Railfan Technology > 8mm tape and cd conversion to.....

Good Morning All,

From my earlier days of railfanning, I have some 8MM tape and also some compact disc video (Sony Mavica). I would like to transfer them to new medium. Maybe a full size disc or portable hard drive What would you suggest? Has anyone made a reader for the hobbyist to use to do this?

Thanks in advance!

There are places around that will do the work for you. There are also a few that will show you how to work the equipment and let you do the work but that may be limited to certain mediums (VHS original yes, film no. I don't know for sure.) You would have to check with them. I don't know where you're at but I looked up a company where I live and found the the following. I include it just for an idea of what the cost might be. I suspect the prices would be similar in whatever town you may be in.

http://www.whatsnewcopycat.com/

Hope this gives you some ideas.

John

If your computer has a DVD writeable drive (likely), you can do the Mavica part yourself, free. Just copy the Mavica data onto your built in hard drive. I'll just bet your HD has more than enough room, because mini Cd's only hold a few hundred megabytes (MB), as opposed to the next bigger brother, gigabytes (GB). Once that's done, just write a DVD or data version DVD. If you put each Mavica into its own directory/folder with a unique name, then you'll be able to easily ID them once they are on the DVD.

The hard part you do not have to worry about; you have working cameras. Far too many people do not and this old media hits the scrap bin.

In today's world, CD's DVD's, and even Blu-Ray are old media. I suggest getting two good quality external hard drives. Transfer all your media to those drives, one drive as a copy, and then keep one off site or in the Cloud on a remote server.

To share, you can make DVD's or Blu-ray discs. What is becoming more prevalent is up loading to YouTube or Vimeo so everyone can enjoy. Or you can use USB keys to distribute copies of your files to friend and families. Most everyone has a compeer that can read USB files. Better yet, more and more TV's can read the USB keys as well.

Advantages to USB keys is there is no burning of discs, no real limit to the size of the video, no fickle DVD players, etc.

Dennis Livesey
New York, NY