Digitizing 8mm home videos

Hey guys,
I'm trying to digitize my families 8mm video recordings. I'd like to to find the best software to HD upscale, and stabilize the home recordings.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

Do you still have the camera they were recorded on ?
You may be able to use an A/V to digital adapter/converter.
There is very little available on the market for this type of conversion that works well.

If you have nothing to play them on..... they would be best sent out to be converted.

 

I am using Roxio Easy VHS to DVD usb adapter, connected to 8mm camcorder, with S-Video, and 3.5mm Audio. Saving the raw video in H.264 format. (other options were MPEG2, or WMV.)
My goal is to get the best resolution, while also increasing the stabilization of the video. I don't mind paying for a product if the results are worth it, but would prefer to find something open source and free.

Thanks!

 

For all consumer analog videotape formats including regular VHS, outputting from the camera or camcorder or VCR as S-video is superior to outputting as composite (yellow jack) video.

Ideally you want to make and save a raw digital copy, that is fundamentally a tape image, and at the highest resolution. Prior to the invention of digital video, it would be comparable to archiving a regular VHS or regular 8 tape as Hi-8 or Super VHS even though that looks like overkill. I do not know if there is a standard digital format for this.

I do not think that MPEG and WMV are raw formats, and more data loss occurs when converting to either of them.

You would do things like stabilization as a separate step starting from the raw digital "almost-orginal" you made.

Regular DVD is not the best archive format although it might be the best available for you. An obscure characteristic of DVD is that the color for every other "line" (row of pixels) is lost. Every two "lines" share the same coloration. Whereas all of the analog tape formats preserve the individual coloration for each "line." (The coloration on each line on tape is severely compromised by blurring changes from one color to another but that happened at recording time so there is nothing you can do about it now. But losing half of the coloration that remains at the time of digitizing is something you should at least think of avoiding.) Common buzzwords that describe systems that lose ever other line of coloration are "4:2:0" and "4:4:0". Common buzzwords that describe systems that do not lose every other line of coloration are "4:2:2" and "4:4:4". If the horizontal resolution of the raw digital copy is high enough then "4:2:2" will suffice as opposed to the higher quality "4:4:4".

 

Hardware first.
Software second.

I'd worry about getting the video off the tape, THEN worry about archiving format.

The biggest challenge is getting the best analog signal you can off the tape. That means finding an 8mm tape player with a component output, (red-blue-green + white/red audio).

THEN finding a component (5 plug) video digitizing board.

I saying this because most computers (Windows 7, Windows 10) can now stream video files directly FROM the computer TO most newer flat screen (i.e. smart) TVs, making the actual DVD backup medium almost irrelevant.

 

I know it's not a very DIY-ey answer, but this is definitely something that I'd send out to a place to do for me. The technology is a bit difficult as others have pointed out, plus it takes a lot of time to transfer, edit, and encode. I would personally spend my time doing post-editing work, pulling out the clips that I liked, uploading those to YouTube, etc. But that's just my 2 cents!