Fateful thing to say, as I did on Friday, “Haven’t seen many Hi8 tapes lately”. Just as well as our global HQ is presently stuffed with VHS tapes we’ve been converting. Two of the biggest tape to DVD conversion projects we’ve taken on.
To answer me we got a batch of Hi8 tapes in the post on Saturday morning, at least the postman was amused to get me out of bed before 08:00. Then on Sunday, thankfully in the afternoon, two calls just to check we’re still converting Hi8 to DVD. Yes, we are.
The other question asked was about taking the converted DVD containing the footage we’ve converted, and then turning that into a computer editable file. Yes, you can do this and you can download free software for either PCs or Macs that will do it for you. We recommend Handbrake, give it a try.
For our own purposes we use paid for software from Xilisoft. They have a gigantic range of PC, Mac software to rip DVDs into files ready to edit or play on virtually any platform including iPods and iPhones. One advantage of Xilisofts offerings is the catch-all term ease of use. Once you’ve got the hang of it you can quickly configure their code to rip DVDs into any format. Then there’s the elapsed time taken to convert a video. A two hour home movie tape can take up to 11 hours to convert if you use Handbrake on a less than modern PC. Even our multicore PCs struggle to get significantly under the 120 minute mark with Xilisoft but my gut feel is its around twice as fast as Handbrake. For us time is money, so Xilisoft got the vote.
If you’re thinking of ringing today yes, we’re still converting Hi8 to DVD, along with MiniDV, VHS-C and ordinary VHS.
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