I have been working on a way to import ~50 8mm camcorder tapes to my computer. I want to do this so that I can archive the footage for the following reasons:
1. The color on the movies when played back are tinted due to age.
2. Get the footage out of my house just in case a natural disaster occurs so I will not loose it.
3. Organize the footage better. Right now we just have tapes with dates on the labels.
4. Finally, I want to put together versions of the movies for the kids to watch from my AppleTV.
This how-to will explain how I was able to get the high quality footage moved over to my computer. First, I use a Mac, but these instructions can be used by Windows users as well since I use Quicktime Pro to do my import and initial organization. I will do another post later to explain why I chose Quicktime Pro vs. other options.
I have discovered (2) ways to do get my 8mm content to my computer. The first process is the only way I can import my 8mm camcorder tapes because the Sharp EL760u camcorder we used recorded only in LP mode. I learned this the hard way after spending $250 on a Sony TRV460 from eBay thinking I could use it to import my 8mm tapes. The second process below applies to users who have 8mm tape recorded in SP mode, HI-8 tape, or Digital8 tapes to import.
Process 1:
1. Attach the Sony DCR-TRV38 to AC power and connect the firewire port to my iMac.
2. On the Sony DCR-TRV38 ensure that A/V -> DV OUT is enabled. FYI… The same menu also appears on the Sony TRV460.
3. Plug in the Sharp EL760u 8mm camcorder to AC power. I strongly suggest not using batteries on either camcorder for this process.
4. Connect the video out cable between the Sharp EL760u 8mm camcorder and the audio/video port on the Sony DCR-TRV38. I had to use a female to female RCA plug to connect the video cable from the 8mm camera to the Sony DCR-TRV38. The image below shows you my monstrosity of a cable used:
5. Turn on both cameras to VCR mode
6. Make sure that Quicktime is setup properly by going into Quicktime Preferences and set the Video Source option to DV-VCR and change Quality to Device Native.
7. Open Quicktime player and choose: File -> New Movie Recording. At this point a new Quicktime player window will open that should have a grey background and a red record button.
If you see yourself via the iSight then double check that the DV camera with the firewire cable attached is on and also ensure it is actually plugged into the firewire port. Repeat the file, new movie recording in Quicktime until you get the grey background screen in the Quicktime window.
8. Press play on the 8mm camcorder once you see video in the Quicktime window. My 8mm tapes were recorded in LP mode so they are 2 hours long. A 1 hour imported file is ~13GB and 2 hours is ~26GB so make sure you have plenty of hard drive space. I store the video on the iMac short term and then I move the file over to my Drobo once I have trimmed the file and named is properly.
During my process of importing I did find where Quicktime would stop recording because the 8mm tape would go to static or a break was detected by Quicktime. This proved to be a pain because I would have to spend many minutes finding where the stoppage occurred on the 8mm camcorder. To make this less of a pain I always reset the counter on my 8mm camcorder when I put in a new tape or started from a new section of a tape. Why did I reset the counter? Quicktime has a timer in the lower left hand corner as shown below:
When recording stops scroll to the end of the recorded movie and note the time. Then rewind/ff your 8mm tape to the same time. Boom, saves many minutes…
Process 2:
This process requires far less hardware but uses the same import process once the hardware is setup. The Sony TRV460 (and TRV480) can play back 8mm analog SP recorded tapes and do the analog to digital conversion so all you need to do is attach a single camcorder and then import. Below are the more detailed steps.
1. Attach the camera to AC power and attach the TRV460 or TRV480 to the computer via firewire.
2. Follow steps 1-7 from the first process above.
A quick word about import quality. I import my video in Device Native mode in Quicktime because someday those tapes may not work and I want the best import quality currently known given the hardware I have. For those ubber geeks I really chose the second best import quality method. The best way I have found to import 8mm without loosing any quality is to dup an 8mm tape to DV tape from camera to camera. I chose not to do that because all of my 8mm tapes were 120 minutes long and they only make 60 minute DV tapes.
This process has worked out really well for me and is a good way to start getting your 8mm camcorder tapes imported and organized. Currently I have around 20 tapes left to import and chewed up 1.6TB of drive space on my Drobo. My next step is to import my large number of DV tapes as well, for that process I am not sure if I will use Quicktime since Final Cut and iMovie can create many small files during import rather than 1 large file. I will write a post on what method I chose to import video from mini-dv when I get that done. My next post will be on how to get the large files divided into smaller clips using Quicktime. Here is a hint for the non-patient ones: Trim Selection is your friend ! Good luck and let me know if you have questions…
In a past career I spent years working with engineers and hard drive manufacturers to come up with a better way to determine if a hard drive is going bad. Finally after thinking about creating my own software to do so I found someone else that wrote a great utility that covers everything I want.
The utility is SMARTUtility, this small but powerful utility uses the smartmon open source project to perform some quick magic. The utility looks at what I call the key SMART attributes and has logic to determine if the drive is healthy or needs replacing. This logic to determine good or bad is great because it predicts drive failure before the manufactures definition of a SMART failure occurs. This awesome utility also shows you the raw drive attributes and values. The author has some great supporting documentation on the attributes and definitions as well.
A bit of background, most software utilities look at a drives SMART value to determine if a drive is good or bad. While that is a step in the right direction, SMART failure criteria varies from vendor to vendor and most drive manufactures do not want to set overly aggresive thresholds due to high warranty costs.
A hard drive has a table of attributes with defined thresholds to determine if the SMART test has passed or failed. In a factory environment,I believe that once a drive is installed in a product and thoroughly tested key attributes in this table should not change. If a company has the resources to do a full write, full read pass, and a random read/write test of a drive and then check the drive attributes that is the best case. Most computer and storage manufactures do not have the manufacturing time to do such a test.
This past weekend our iMac would not boot. After dropping to single user mode and seeing FSCK fail I quickly booted from a backup firewire drive and ran Mac OS X Disk Utility,which also failed. I then booted the Tech Tool Deluxe DVD and noticed the full surface scan failing.
Based on my past experience I really desired a quick way to see the HDD SMART attributes to see what the drive firmware is registering. I did a quick search and found SMARTUtility. After a quick Mac install and launch I saw that my HDD was over temp at some point and over 30 sectors have been reallocated. I knew that a 250GB drive can have up to ~2000+ reallocated sectors before SMART trips. So, only seeing 30 led me to believe that I have some time, maybe seconds or years, but sometime before I start to panic that the drive needs to be replaced NOW.
My next step to determine if the drive was quickly failing was to do a full write pass, and then a full read pass on the drive. This would cause the drive to reallocate bad sectors and also tell me if more bad sectors were reallocated. Luckily the reallocation count did not grow after performing the full write pass using disk utility followed by a full read pass using the Tech Tool Deluxe DVD. To me, this meant the drive, while bad, is healthy enough to continue.
If I had a spare drive I would have replaced it right away but we had important work to be done that weekend. After my testing and a Time Machine restore we were able to get our weekend work done with only loosing one day of work. I was able to do this only because of SMARTUtility. This is a great app and I highly recommend it.
This is my experience and I will be replacing this drive as soon as I ship the iMac to Apple for a drive swap for free thanks to APP. I am not recommending to others that a drive that has been over-temp and has “x” number of bad sectors is good enough to run production on. I truly believe and highly recommend that if SMARTUtility says the drive is failing swap it out as soon as you can.
This is a short how-to copy over an existing installation of AutoCad to a new computer if you lost the installation disk.
1. Copy the following to a backup drive and then copy back to the same location on the new install.
- c:\Program Files\ACAD2000
- c:\Program Files\Common Files\AutoDesk Shared
2. Go to Control Panel, System, Advanced, Environment Variables. Append the following to the PATH variable.
;c:\Program Files\Common Files\AutoDesk Shared
At this point AutoCad will launch and be able to work.
What a geek I have become, I am so excited to share with all that I got to meet Merlin Mann in person. Merlin is a GTD master, owner of 43Folders, and is quickly becoming a geek celebrity on MacBreak podcasts. I had the pleasure of meeting Merlin during an informal discussion on the upcoming release of OmniFocus during WWDC in San Fransico.
CSS-based techniques you should always have ready to hand if you develop web-sites. Thanks to all developers who contributed to accessible and usable css-based design over the last few years. We really appreciate it. Show some Love.
Official Seal Generator - Enter some text, choose a border and an emblem, pick your colors, and click the ‘Go’ button. An Official Seal will be generated for you. Collect ‘em, trade ‘em, put ‘em on your website, or e-mail ‘em to your friends…..
CSSEdit 2 is a major upgrade to the simple and powerful Mac OS X shareware CSS editor. The biggest feature is stylesheet overrides, which allow you to tinker with any site’s CSS without having to save, upload and refresh. Also featured is X-ray, which lets you easily see how any layout is built. Lots of other new goodies - check it out!
