with its "Device Native" import setting (it works up to Mojave). QuickTime Player 7 "Pro" licenses are no longer sold and I have not tried if that is needed for importing, though.

Download QuickTime Player 7 for Mac OS X v10.6.3 - Apple Support

The G4 only supports up to 10.5.8.

But proceed with the new QuickTime Player and see if the quality is OK for your needs.

My needs are to get the best discernible quality. Right now I'm not sure if I am because I don't know how to compare what I'm getting to what the best quality would look like, or if going with High instead of Maximum might not show up when I do a side-by-side comparison on my mac, but might in some other setting (especially if further editing of the video is done). My original question was with Maximum vs High quality, but this discussion has sidestepped that question and is in general about the best way to digitize these tapes.

FWIW I no longer bother burning video-DVDs. They are clumsy to use and optical media and devices are being phased out. I have lots of old video-DVDs made with iMovie and iDVD collecting dust. Instead, I store old home movies as .mp4 movies on computer drive archives and copy them to iPads for viewing or thumb drives to view on smart TVs.

Yeah, I get it. I see DVDs more as a way to have additional backups. Mostly these will be videos will be archived on my computer, hopefully in a way that makes them easy to watch. I like that DVDs allow for an index and can contain info about what the video clips contains (dates, people, locations, etc). I'm not sure to what extent that is possible with .mp4.

What is meant by "trimming as straight cuts"?

Since you've used a Sony D8 camcorder for this purpose before, let me ask another related question. I'm using the Sony TRV350. All my converted Hi8 tapes have a defect at the bottom of the screen. See the image below. The defect constantly changes as the scene changes. Is this normal?

So obviously 32 kHz stems from the original camcorder setting and tapes

and you might leave it as such, although using 32 kHz, 12-bit audio

might make the audio out of sync as well as other audio glitches.

It looks like by default my camera recorded in 12-bit:

I'm not sure what is meant by "two stereo sounds" and "one stereo sound". I still don't get why using "-an" makes the error go away. I haven't noticed any audio issues yet, but I'll check a look closer.

I have been wary joining movie files because they should all have exactly the same codec and codec parameters but your .dv files imported via the same workflow should be the same.

Yes. I'm always joining the multiple .dv clips that are created when doing a single import of a tape, and the entire tape was filmed using the same camera (I read that recording on a single tape using different cameras can cause problems).

A few multimedia containers (MPEG-1, MPEG-2 PS, DV) allow one to concatenate video by merely concatenating the files containing them with the humble cat command (the output is essentially the same as with MPEG Streamclip):

cat input1.dv input2.dv input3.dv > joined.dv

I'll definitely give that a try.

BTW, I could really use a video editor that allow me to edit the DV clip (namely, remove sections of video from the clip), and then re-export as DV without decoding/encoding the entire clip (but possibly doing so for a few seconds around the edit). ffmpeg can accomplish that, but you need to specify the time code of where to split the clip, which I imagine will take some trial an error before getting it just right. And then of course you will need to split again at the end of the section of the clip you want to edit out. So then you have 3 clips and you throw away the middle one, and then concat the two remaining clips. Rather laborious, especially if there are multiple edits you want to make.

I'd also be interested in knowing if sending the tapes out to a video digitizing service would produce some thing that is the same, better, or worse quality than what I'm doing. I certainly don't want to put a lot of effort into creating something that is substandard, and am even willing to pay if it would be the same quality as what I'm doing, but certainly don't want to pay for worse quality.

AFAIR in the link you mention VLC was mentioned only relating to deinterlacing display options, not importing, and I have never tried to import from DV/D8 tape with it.

I was trying to better understand deinterlacing. I can play these videos with VLC, but the only thing I've been able to discern w.r.t. deinterlacing is that Video -> Deinterlace has "automatic" selected, and Video -> Deinterlace Mode has "auto" selected. I don't know what this implies about the current state of the video (deinterlaced or not).

I just compared a video captured with "Maximum" quality to the same video compressed with the H.264. The compressed version looks way better. The original is grainy while the compressed looks very crisp. I guess there is a lot of correction that goes on during the compression that makes it look better. They both suffer from what I guess you would call ghosting or doubling of the image when there is movement. I thought this is what deinterlacing was suppose to correct.

Matti Haveri wrote:

QT Player 7 might work in 10.5.8 so you might try if it works.

It's a 32-bit intel app, so can't run on the G4. That's probably the reason it says it is for 10.6 and later. 10.5.8 was the last release to run on PowerPC.

I created both maximum quality and high quality copies of a tape. For the maximum quality I also then encoded it to reduce the size. The results are:

max: 20.79gb

max+encoded: 1.57gb

high: 2.02gb

So going with max and then encoding gives you something smaller than high, even though in both cases you end up with an H.264 encoding. I then took a closer look at the quality of the high and max+encoded videos, and there is a slight difference. I feel the high version was less grainy. It's no that obvious at first, but when you really look closely you can see the difference in some parts of some frames.