Capturing and Archiving MiniDV Tapes on macOS

One suggestion - as DV is an interlaced format, conversion to AVC&#x2F;HEVC should perform a double-framerate deinterlace. ffmpeg supports yadif, which handles this quite well, pass it mode=send_field (for &quot;output one frame per field) and parity=bff (as DV, whether PAL or NTSC, is always bottom field first). As all frames should usually be considered interlaced, the deint parameter (which can deinterlace only marked-as-interlaced frames) can be omitted.<p>I see people converting SD video all the time and dropping half the fields because &quot;well, it says 29.97fps!&quot;. The only time this is not an issue with DV is if the tape was recorded with a camera that has either a progressive 30fps or 24fps setting enabled.<p>Edit: Wow, I don&#x27;t know how to read. I see the author already did this. I&#x27;m just so used to people getting it wrong that I overlooked the fact that you got it right. I&#x27;ll leave this here to take my karma lumps lol

&gt; Connecting Mini FireWire to a modern MacBook with only USB-C ports takes a few adapters to achieve:<p>&gt; Thunderbolt 3 -&gt; Thunderbolt 2<p>&gt; Thunderbolt 2 -&gt; FireWire 800<p>&gt; FireWire 800 -&gt; FireWire 400<p>&gt; FireWire 400 -&gt; Mini FireWire<p>Ummm... Lol yeah I suppose you could do that.<p>I just used my old 2010 MBP which has a firewire port :)<p>But indeed older Macs are pretty ideal for this as FireWire is an integrated part of the ecosystem.<p>What was actually quite difficult is obtaining old versions of iMovie and QuickTime. I still had the old OS images, but Apple makes it impossible to get old versions from the app store. If you look for iMovie it just shows the latest version which is no longer supported for my old macOS (the latest my MBP could run) so it&#x27;s a dead end.<p>Eventually I found a link on Apple&#x27;s site with a ZIP file of the iMovie files, and I needed to do something else to actually make it work (extracting and moving to &#x2F;Applications wasn&#x27;t enough). I don&#x27;t remember exactly. It was a bit of a PITA but in the end I got it.

Great work and a good reference. I wish I had this to read when I went through a similar process after growing tired of storing a couple hundred miniDV tapes I had recorded as a teenager. Unfortunately I was not yet skilled enough to dive into the command line and so was using premiere pro and Lifeflix with great frustration. The endless problems (scene detection splitting clips on every glitch, wearing out player heads in multiple miniDV cameras and having to buy more, the ridiculous amount of time required capturing at 1x and being unable to really do it passively because of these issues) caused me to give up and send the whole lot into a digitizing service. For a few hundred bucks I got back DVDs and downloadable files of each tape and was done. I didn’t have as much granular control over the capturing method or codec used etc, but honestly it was a major weight off my shoulders that I had been continuously starting and then putting off for a decade so I consider it money extremely well spent.

After reading this article this morning, I received a phone call this afternoon from a producer friend asking for assitance capturing miniDV tapes. I kind of got shivers from the coincidence of it all. Luckily, this person still has a 2006 MacPro OS X Snow Leopard and FCP7. That also means the firewire is directly on the tower (no dongle chain required). However, the studio deck he has doesn&#x27;t have firewire. Back to the storage closet, viola. Aja PCI-X interface card with breakout box. SDI it is. No firewire means 9pin deck control cable. Not one to be found in any of the boxes. Anyone wanna place over&#x2F;under on finding something tomorrow at Micro Center?<p>So dear author, I feel your pain! I&#x27;m starting to think your approach might be more sane than what I&#x27;m about to do ;-)

I did this (with the same daisy chain of connectors, without the protector) last year and it worked pretty well.<p>iMovie actually splits the tape up per segment and even tries to datetime stamp the files. You quickly realize how much people didn&#x27;t set the correct time on their cameras :)<p>MiniDV is a lot less fun to archive because the files are already digital. A more fun project is digitizing old VHS tapes. With the right setup you can double the framerate and upscale a little bit and bring a HUGE breath of fresh air to them. Here is the guide I followed:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;macilatthefront.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;tutorial-4-sd-to-hd-revisited.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;macilatthefront.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;tutorial-4-sd-t...</a>

Recent thread on doing this with Linux as well. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27956874" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27956874</a>

I found this a bit strange:<p>&gt; iMovie and Final Cut support capturing from MiniDV and write the data straight to disk without any modification, but they didn&#x27;t work out for me for two reasons:<p>&gt; There was no way to turn down the audio while a tape was being imported<p>When I did a similar exercise (on an older Mac that had a FireWire port), iMovie worked quite well. Since the import happens in real time (a 60-minute recording will take 60 minutes to import), the audio and video are played on the camcorder. All I had to do was reduce the volume on the camcorder to prevent it from being too loud. There was no audio output from iMovie on the Mac during the import.<p>Tip: If you can get a Mac with iMovie &#x27;06 (as opposed to iMovie &#x27;08), use that. The older version of iMovie is better (not as much dumbed down) than the newer version.

Acquaintance bought some used minDV tapes off ebay; decided to look at a couple to see if there was anything on them...<p>Veterinary Endoscope videos.<p>the story was worth more than the tapes

I find this fascinating. Back in the day - (2004-2009) - I absolutely loved using iMovie, and eventually Final Cut Express - with my G4 Mac Mini - the ease of use of the software and speedy FireWire 800 importing made for really fun times making skits with friends.

I think I had dozens of MiniDV tapes? I think I used dvgrab with some parameters. It looks like that was linux-only, and part of the now-defunct kino project. I&#x27;m glad I ripped them all a few years ago.

If you happen across an old DVR that burns to DVD the process is much simpler, plus you get a diversified backup that can be read by practically anything.<p>I was lucky enough to pick up a Sony RDR-HXD870 at a charity shop. It has a firewire input on the front and a one touch system to transfer the tapes to DVD. No muss, no fuss, all the tapes I had of the kids transferred to a NAS by ripping the DVDs afterwards.

I did this over three Christmas holidays, with the hardware I had available each time — Windows, Linux and Mac. The results are pretty much the same.<p>Is there a lossless format that&#x27;s smaller than the original DV? The 1.5TB I have is still annoying to handle.

Is HEVC really the best option for a long term format that will still be readable in a decade or three? Something more open and standardized seems preferable.