Digitize MiniDV Tapes with Linux

Re:Digitize MiniDV Tapes with Linux by darknavi on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @11:10AM (#27973373)

This winter I transferred a ton of VHS tapes and a bunch of MiniDV tapes. The process is vastly different (obviously analogue vs digital). VHS was a lot more fun with the super cool deinterlacing/FPS boost stuff you can do with AviSynth.

For MiniDV I ended up using iMovie on my Macbook Pro and it worked surprisingly well. It automatically imported and spliced the different "cuts" of a single tape into different files. It even timestamped the videos with what the camera thought the time was (spoilers, tons of the times were clearly wrong).

I found a guide online somewhere, but I'd like to present the dongle beast I used between my Macbook and my camera: https://i.imgur.com/wZ9rJnH.png

Thunderbolt 3 -> Thunderbolt 2 -> Firewire

I just handed off my MiniDV hardware setup to a friend to try out on Windows for some of his tapes. What a blast!

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Re:Digitize MiniDV Tapes with Linux by krueger71 on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @12:50PM (#27974613)

Did something similar on my Mac. Dongle for Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire and then got the raw .mov files via iMovie. De-interlacing and encoding with ffmpeg. For a raw file with a size of say 600 MB you can get down to something like 30 MB with h264, h265 can reduce this further to perhaps 15 MB. All of a sudden those old memories will be easy to keep and share :)

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