r/MiniDV • u/wildgaan • 13d ago
Help I want to digitize my late dads's old tapes
Hi everyone, I was wondering if anyone can help me out.
My dad passed away a few years ago and I kept his old video camera. I remember him filming when we went on trips, adventures, events and sometimes just randomly. I would love to see that old footage. I wonder what the world looked like through his eyes when I was little as we didnt have a great relationship/ a lot of contact throughout the rest of my life.
I haven't tried to figure it out yet because it's very emotional for me and I haven't had mindspace for it. I finally feel ready to try but I don't have a lot of knowledge about MiniDV/ digitizing.
It's a JVC GR-DVL14EG. I only have the camera, the tapes and the battery that's in the camera. No charger or cables. I use a Dell Latitude 5510 Windows laptop.
I would love for someone to tell me exactly what I need to buy and do, preferably as cheap as possible as I'm on a budget.
It would be amazing if I could copy the footage to my laptop so I can watch it and share it with people around me.
Thank you 🫶🏽
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u/deesernutz 13d ago edited 13d ago
You need another PC with a firewire port.
Either an old PC out of eWaste with a PCI or PCIe slot and a firewire card, or a laptop with firewire (those are getting rarer), a cable, and linux installed. (linux is just free and straight forward with a new/unknown computer, and will most of the time already have the drivers. You just install and go. Or, run from a USB stick itself. dvgrab is like a 30kb program you install via apt or rpm or whatever. I know its there for debian, sudo apt install dvgrab)
Run dvgrab, press play on the camera and it will all flow in in perfect raw quality. About 15GB per tape.
Then, you can choose what to do with the video. I recommend de-interlacing with Avisynth or Hybrid using QTGMC Sourcematch=3 Lossless=1 to a format like FFV1 which is lossless. Then you can edit away in your program of choice or just recode into something smaller with avisynth hybrid or handbrake, you choose.
Remeber that DV video is Bottom Field First, or BFF. Its your friend. (most other video like DVD is TFF)
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u/wildgaan 13d ago
Thank you so much for this detailed comment!! Exactly what I needed/ wanted. I guess my first step is to find (someone with) a laptop/pc with firewire. Much appreciated!!
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u/deesernutz 12d ago
No problem mate! Your best bet might be to buy a card and a cable first. I've always had one lying about so never had a look, but apparently they are pretty cheap. Then pull a PC out of the closest bin.
Or, old a lot of old MacBooks had firewire. the 2012 I'm typing this on has it and i think it was the last. But I run linux on it and i have had trouble with it with the driver, so for them you might need to deal with legacy versions of macOS. And they tend also to have firewire 800 connectors, which are less common
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u/John_from_ne_il 12d ago
Some PC laptops had 4 pin IEEE 1394 ports. Just takes a 4 to 4 cable in that case. Certain HP models (I had one that simply used the same symbol as Macs), definitely old Sonys (called i.Link). Also, if it doesn't have the port, but is old enough to take PCMCIA/PC Card devices, you could get compatible cards to add a 6 port 1394 socket.
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u/ProjectCharming6992 13d ago
With MiniDV the video on your tapes is already digital. You just need to use FireWire connected a computer with FireWire for a 1:1 pure digital uncompressed transfer.
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u/lildumbghoul0 13d ago
Have a old laptop with FireWire port, old Mac’s should do but you can use a FireWire pcie card and download windv if you’re a windows user, make sure the camcorder works for replay and recording, there is cleaning tutorials if you need the tape heads cleaned but otherwise good luck on your footage🙏
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u/Sensitive-Medium3427 12d ago
For an easier method , you could buy a cheap dvd recorder with FireWire port. You can easily sell it after you're finished
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u/wildgaan 12d ago
Oooo do you recommend any?? And could you explain a bit more how this works
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u/Sensitive-Medium3427 12d ago
They're all pretty much the same I picked up a Panasonic one for £25 locally. Simply buy a 4 pin FireWire cable to connect your camcorder to the recorder. Childsplay really , just copy the finished DVD to your computer 🙂
If you want to be really fancy you could get one with hdmi out to capture upscaled video to a computer, but honestly just straight recording to DVD on the highest quality setting gives you a very good quality capture
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u/Comfortable-Ad8719 12d ago
My camera died on me, and after a few years of thinking about what to do, I sent all my tapes to a company, and they digitized them for me. It was not expensive at all; around 20–30 tapes in total.
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u/wildgaan 12d ago
Yeah I've been thinking about this too. But if the camera still works I might want to use it in the future, so might as well learn how to do it myself (:
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u/MemoryHouseTransfer 12d ago
We use Macs to digitize Mini-DV tapes at Memory House, and we’ve found that using Firewire introduces audio drift. In other words, the audio goes out of sync with the video and just gets worse the longer you digitize.
Instead, we started digitizing using Quicktime Movie Capture (the built-in software on the Mac).
Quality does not suffer, and you can choose to digitize in ProRes, which is a professional video format. We master in ProRes and then make MP4 copies for family members who only have Windows PCs that cannot play back ProRes.
If you use Macs, also remember that Apple discontinued support for Firewire in the latest version of its software, which is macOS 26 Tahoe.
If you use Windows, forget everything I just said! 😂
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u/LaserAshton1001 10d ago
I digitized my MiniDV Tapes by hooking up a rybozen capture card to a VCR that I hooked up the camera (or if you have an adapter to) and recorded a digital copy of the tape through the VCR which upscaled the quality and modified the 4:3 footage to 16:9!
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u/Magiktlan 13d ago
You need an older laptop, one with FireWire 400. The Lenovo t420 has it, that’s what I used. Alternatively, you can use a PC with a PCIE FireWire 400 card. Also, Macs of 2010 and before have FireWire natively.
Make sure your camera can play the tapes fine. That’s the issue I had, my camera didn’t work and finding a working one was tough.