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 :)