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.

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).

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 got the G4 setup to stream from the camcorder video again. I’m pretty sure I used iMovie (or iMovie HD) when I last went down this path in 2003. That’s also when I got the Digital8 camcorder, making it possible to stream out the Hi8 tapes over firewire.

I streamed in a tape using iMovie HD and it seems to have worked, but things are a bit different than in 2003. In 2003 the clips were all segmented into clips of about 2gb (a bit under 10 minutes). Now they are segmented into 1hr clips. In both cases the finder says the clips are files of type “DV movie”. However, the clips from 2003 do not have a .dv extension and the new clips do. Also the 2003 clips were not playable with the macOS 14 version of QuickTime Player (but were with the 10.13 version), but the new clips are playable. That got me thinking, is it the lack of the .dv extension the only reason the current QuickTime Player would not play the clips. Sure enough it is. I added .dv to the old files from 2003, and now QuickTime Player will play them. And unlike the 10.13 version of QuickTime Player, it did not require automatically converting them first.

Since it seems I should be starting with the raw video whenever doing any editing, and choosing a better deinterlacer, I’m thinking of taking up your original advice and doing all the streaming on the G4 using iMovie HD. It will mean sending much larger files to my daughter (she’ll be doing the editing), but seems like it is a better approach, and I can keep the raw video files archived in case they are ever needed in the future. BTW, is there a better format to keep these DV movies in that VLC can easily convert to, but is still considered raw video?

Regarding deinterlacing choices. I tried Bob compared to the QuickTime Player default. Bob has much more noticeable stair stepping. The default QuickTime Player has ghosting and what I would call blurred stair stepping (probably blurred front the ghosting. I found just using the VLC default deinterlacing (I’m not sure what that actually is) had much better results than either Bob or the QuickTime Player default. No ghosting and no stair stepping.

I guess the most important thing for me right now is that I get the content off the Hi8 and Digital8 tapes and in an archival format that can be used in the future to create whatever end product desired. It sound like you are saying just keeping them around as .dv files is fine for that.

One question I have along those lines relates to the auto splitting that iMovie is doing. Yes, I found the "start a new clip at each scene break" option, but that only seems to impact Digital8 tapes. Hi8 tapes start a new clip at 1hr no matter what the setting. I'm trying to decide if I should set this option for the Digital8 tapes. I've only streamed 1 Digital8 tape so far, and it ended up with 178 clips for a 1hr tape. Should I go with this or go with 1 large 1hr clip?

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?

With 4:3 NTSC scale 720x480 to 648x480 and then crop to the final 640x480.

I understand you are trying to crop the artifact at the bottom of the image, but doesn't the above end up cropping the side of the image, not the bottom. I would have expected you to say to scale to 640x488 and then crop to 640x480, which would crop out the bottom 8 lines.