Somewhere around 1994 my family started filming everything and then stopped watching any of it. This is the log of moving those tapes onto disk while they can still be played.
The count as of the last inventory pass is 61 cassettes: 34 Video8, 19 Hi8 and 8 MiniDV, plus two VHS-C that belong to an aunt and will probably never be returned. None of them were stored well. They sat in a cardboard box in a flat with no climate control for roughly twenty years, which is long enough for the binder to start shedding and for at least four of them to squeal on the first pass.
I am not restoring anything. The goal is a lossless capture of what survives, one file per tape, with a note about what went wrong. Colour correction and cutting can happen later, or never. The tapes are the part with a deadline.
| Captured | 38 of 61 |
|---|---|
| Unplayable so far | 2 (both Video8, severe mould) |
| Total runtime | just over 47 hours |
| Archive size | 1.9 TB, FFV1 in Matroska |
| Started | February |
The bottleneck is not disk or time, it is the deck. A working Hi8 transport is a consumable now, and the two I own are both making noises I have learned to recognise. Everything else in the chain can be replaced from a shop.
If you have a Sony EV-S9000 or a CCD-V6000 sitting in a cupboard and no plans for it, I am interested. Details on the about page.
Two separate recordings on one cassette with a gap of blank tape between them, and the deck resyncs badly across the join. Captured as a single stream rather than fighting it, and marked the frame offset in the sidecar file.
Loud enough to hear from the next room. Not the tape: a hardened pinch roller on the deck. Twenty minutes with isopropyl and the noise went away entirely, which was a much better outcome than I expected.
Lossless capture at this rate fills a drive fast. Switched the working set to a pair of spinning disks and kept only the current month on the SSD.