About
A one-person archive project with no schedule and no audience, written down mostly so I stop making the same mistake twice.
The name is what the working directory was called on the first day and it stuck. There is no company behind this, no newsletter, and nothing for sale.
The capture chain
| Decks | Sony CCD-TRV308 (Video8/Hi8), Sony DCR-TRV22 for MiniDV passthrough |
|---|---|
| Time base | Panasonic AG-1980 with the TBC left on for everything analogue |
| Capture | Blackmagic Intensity Shuttle over USB 3, 8-bit 4:2:2 |
| Codec | FFV1 level 3 in Matroska, slicecrc on |
| Audio | FLAC, 48 kHz, kept as recorded even where one channel is dead |
| Storage | Two 8 TB disks, mirrored by hand once a month, one copy off site |
Why the files are so big
FFV1 is lossless, so an hour of Hi8 lands somewhere between 35 and 50 GB depending on how much grain and dropout there is. That is absurd for something that was 400 lines of resolution on a good day.
I keep them anyway. Every lossy pass makes a decision on your behalf, and I would rather make those decisions later, once, with the whole thing in front of me. The deck is the part that is dying. Disk is cheap and getting cheaper.
What I do not do
- No deinterlacing at capture. It is stored as it came off the tape.
- No noise reduction, no sharpening, no automatic colour anything.
- No cutting. Even the twenty minutes of a garden fence gets kept.
- No uploading of family footage. That is not what this project is for.
Looking for
A working Sony EV-S9000, or a CCD-V6000 in any cosmetic state as long as the transport turns. Also genuinely interested in anyone who has a reliable fix for hardened pinch rollers that does not involve replacing them, because sourcing those has become the slowest part of this.
I do not run a contact form here. If you recognise the handle from the tape transfer forums, that is the same person, and that is the easiest way through.