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).
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.
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/
Wish vhsdecode was easier to use in practice! Such a cool idea but a bit too inconvenient to hack your own hardware like this...
My pipeline was camera -> WinDV -> DVdate (to extract exact datetimes into srt subtitles) -> Handbrake (to convert to mp4).