Honestly, to me the full quality 4K version looks just like you'd expect a modern music video to look. Looks pretty good. But the Digital8 version looks like it's actually from the early-mid 2000s, which makes it look like a professional and expensive music video that you'd probably see on MTV. I'm imagining flipping on MTV to get some background music while I'm working on an assignment for school, and getting distracted watching this music video. So I don't think it was pointless, it gives the video a new context, gives it a different feeling. It's another example of how making something "look worse" can actually improve it. And to me, that makes it worthwhile.
@@Marc42yep. if there's no damage the transfer should be lossless -- FireWire is actually the only way to do this, USB is simply not designed for this style of transfer
I love your entire style, it's so nostalgic. I know exactly what you mean about the excitement of buying a box of software. I was 14 when I convinced my mum to buy me some editing software called Magix, and it was such a major upgrade from windows movie maker. I also remember spending hours watching my dv tape transfer the footage via firewire, it was so exciting!!
I never used their video editing software, but I quite literally learned how to produce music using Magix Music Maker, back in 2003/2004. I LOVED that software! I actually have a video in the pipeline featuring Magix 😄 Thank you for sharing your story!
@@harkeofficial oh man I also remember making music in the magix music software too! I remember putting a load of the preset loops together and it totally changed to the game for my amateur movies haha!
Some of my older computers from back in the day had FireWire (IEEE1394) built in. I always though "Oh cool, maybe I'll use that someday."... That day never came. Even the DV cams I had back then didn't use Firewire. I did have an iPod back then, but I was a broke teenager and those iPod-Firewire cables were not worth the slightly faster file transfer speeds.
Loved the video. The “algorithm” finally got you to me. Quick fun fact. One thing that made FireWire so much superior to USB back in the day isn’t just the speed. It took several revisions of USB before it could transfer data both directions simultaneously. That’s why FireWire was so much better for audio and video. It didn’t have to interrupt the data stream to send acknowledgment packets, telemetry, and control data back to the host. I worked in recording studios back in the day and all the audio interfaces were FireWire or they had their own PCI interfaces. It was super revolutionary at the time. 😊
It was hot swappable too! No need to power off like SCSI.
Місяць тому+28
"maybe you like wasting hours of your life for results that were shot on potato" my sister in christ, as a huge lgr fan, I demand you print at least one good cd jewel case insert on a 30 years old laser colour printer for your album
I put one in my rig I built at the start of this year. My USB Audiobox had started to make popping sound through my monitors, which is most likely the electrolytic capacitors at the end of their service life. Since I had an M-Audio FireWire 410 sitting unused in a drawer, not enough spare cash for a new interface but enough for a FW card, the choice seemed simple. Getting the drivers for the M-Audio to work with Windows 10, was far from simple, though. But I can now also expand my storage with some aluminium external HDD enclosures (again sitting unused in the drawer)each with active cooling and fresh 3.5" drives installed, all daisy-chained to the spare FW port.
that's what I was hoping this video would be a guide to honestly. I have an Avid Mbox Pro (3rd gen) that has just been a stand for one of my speakers for about 5 years because I can't connect it but the actually inputs in it are way higher quality than anything I've bought to replace it since.
@@the_panos I'll see if I can dig up the info on which card I bought (I'm also using an Mbox) -- failing that, I'll boot up after work and get the info out of Device Manager
Just so everyone is aware you can still install a firewire card on a new desktop along with legacy IEEE-1394 drivers. Then all you need is WinDV and/or HDV Split.
The usual method for DV(including Digital8) video was to copy to the computer in DV format (the same as how it was sent back from the pc to the camera here) - giving *exactly* the same data on your computer as on the tape, ie: no loss in image quality. The DV encoding(which was designed for editing) also means that unchanged sections of video won't be recompressed after editing and saving the edited video / sending to the camera in DV format again. It should also be less taxing on older computers, though the files are bigger. As DV was so common, a ton of editing applications(free or paid) did and often still do support it. The old, tiny, free application(which still works with modern versions of Windows) WinDV is one way to copy DV from/to the camera for example. Windows 10 & 11 still support firewire. With the process shown here it started as DV, was converted to mpeg2, edited, all video was converted back to DV, with losses in each conversion - albeit perhaps not much.was degrading quality, and obviously still better than the s-video capture (though that's partly due to the cheap capture device, others can be significantly better.)
Ha! This is my intro to your content, and I am loving your style! Too funny! I feel sooooo old, though, having done video transfers before FireWire and thinking just how ever-loving magical FireWire really felt back in the day. And I, too, was an avid manual reader, cover to cover, always and forever, amen. Peace be with you.
Oh, my dad has one of those handicams. When my parents went on vacation to Vegas for a week, he kept me busy by tasking me with getting it hooked up to a PC so we could get the footage off of our old mini DV tapes. I ended up having to order a double-ended mini firewire cable and drag out my bright pink Dell Inspiron from 2008, lol.
Looks like things I did back in the 1990s and 2000s. Neat to see someone who was probably a toddler at that time going back and appreciating all the hassles of computer video at the time. Kudos! I have subscribed.
Feels like yesterday I was using windows 7 on my old computer... mainly because it was a few years ago. Windows XP brings back so many memories of using my nana's computer and watching old 2015 youtube.
This is the type of stuff I live for! Messing with old operating systems and hardware, I did it with an Optiplex, Windows XP and Bryce3D to make the visuals for an art project, it’s a goofy set up but it works! I would love more old tech content from u, love ur editing style
The youtube recommendations have been super random for me in the past few weeks. It's mostly rubbish, but this channel has earned a subscription, because i like the topics. Greetings from Bavaria.
The Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 interfaces in my Windows 10 based studio are Firewire. You can pick up excellent used Firewire audio interfaces dirt cheap and they still work great. Also: great cameo by the Bernard Grob Basic Electronics textbook. Essential. Also, post from Craig Anderton, personal hero of mine.
I would suggest setting the XP machine up as an SMB share/enabling network sharing, as that standard is cross platform and doesn’t care about file system type
@@harkeofficial Well, it didn't go unappreciated! I especially like parts where it's animated so it looks like an Apple Quicktime game. Made me want to go play some Oregon Trail II haha.
If anything, the problems have just gotten worse. Buy something new now and a year later, you can't use it because the latest version of Windows is required. And you can't get the latest version of Windows because the latest version of Windows is too new for your computer. Which is old because you've had it for more than a year. Still remembering the struggle for getting better picture quality. Digital8 and Mini DV wasn't a huge jump up from VHS and 8mm but it was the best we could do.
No, things are the same. Companies want your money and will make up "new standards" to sell you expensive adaptors, right Apple? USB is a naming mess, USB1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.2 gen1. 3.2 gen 2. BUT they are backwards compatible at least. Same with PCIE and most of our ports. It isn't IEEE making it hard, they try to make it make sense.
Wow...thought I was the only freek still doing this...transferring videos back and forth to my dig8 and mDV camcorders via my fire wire and 20 year old pc...at least running on win7 32bit machine to be able to use Adobe premiere 6.5 This gives me so much satisfaction to see the results when you give a modern video that VHS "look" There are people out there spending everything to try to give their videos that "VHS" look. Modern day software just can not accomplish that. Love your channel.
The only item I owned that had FireWire was a Sony DVD/DVR that I still own. It had the ability to transfer from a firewire capable camera then burn it to DVD.
I remember one video I did for a band, they asked for David Lynch on a busted VHS. A lot of the issues you faced were easy compared to the madness that was smashing up this colour grade/degrade hahaha. Really enjoyed this video. Your pacing tickled my brain, subscribed.
Two quick comments - One, you could try to play with this using "anamorphic widescreen", which was a trick in the 90s and 2000s that DVDs did where a widescreen 16:9 video was smushed to a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the dvd player or TV would be able to stretch it back out. This was done to avoid black bars being encoded directly in the video stream, and to increase the resolution. Depending on what kinds of settings you have, you might be able to export it from the old software as anamorphic 4:3 into the camera, then record it from the camera in 4:3 again like you did, then in a modern editing tool, import the 4:3 from the camera and set the aspect ratio to 16:9. It should still look retro, but it will be in a widescreen format, rather than cutting off the frame of the video at the edges. Two, you could run a high-pass filter on your youtube uploads - with quality headphones on, there's a bit of high hiss / static. Great video though, really brings me back and makes me feel ways about stuff.
If you use a Updown Cross Converter from Black Magic you can upscale and restretch the video to 16x9 you'd need to convert to SDI to do that. A Black Magic Teranex depending on model would deinterlace and upscale to 4K. I've wanted to experiment with shooting anamorphic and transferring it to tape before I de-squeeze it.
This is good, 4:3 video and the right equipment. I see so many "retro" vids that just use a digital filter and it feels cheap and low effort since i can tell the difference. When it's done right like this it looks awesome
as insane as this is, i think i'd have gone the extra step to install the firewire card in my actual modern 2023 build. i'm insane enough to want a tape drive in my modern computer. loved this video, it was great! subscribed for sure.
I was sold after the Brave Little Toaster reference. I have a firewire card in my modern NAS to transfer music and podcasts at BLAZING SPEEDS to my fourth gen iPod, while also fast charging it!
I Have that exact same camcorder & I have also shot a lotta things with it!! super glad to see a resurgence of this era of tech, the look is unrivalled. I use a piece of hardware that uses VGA cables to directly port the tape & record it as an mp4, it's been a while since I've used it so i don't remember exactly what it is but if ur interested i will look back into it!
thunderbolt to fw800 adapter still work and there are 800 to 400 cables for pennies on amazon. It's how I am still able to use my motu ultralite mk3 hybrid with my apple silicon Macs. Also the action retro guy can always be there to help you with similar adventures.
I've used FireWire on relatively recent PCs, not just retro systems. They still work great on many systems, software support is the hardest part. It's the only way to losslessly (except for tape errors) transfer DV/MiniDV tapes to a computer. Haven't seen anyone try to send it back to tape in at least a decade though! 😂 WinDV, DVRescue, and Scenalyzer are amazing tools if you're trying to archive old tapes to computer.
Ah, memories. Actually I have a firewire 800 card not far from me right now, in my "Keep in case" box. I used it with my Drobo (Another retro thing!), before NAS and USB was "a thing". Funny how our perspectives of "fast" have changed - my current homelab setup would rival a whole 1997 small datacenter. Now I find 10Gb networks just passable. Personally I would use the tape footage sparingly, like an effect, and not smear it over everything; cut in and out of it when it makes an impact. Just me tho. I don't find DV footage triggers my nostalgia much - you want old-school go back to VHS! Analog was where it was at. (two turntables and a microphone).
I find DV is nostalgic because of the camera quality but not the tape quality. btw... Drobo went bankrupt so be careful using their equipment, if hardware or software stops working it can be nearly impossible to fix, and data recovery from an array can get expensive. Have seen too many people screwed by an OS update that corrupted the client-side software and left their data inaccessible.
@@QualityDoggo Oh, I haven't used the drobo for more than 10 years now - there's a limit to old tech, especially storage. That's why the card sits in a box, unused. I wonder if any modern OS still has drivers for it?
Damn, I completely get the nostalgia in this video. I think I had almost the same Sony Digital-8 camcorder and used it to shoot goofy videos with my school friends. Luckily, UA-cam wasn't yet a thing in early 2000s. I used Pinnacle Studio to transfer, edit and copy the footage back to tape. Sold the camcorder some years ago to someone who wanted to backup their Video-8 tapes. Still kept the original tapes and I think even a PCI Firewire card somewhere, because you never know what it will be good for :D
oh for sure! I had an old FireWire card and a copy of Pinnacle 11 so I figured WHY NOT 😂 But then I ended up having to buy a new FireWire card anyway 🤦🏼♀️
I remember when my grandpa bought me MS visual basic 5 education edition. I was so proud of that big box, i read all the manuals front to back and watched all the videos on the educational companion cd. I don't think I have been excited about buying software in over a decade or even longer.
DV was big, back when I was in film school. Firewire was bad, because it acted like a hot-swappable interface without being one. It was very ill-advised to be connecting DV devices together that were running, as it could fry the bridge chip. In college, a ton of our gear had fried ports. I even fried my own FireWire at home once. Fried the chip on my Sony camera. I still have my cables, one Sony and one Panasonic camera that record on Mini-DV. I preferred Digital 8 back in the day, because the tapes were interchangeable with Hi-8 camera I had in the early 90's. I edited in Premiere and Ulead Media Studio. I have so many videos on DV that I shot decades ago and never edited together. I made music videos that were never published. DV is pure nostalgia at this point.
The FireWire interface of our JVC camcorder got fried as well :-(. Loaned the camcorder of a friend to digitize all my DV tapes. Kinda wish I had the Thunderbolt (2) to FireWire adapter by Apple (it’s expensive) but when looking for it I realized, again, the interface on my camcorder is fried. It’s also SD resolution, not even HD 😊.
@@Htbaa At first I wanted to buy a Sony DV deck to dump videos without the camera, but that would've been $500+ extra. Instead I just sold the semi-fried camcorder to someone who didn't care about firewire. I have nostalgia for DV look, but I haven't recorded anything in that format since 2004. It's easier to film with modern cameras and then filter it down to look like DV. Less of a hassle.
I had the SAME camera back then! So many memories. Thankfully I have all of the footage digitized thanks to transferring it back in the day. I used Sony Vegas back then.
I thought I was watching my "Watch Later" list, but when this video started I was like "That's not what I ordered", but it quickly turned into "Yk what, I'm not complaining". Nice vid
Pro Tip: In MacOS when formatting a flash drive for maximum compatibility with Winderps you can use Disk Utility > select Format: MS-DOS (FAT) and Scheme: Master Boot Record. In modern macOS this will format it as FAT32. If you're feeling dangerous more formats are available through Terminal (command line) using `diskutil`. For example `diskutil partitionDisk disk10 MBR "MS-DOS FAT32" DOSBOY 16G` would format the flash drive assigned disk10 `diskutil info` with a 16GB MBR partition formatted in FAT32. `diskutil list` and `diskutil listFilesystems` are your friends. Be wary of partition and file size limitations of various file system formats.
This video was fascinating however something I want to point out is a frustration I dealt with in the 2000s when it came to do projects like this, imo Windows computers take a laborious amount of work to do any audio or video editing import or export duties, what would be very entertaining is to see you get your hands on a power Mac G4 and run an old school copy of final cut pro with all the bells and whistles that used to come in the software. If I recall out of the box final cut will do everything you needed to do
Wow, I love your editing style! Especially that band-passed and aliasing audio lip-synced to your pixelated cut out. That’s exactly the kind of stuff I used to do in like 2009. (Also at first I thought your mic arm was on that tiny tripod and I got very confused!)
I wonder how people would transfer music to the original ipods (if they are still in circulation??? Maybe dankpods could help us with that)--RIP firewire. Many years after they did it. XD Edit, now that I've watched the rest because I'm ADHD and responded in the middle: I love the look of the old VHS (I know Super8 is different) kind of look. The total authentic solution as opposed to filters (blur + chromatic aberration != vhs idc what filter designers say) LOOKS SO GOOD. Worth it? Probably not--I'm sure the frustration was off the charts--but the output was amazing. Great job!
As a vintage Mac collector, I use FireWire a lot, and my 2010 Mac Pro has a FireWire 400 card. This is very useful for me, as the later cheesegrater Mac Pros only have FireWire 800. This also gives my Mac Pro some fun anachronistic PCIe expansion: advanced NVMe (2 TB 970 EVO Plus) in Slot 2 and USB-C in Slot 3, alongside antiquated FireWire 400 in Slot 4. I'm not sure if Apple has fully dropped support for FireWire in MacOS. My Mac Studio has an Apple Thunderbolt Display, running through a Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter, and the FireWire 800 port on the back is fully functional in 14 Sonoma. I also had success using a Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter with a Thunderbolt 2-to-FireWire 800 adapter.
Great work. Still using FireWire in a DAW I built in '21 to run my PreSonus FireStudio Mobile audio interface, which works great, runs off of the FireWire power, has all the inputs I need (multiple computers, synths and consoles), fits in my hand and has a U/I with detailed controls that still runs just fine on Win10. Sometimes it's worth the futzing.
PCIE Firewire just works, I have 1 in my PC to drive my Nikon CoolScan film scanner. Can't answer about ffmpeg or Linux use, but card should also just work under Linux
It should just work, the software is the hard part. Most hardware and operating systems will still happily accept a PCIe FireWire card. Note that there is no way to convert USB to FireWire since they are fundamentally different protocol designs, any "adapters" are a scam (except for a few obscure cameras that allegedly had nonstandard combined USB & FireWire ports)
@lachlanlau A lot of Nikon CoolScan users use that TB3 > TB2 > FW800 method, but I don't know what modern macOS support is like for FW support and I don't know if some of that combo needs drivers on Windows or what. Windows 10/11 do support Thunderbolt and Firewire out the box, but I don't know how supported the Apple dongles are
Golly... I recall a person who bought one of those Gateway Destinations because it had all the AV ports you could need. I think it was $4000 including a 35 inch 800x600 VGA monitor / TV. For a $4000 setup you expect at least a BX chipset but no, it was LX so the highest CPU was like a Pentium II 333. I performed an upgrade and then asked the silly question "Is that a digital 8, you need a basic firewire card", and that was just too much for him. New PC time.
Very fun to watch! And congrats on the success of the transfer! I like the old school look! But if it was me I would experiment with mixing back a bit of sharpness around your face / eyes area maybe? See how that looks? Just a bit maybe. Or not.
i recently installed a firewire card in my daily PC, windows 11 picked up the drivers, installed miniDV (which iirc was meant for windows XP) and i was able to preserve all my tapes from my samsung VP-D31i :D
Very cool :) I wanted to transfer my old tapes to my computer but realised the only option with a USB-C Mac is by getting the FW800 to Thunderbolt adapter, and Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3/USB-C adapter. Except that FW800 to Thunderbolt adapter now costs ~£150 on eBay and I sold it a few years ago for like £20 🤡 so my next option is to just get an older Mac Mini (2012 or older) that has the FW800 port on it, they cost like £50-£70 and then you have an entire Mac Mini to do it with.
Why is this supposedly unthinkable or insane? There is still a lot of equipment out there which is perfectly servicable and in working environments that still have firewire connections. I have firewire cards that run radio equipment in computers which are only about 5 years old - not retro computers by any stretch of the imagination. Additionally you do not need to transfer digital footage back to tape to be able to edit it at the original resolution or to be able to maintain artifacts such as graininess.
I know I didn’t HAVE to transfer back to tape, I just wanted to for the experience 😂 Also, as a fellow amateur radio operator (I assume based on your comment), we use a lot of equipment like this pretty often. Many people who aren’t “into” this stuff haven’t even heard the word “FireWire” in over a decade.
@@harkeofficial I am a ham but I also use flywhee with broadcast audio equipment. A lot of small stations cannot afford to upgrade and some don't want to. In my main professional work we still use a lot of equipment that is firewire connected as while the technology has been updated over time the functionality has not and therefore there is no reason to get rid of good working equipment.
Be careful connecting a PC firewire card to another (which is OK according to spec, and can be used to network computers!), or even worse a firewire port on a 2000s era mac. PC firewire cards tend to assume they are the only power source on the bus and can endure at most 12 volts, while macs tend to feed 30+ volts at considerable ampacity down the wire (which it is OK to do according to spec!)... I had components on firewire cards LITERALLY blow up from that. As in, capacitor pieces flying past my ringing ears! Clip out or desolder the diode (not: bypass it :) ) from the +12V line and the electrolytic capacitor across the firewire power wires before doing experiments of that kind.
Great video. There is a good free program for sony camcorders called Stoik that let’s you record minidv tapes to your computer together with a firewire card. I actually bought one for amazon and it works in a modern computer (then just make sure it’s a PCI-E card, not PCI). Although, you might have to download a legacy driver for the card.
i love sending files from modern sources to retro ones. i don't know why, but it always cracks me up. my current record is sending some software from my current PC to an early model Thinkpad running windows 98. I used RS-232 and zmodem to do the file transfer. it turns out that zmodem will get you pretty far back in time lol
I have an old "Dazzle" video capture device, it's got S-Video and composite and outputs Firewire. I used it to convert a bunch of VHS tapes back in the day.
What do you mean the FireWire port is broken? Those don't usually break, you know. And even if they do, the breakage is catastrophic, meaning your PC will not detect a camcorder at all. Also, I am amazed that you didn't just try ScenalyzerLive (which does not need installing or anything complicated) after transcoding the video with ffmpeg or Handbrake. You don't even need to press play on the camcorder, because it controls it all through the Firewire connection. 🙃
These obscure devices you use to solve obscure compatibility problems with old tech - I use on a daily basis. 😁 Tip: You should get an "AVerMedia Live Gamer HD2" and some decent HDMI adapters to record old footage. That S-video to USB adapter you have is pants.
Oh I know it wasn't a very good choice, but I didn't want to wait to order something because the project was taking too long for my taste, and it's what I had on hand!
3:10 - Nope. Not invented by Apple, regardless of what they advertised. Firewire came from Intel. Firewire didn't die off, it's what evolved in to another Intel created system, Thunderbolt. Now, let's see, PCIe based firewire card, meaning modern PC, then installed XP, that must have been fun, finding the motherboard drivers for as OS that was out of support before PCIe was in shops,.. Even so, XP supported networking, why mess around with burning a disk when you could just have created a Samba share and copied it across the network? If you got the footage in to the camera, then the firewire port on the camera isn't broken. More likely is you needed to power cycle the camera, hook it to the PC, put it in Playback mode, press Play/Pause, and then let the software take control of when the tape rolls. Some cameras used to be a bit flakey about which mode they were turned on in, to have video out or video in function on the firewire port. I'd bet on the fastest NLE, Edius, still supporting it, with the transport controls still available. Now, if you'd wanted to save time and stay in the Apple ecosystem, a secondhand 2012 Mac Mini 'Server' would probably have cost less then the PC, firewire card and software, and would have the hardware drivers for FCP-X to access the camera.
There are many ways to do this more efficiently if I wanted to save time, but I wanted to specifically use similar equipment to what I used as a kid in the early 2000s. This is merely an adventure through nostalgia. :)
@@harkeofficial I still have the AMD 3200+ based full tower (yeah, the ones that are more then three feet tall,..) with firewire and IOMega Zoom AV capture card that I used for editing weddings from '98 to '02 on Premiere 3.5 LE, with two 14" CRT screens,... I don't miss tape!
@@harkeofficial Oh/And,.. the Mac Mini Server 2012 I mentioned earlier,... is my 'portable' Raw capture via Thunderbolt for an AJA Cion,.... Raw 'in camera' is so nice. :D
Some Firewire audio interfaces still run circles around modern usb ones. In some RME interfaces, you could use all inputs of the Interface at the same time. And record all of them.
i'm going to do something i never do, subscribe after first time seeing one of your videos which turned out to be a nice stress free change compared to everything else we're being bombarded with right now besides, who else is going to get excited over firewire, you even had me thinking about grabbing a card out the drawer and installing one too, well for a minute anyway...
There are tons of super nice audio interfaces / preamps, which are dirt cheap because they're FireWire. I desperately wish they could be used because it would make owning an 8-channel RME interface affordable
You could just an older macbook with firewire builtin, they're very cheap & many would likely still be easily powerful enough for audio processing(with an i5 cpu for example). Windows would be fine too, but the software/drivers for firewire audio interfaces more often seem to be for Mac.
Substancial, real, magical and NO SUBSCRPTION. 😍 Windows XP. I loved that OS for many years. What about putting the old PC on the LAN? Maybe blocking it's internet access on the router, so it doesn't go online. I still have a Shuttle XPC barebone with an Athlon XP CPU, AGP graphics and Firewire, which I keep for retro games. With some luck, the Firewire port on your camcorder might still be fixable. I must say I like the original 4k footage better. The question is if the camcorder as well as the cheap converter both really used the SVideo signal.
I bet I’m not alone in wanting to know more about that PC. All the specifications! Starting in elementary school, I read through every line of every PC ad I came across. That’s not weird, right?
I have been using a MiniDV cam recently and broke out my old Intel Macbook to capture video. I just get the *.dv files and then copy to my modern Mac. I had tried to do DV to FW 400 to USB but that ends up being a ridiculous amount of money on Apple adapters including things they don't make anymore!
I have all those adapters, and they worked splendidly up until two weeks ago, when I stupidly updated to Sonoma on my current MacBook and now it won't recognize it. :(
Just some suggestions: You probably could've connected your Windows computer to the same LAN as your Mac, enabled the SSH server on your Mac (and port 22 on your local firewall if necessary), and used a program like WinSCP on your Windows computer to transfer files. Also, DV video is encoded by the computer. Therefore, although it stinks that your camcorder's FireWire port broke, sending video to and from the camcorder via FireWire probably just sent the already encoded DV video back to the computer - just downscaling and converting to DV video on the computer would've had the same effect. Obtaining via S-Video and analog audio involved digital-to-analog operations on the camcorder, increasing the retro effect further. By the way, is your camcorder a DCR-TRV340? I've got one too!
Honestly, to me the full quality 4K version looks just like you'd expect a modern music video to look. Looks pretty good. But the Digital8 version looks like it's actually from the early-mid 2000s, which makes it look like a professional and expensive music video that you'd probably see on MTV. I'm imagining flipping on MTV to get some background music while I'm working on an assignment for school, and getting distracted watching this music video. So I don't think it was pointless, it gives the video a new context, gives it a different feeling. It's another example of how making something "look worse" can actually improve it. And to me, that makes it worthwhile.
I miss when MTV was just videos 🥹 Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I do think I’m overall happy with the outcome 😁
My gosh, that tape transfer clip has more artifacts than a history museum.
I'd still call this a win.
I think putting it back on the computer with the S-Video cable actually “helped” with the “look” 😆
@@harkeofficialYes, actual Firewire would likely have looked way too clean - SD, but still digital.
@@Marc42yep. if there's no damage the transfer should be lossless -- FireWire is actually the only way to do this, USB is simply not designed for this style of transfer
The tape gives off the "I recorded my favorite music video off of MTV!" vibes.
I love your entire style, it's so nostalgic. I know exactly what you mean about the excitement of buying a box of software. I was 14 when I convinced my mum to buy me some editing software called Magix, and it was such a major upgrade from windows movie maker. I also remember spending hours watching my dv tape transfer the footage via firewire, it was so exciting!!
I never used their video editing software, but I quite literally learned how to produce music using Magix Music Maker, back in 2003/2004. I LOVED that software! I actually have a video in the pipeline featuring Magix 😄 Thank you for sharing your story!
@@harkeofficial oh man I also remember making music in the magix music software too! I remember putting a load of the preset loops together and it totally changed to the game for my amateur movies haha!
Some of my older computers from back in the day had FireWire (IEEE1394) built in. I always though "Oh cool, maybe I'll use that someday."... That day never came. Even the DV cams I had back then didn't use Firewire. I did have an iPod back then, but I was a broke teenager and those iPod-Firewire cables were not worth the slightly faster file transfer speeds.
Loved the video. The “algorithm” finally got you to me. Quick fun fact. One thing that made FireWire so much superior to USB back in the day isn’t just the speed. It took several revisions of USB before it could transfer data both directions simultaneously. That’s why FireWire was so much better for audio and video. It didn’t have to interrupt the data stream to send acknowledgment packets, telemetry, and control data back to the host. I worked in recording studios back in the day and all the audio interfaces were FireWire or they had their own PCI interfaces. It was super revolutionary at the time. 😊
It was hot swappable too! No need to power off like SCSI.
"maybe you like wasting hours of your life for results that were shot on potato" my sister in christ, as a huge lgr fan, I demand you print at least one good cd jewel case insert on a 30 years old laser colour printer for your album
I actually have a FireWire card installed in my modern gaming rig. Currently has an audio interface plugged in.
I put one in my rig I built at the start of this year. My USB Audiobox had started to make popping sound through my monitors, which is most likely the electrolytic capacitors at the end of their service life. Since I had an M-Audio FireWire 410 sitting unused in a drawer, not enough spare cash for a new interface but enough for a FW card, the choice seemed simple. Getting the drivers for the M-Audio to work with Windows 10, was far from simple, though. But I can now also expand my storage with some aluminium external HDD enclosures (again sitting unused in the drawer)each with active cooling and fresh 3.5" drives installed, all daisy-chained to the spare FW port.
that's what I was hoping this video would be a guide to honestly. I have an Avid Mbox Pro (3rd gen) that has just been a stand for one of my speakers for about 5 years because I can't connect it but the actually inputs in it are way higher quality than anything I've bought to replace it since.
@@the_panos I'll see if I can dig up the info on which card I bought (I'm also using an Mbox) -- failing that, I'll boot up after work and get the info out of Device Manager
@@the_panos HP Hi349-2
What is it useful for in the 2020s?
Just so everyone is aware you can still install a firewire card on a new desktop along with legacy IEEE-1394 drivers. Then all you need is WinDV and/or HDV Split.
Yep. At least on Windows 10 capture still works great.
WinDV to capture
DVRescue to find errors
Scenalyzer to split by timestamp
@@QualityDoggo win 11 also works.
The usual method for DV(including Digital8) video was to copy to the computer in DV format (the same as how it was sent back from the pc to the camera here) - giving *exactly* the same data on your computer as on the tape, ie: no loss in image quality.
The DV encoding(which was designed for editing) also means that unchanged sections of video won't be recompressed after editing and saving the edited video / sending to the camera in DV format again. It should also be less taxing on older computers, though the files are bigger.
As DV was so common, a ton of editing applications(free or paid) did and often still do support it.
The old, tiny, free application(which still works with modern versions of Windows) WinDV is one way to copy DV from/to the camera for example.
Windows 10 & 11 still support firewire.
With the process shown here it started as DV, was converted to mpeg2, edited, all video was converted back to DV, with losses in each conversion - albeit perhaps not much.was degrading quality, and obviously still better than the s-video capture (though that's partly due to the cheap capture device, others can be significantly better.)
FireWire was ridiculously better than USB at isochronous transfers and never should have gone away.
Ah, it has all the qualities of a 30mb .mov clip that you used to download for hours and hours on a dial-up modem.
My prized possession was a clip I downloaded of 3D Homer Simpson. It took like 6 hours in the 90s 😂
Then someone picks up the phone at 99%
Ha! This is my intro to your content, and I am loving your style! Too funny! I feel sooooo old, though, having done video transfers before FireWire and thinking just how ever-loving magical FireWire really felt back in the day. And I, too, was an avid manual reader, cover to cover, always and forever, amen. Peace be with you.
so happy I found your channel, as a fellow musician, videographer and vintage tech geek :D
Oh, my dad has one of those handicams. When my parents went on vacation to Vegas for a week, he kept me busy by tasking me with getting it hooked up to a PC so we could get the footage off of our old mini DV tapes. I ended up having to order a double-ended mini firewire cable and drag out my bright pink Dell Inspiron from 2008, lol.
Looks like things I did back in the 1990s and 2000s. Neat to see someone who was probably a toddler at that time going back and appreciating all the hassles of computer video at the time. Kudos! I have subscribed.
Feels like yesterday I was using windows 7 on my old computer... mainly because it was a few years ago.
Windows XP brings back so many memories of using my nana's computer and watching old 2015 youtube.
This is the type of stuff I live for! Messing with old operating systems and hardware, I did it with an Optiplex, Windows XP and Bryce3D to make the visuals for an art project, it’s a goofy set up but it works!
I would love more old tech content from u, love ur editing style
This is all the shit I used in my 20's in the late 20's and not one bit of it sounds fun to use any more, lol.
The youtube recommendations have been super random for me in the past few weeks. It's mostly rubbish, but this channel has earned a subscription, because i like the topics.
Greetings from Bavaria.
thank you so very much! 🙏
The Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 interfaces in my Windows 10 based studio are Firewire. You can pick up excellent used Firewire audio interfaces dirt cheap and they still work great. Also: great cameo by the Bernard Grob Basic Electronics textbook. Essential. Also, post from Craig Anderton, personal hero of mine.
I knew I was in for a nostalgia trip but like DAMN, I'm pretty sure I had that EXACT case back in the day
I would suggest setting the XP machine up as an SMB share/enabling network sharing, as that standard is cross platform and doesn’t care about file system type
That would work, also XP has support for exFAT, KB955704. Windows 11 would probably run that software. Is PCIe retro now?
I love the vibe of this video! It's so effortlessly fun but at the same time looks like it was hellacious to edit together.
Thank you so much! I kept creating more work from myself, because every five minutes I thought of a new thing I should add to the video 😅😂
@@harkeofficial Well, it didn't go unappreciated! I especially like parts where it's animated so it looks like an Apple Quicktime game. Made me want to go play some Oregon Trail II haha.
If anything, the problems have just gotten worse. Buy something new now and a year later, you can't use it because the latest version of Windows is required. And you can't get the latest version of Windows because the latest version of Windows is too new for your computer. Which is old because you've had it for more than a year.
Still remembering the struggle for getting better picture quality. Digital8 and Mini DV wasn't a huge jump up from VHS and 8mm but it was the best we could do.
No, things are the same. Companies want your money and will make up "new standards" to sell you expensive adaptors, right Apple? USB is a naming mess, USB1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.2 gen1. 3.2 gen 2. BUT they are backwards compatible at least. Same with PCIE and most of our ports. It isn't IEEE making it hard, they try to make it make sense.
Wow...thought I was the only freek still doing this...transferring videos back and forth to my dig8 and mDV camcorders via my fire wire and 20 year old pc...at least running on win7 32bit machine to be able to use Adobe premiere 6.5 This gives me so much satisfaction to see the results when you give a modern video that VHS "look" There are people out there spending everything to try to give their videos that "VHS" look. Modern day software just can not accomplish that. Love your channel.
I am binging your vids right now, they are so great! Just chock full of all that retro goodness that we miss today! 🎉
The only item I owned that had FireWire was a Sony DVD/DVR that I still own. It had the ability to transfer from a firewire capable camera then burn it to DVD.
this truly was an episode of crazy harke's amazing emporium of total retro madness !!
I remember one video I did for a band, they asked for David Lynch on a busted VHS. A lot of the issues you faced were easy compared to the madness that was smashing up this colour grade/degrade hahaha. Really enjoyed this video. Your pacing tickled my brain, subscribed.
this is amazing wow👏
Two quick comments - One, you could try to play with this using "anamorphic widescreen", which was a trick in the 90s and 2000s that DVDs did where a widescreen 16:9 video was smushed to a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the dvd player or TV would be able to stretch it back out. This was done to avoid black bars being encoded directly in the video stream, and to increase the resolution. Depending on what kinds of settings you have, you might be able to export it from the old software as anamorphic 4:3 into the camera, then record it from the camera in 4:3 again like you did, then in a modern editing tool, import the 4:3 from the camera and set the aspect ratio to 16:9. It should still look retro, but it will be in a widescreen format, rather than cutting off the frame of the video at the edges. Two, you could run a high-pass filter on your youtube uploads - with quality headphones on, there's a bit of high hiss / static. Great video though, really brings me back and makes me feel ways about stuff.
If you use a Updown Cross Converter from Black Magic you can upscale and restretch the video to 16x9 you'd need to convert to SDI to do that. A Black Magic Teranex depending on model would deinterlace and upscale to 4K. I've wanted to experiment with shooting anamorphic and transferring it to tape before I de-squeeze it.
This is good, 4:3 video and the right equipment. I see so many "retro" vids that just use a digital filter and it feels cheap and low effort since i can tell the difference. When it's done right like this it looks awesome
The HD version is nice, but the Tape Transfer one is definitely my favourite. It's more tonally consistent with the material. Worth it!
as insane as this is, i think i'd have gone the extra step to install the firewire card in my actual modern 2023 build.
i'm insane enough to want a tape drive in my modern computer. loved this video, it was great! subscribed for sure.
Don't give me crazy ideas!
Yeah, I'm all in for this content. It's like we lived in the same time period.
I was sold after the Brave Little Toaster reference. I have a firewire card in my modern NAS to transfer music and podcasts at BLAZING SPEEDS to my fourth gen iPod, while also fast charging it!
I Have that exact same camcorder & I have also shot a lotta things with it!! super glad to see a resurgence of this era of tech, the look is unrivalled. I use a piece of hardware that uses VGA cables to directly port the tape & record it as an mp4, it's been a while since I've used it so i don't remember exactly what it is but if ur interested i will look back into it!
Firewire is oldskool and retro? Damn! 😮
Later versions are actually quite competitive with USB2: 1394a, half-duplex 100-400 Mbit/s (12.5-50 MB/s); 1394b and later, full-duplex 800-3200 Mbit/s (100-400 MB/s)
I was like... A retro computer has PCIe slots?
@@Marc42 Firewire was released in 1995, USB 2.0 in 2000. They weren't competing standards; I don't get your point.
thunderbolt to fw800 adapter still work and there are 800 to 400 cables for pennies on amazon. It's how I am still able to use my motu ultralite mk3 hybrid with my apple silicon Macs. Also the action retro guy can always be there to help you with similar adventures.
I have all the adapters, and used my Mac to upload footage for years, but they stopped working completely when I updated to Sonoma ☹️
@@harkeofficial which is why mojave is the best macOS version. 32bit app support (90% of mac games), still runs great on non metal gpus
I loved and still love reading physical manuals. I read so many computer manuals, troubleshooting guides, and programming from them.
Pointless but perhaps entertaining tech escapades are my JAM!
The tape version really reminds me of like late 90s and early 2000s TV
I've used FireWire on relatively recent PCs, not just retro systems. They still work great on many systems, software support is the hardest part. It's the only way to losslessly (except for tape errors) transfer DV/MiniDV tapes to a computer. Haven't seen anyone try to send it back to tape in at least a decade though! 😂
WinDV, DVRescue, and Scenalyzer are amazing tools if you're trying to archive old tapes to computer.
I see you all the time on Tiktok! More content like this please. I've been loving old tech lately so anyone making content on it is A+ to me
Awesome vid! I also use firewire with my older audio interface :D
Ah, memories. Actually I have a firewire 800 card not far from me right now, in my "Keep in case" box. I used it with my Drobo (Another retro thing!), before NAS and USB was "a thing". Funny how our perspectives of "fast" have changed - my current homelab setup would rival a whole 1997 small datacenter. Now I find 10Gb networks just passable. Personally I would use the tape footage sparingly, like an effect, and not smear it over everything; cut in and out of it when it makes an impact. Just me tho. I don't find DV footage triggers my nostalgia much - you want old-school go back to VHS! Analog was where it was at. (two turntables and a microphone).
I find DV is nostalgic because of the camera quality but not the tape quality.
btw... Drobo went bankrupt so be careful using their equipment, if hardware or software stops working it can be nearly impossible to fix, and data recovery from an array can get expensive. Have seen too many people screwed by an OS update that corrupted the client-side software and left their data inaccessible.
@@QualityDoggo Oh, I haven't used the drobo for more than 10 years now - there's a limit to old tech, especially storage. That's why the card sits in a box, unused. I wonder if any modern OS still has drivers for it?
Damn, I completely get the nostalgia in this video. I think I had almost the same Sony Digital-8 camcorder and used it to shoot goofy videos with my school friends. Luckily, UA-cam wasn't yet a thing in early 2000s. I used Pinnacle Studio to transfer, edit and copy the footage back to tape. Sold the camcorder some years ago to someone who wanted to backup their Video-8 tapes. Still kept the original tapes and I think even a PCI Firewire card somewhere, because you never know what it will be good for :D
You could’ve just encoded it to DV with ffmpeg or something but where’s the fun in that? Congrats on the new series 😁
oh for sure! I had an old FireWire card and a copy of Pinnacle 11 so I figured WHY NOT 😂 But then I ended up having to buy a new FireWire card anyway 🤦🏼♀️
I remember when my grandpa bought me MS visual basic 5 education edition. I was so proud of that big box, i read all the manuals front to back and watched all the videos on the educational companion cd. I don't think I have been excited about buying software in over a decade or even longer.
loving the retro looking versions 😊 totally worth it!
thank you so much!
DV was big, back when I was in film school. Firewire was bad, because it acted like a hot-swappable interface without being one. It was very ill-advised to be connecting DV devices together that were running, as it could fry the bridge chip. In college, a ton of our gear had fried ports. I even fried my own FireWire at home once. Fried the chip on my Sony camera. I still have my cables, one Sony and one Panasonic camera that record on Mini-DV. I preferred Digital 8 back in the day, because the tapes were interchangeable with Hi-8 camera I had in the early 90's. I edited in Premiere and Ulead Media Studio. I have so many videos on DV that I shot decades ago and never edited together. I made music videos that were never published. DV is pure nostalgia at this point.
The FireWire interface of our JVC camcorder got fried as well :-(. Loaned the camcorder of a friend to digitize all my DV tapes. Kinda wish I had the Thunderbolt (2) to FireWire adapter by Apple (it’s expensive) but when looking for it I realized, again, the interface on my camcorder is fried. It’s also SD resolution, not even HD 😊.
@@Htbaa At first I wanted to buy a Sony DV deck to dump videos without the camera, but that would've been $500+ extra. Instead I just sold the semi-fried camcorder to someone who didn't care about firewire. I have nostalgia for DV look, but I haven't recorded anything in that format since 2004. It's easier to film with modern cameras and then filter it down to look like DV. Less of a hassle.
I knew that it wasn't foolish to save FireWire wires.
Wait what, how come you've only got 4k subs?? This is top tier content?
Thank you so much! I’m already getting started on episode 2 🫡 Shooting for every other week for now!
@@harkeofficial We'll all be here for the 5k special 😳
@@harkeofficialretro PC'S? Count me subbed.
I had the SAME camera back then! So many memories. Thankfully I have all of the footage digitized thanks to transferring it back in the day.
I used Sony Vegas back then.
Cool video. Brought back a lot of memories. I don’t really even use computers anymore. I do everything on my phone. Burning a CD…freaking classic
I have a Canon GL2 and Sony VX2100 that I use all the time to film! I have a FireWire card installed on my Windows 10 machine that gets A LOT of use!
I am also miserably sick, but this video was still a lot of fun. I'd love to see more stuff like this
I still use a Digital8 camcorder. I don't use those crappy A/V capture cards cuz my PC case already has 6-pin FireWire port.
I thought I was watching my "Watch Later" list, but when this video started I was like "That's not what I ordered", but it quickly turned into "Yk what, I'm not complaining". Nice vid
I enjoyed watching that but I found it funny about the editing at some part and I really had fun watching that!
thank you SO MUCH FOR WATCHING! I was trying to keep it fun, hopefully it'll get better as I go 😅
@@harkeofficial can you put a tutorial of a bitcrusher?
@@AsterixLiangVEVO yes I can make a tutorial in a future video, hopefully soon!
Pro Tip: In MacOS when formatting a flash drive for maximum compatibility with Winderps you can use Disk Utility > select Format: MS-DOS (FAT) and Scheme: Master Boot Record. In modern macOS this will format it as FAT32. If you're feeling dangerous more formats are available through Terminal (command line) using `diskutil`. For example `diskutil partitionDisk disk10 MBR "MS-DOS FAT32" DOSBOY 16G` would format the flash drive assigned disk10 `diskutil info` with a 16GB MBR partition formatted in FAT32. `diskutil list` and `diskutil listFilesystems` are your friends. Be wary of partition and file size limitations of various file system formats.
This video was fascinating however something I want to point out is a frustration I dealt with in the 2000s when it came to do projects like this, imo Windows computers take a laborious amount of work to do any audio or video editing import or export duties, what would be very entertaining is to see you get your hands on a power Mac G4 and run an old school copy of final cut pro with all the bells and whistles that used to come in the software.
If I recall out of the box final cut will do everything you needed to do
Wow, I love your editing style! Especially that band-passed and aliasing audio lip-synced to your pixelated cut out. That’s exactly the kind of stuff I used to do in like 2009.
(Also at first I thought your mic arm was on that tiny tripod and I got very confused!)
Digital Audio has been figured out for decades. There are tons of perfectly fine professional Firewire interfaces
I wonder how people would transfer music to the original ipods (if they are still in circulation??? Maybe dankpods could help us with that)--RIP firewire. Many years after they did it. XD
Edit, now that I've watched the rest because I'm ADHD and responded in the middle: I love the look of the old VHS (I know Super8 is different) kind of look. The total authentic solution as opposed to filters (blur + chromatic aberration != vhs idc what filter designers say) LOOKS SO GOOD.
Worth it? Probably not--I'm sure the frustration was off the charts--but the output was amazing. Great job!
As a vintage Mac collector, I use FireWire a lot, and my 2010 Mac Pro has a FireWire 400 card. This is very useful for me, as the later cheesegrater Mac Pros only have FireWire 800. This also gives my Mac Pro some fun anachronistic PCIe expansion: advanced NVMe (2 TB 970 EVO Plus) in Slot 2 and USB-C in Slot 3, alongside antiquated FireWire 400 in Slot 4.
I'm not sure if Apple has fully dropped support for FireWire in MacOS. My Mac Studio has an Apple Thunderbolt Display, running through a Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter, and the FireWire 800 port on the back is fully functional in 14 Sonoma. I also had success using a Thunderbolt 3-to-2 adapter with a Thunderbolt 2-to-FireWire 800 adapter.
My grandma collected little spoons from different states or countries, she thought it was cool so that was good enough for the rest of the family.
Great work. Still using FireWire in a DAW I built in '21 to run my PreSonus FireStudio Mobile audio interface, which works great, runs off of the FireWire power, has all the inputs I need (multiple computers, synths and consoles), fits in my hand and has a U/I with detailed controls that still runs just fine on Win10. Sometimes it's worth the futzing.
What if I put a firewire card in a modern computer? What if I use ffmpeg ? What if I use linux ? Got so many questions...
My modern computer is a MacBook, so I couldn’t install a FireWire no matter how hard I tried 🥲
PCIE Firewire just works, I have 1 in my PC to drive my Nikon CoolScan film scanner. Can't answer about ffmpeg or Linux use, but card should also just work under Linux
@@harkeofficial does the TB3-2 then 2-FW800 method work? I hear windows is better for FW capture tho due to software like WinDV.
It should just work, the software is the hard part. Most hardware and operating systems will still happily accept a PCIe FireWire card.
Note that there is no way to convert USB to FireWire since they are fundamentally different protocol designs, any "adapters" are a scam (except for a few obscure cameras that allegedly had nonstandard combined USB & FireWire ports)
@lachlanlau A lot of Nikon CoolScan users use that TB3 > TB2 > FW800 method, but I don't know what modern macOS support is like for FW support and I don't know if some of that combo needs drivers on Windows or what. Windows 10/11 do support Thunderbolt and Firewire out the box, but I don't know how supported the Apple dongles are
Golly... I recall a person who bought one of those Gateway Destinations because it had all the AV ports you could need. I think it was $4000 including a 35 inch 800x600 VGA monitor / TV. For a $4000 setup you expect at least a BX chipset but no, it was LX so the highest CPU was like a Pentium II 333. I performed an upgrade and then asked the silly question "Is that a digital 8, you need a basic firewire card", and that was just too much for him. New PC time.
Very fun to watch! And congrats on the success of the transfer! I like the old school look! But if it was me I would experiment with mixing back a bit of sharpness around your face / eyes area maybe? See how that looks? Just a bit maybe. Or not.
i recently installed a firewire card in my daily PC, windows 11 picked up the drivers, installed miniDV (which iirc was meant for windows XP) and i was able to preserve all my tapes from my samsung VP-D31i :D
Very cool :) I wanted to transfer my old tapes to my computer but realised the only option with a USB-C Mac is by getting the FW800 to Thunderbolt adapter, and Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 3/USB-C adapter. Except that FW800 to Thunderbolt adapter now costs ~£150 on eBay and I sold it a few years ago for like £20 🤡 so my next option is to just get an older Mac Mini (2012 or older) that has the FW800 port on it, they cost like £50-£70 and then you have an entire Mac Mini to do it with.
Why is this supposedly unthinkable or insane? There is still a lot of equipment out there which is perfectly servicable and in working environments that still have firewire connections. I have firewire cards that run radio equipment in computers which are only about 5 years old - not retro computers by any stretch of the imagination. Additionally you do not need to transfer digital footage back to tape to be able to edit it at the original resolution or to be able to maintain artifacts such as graininess.
I know I didn’t HAVE to transfer back to tape, I just wanted to for the experience 😂 Also, as a fellow amateur radio operator (I assume based on your comment), we use a lot of equipment like this pretty often. Many people who aren’t “into” this stuff haven’t even heard the word “FireWire” in over a decade.
@@harkeofficial I am a ham but I also use flywhee with broadcast audio equipment. A lot of small stations cannot afford to upgrade and some don't want to. In my main professional work we still use a lot of equipment that is firewire connected as while the technology has been updated over time the functionality has not and therefore there is no reason to get rid of good working equipment.
@@TalmidAndy I completely agree! If it’s not broken, why fix it! 🫡
Be careful connecting a PC firewire card to another (which is OK according to spec, and can be used to network computers!), or even worse a firewire port on a 2000s era mac. PC firewire cards tend to assume they are the only power source on the bus and can endure at most 12 volts, while macs tend to feed 30+ volts at considerable ampacity down the wire (which it is OK to do according to spec!)... I had components on firewire cards LITERALLY blow up from that. As in, capacitor pieces flying past my ringing ears! Clip out or desolder the diode (not: bypass it :) ) from the +12V line and the electrolytic capacitor across the firewire power wires before doing experiments of that kind.
Great video. There is a good free program for sony camcorders called Stoik that let’s you record minidv tapes to your computer together with a firewire card. I actually bought one for amazon and it works in a modern computer (then just make sure it’s a PCI-E card, not PCI). Although, you might have to download a legacy driver for the card.
Damn, I’m sold!
On your channel I mean. Not this process, that’s for sure.
:D
i love sending files from modern sources to retro ones. i don't know why, but it always cracks me up. my current record is sending some software from my current PC to an early model Thinkpad running windows 98. I used RS-232 and zmodem to do the file transfer. it turns out that zmodem will get you pretty far back in time lol
Maybe the real treasure was the dead formats we mostly make work along the way!
oh man. I wanted firewire so bad back in like 2003 for my mini-dv camcorder lmao I never actually got to see it work in person and now I have!
There is a front panel IEEE 1394 port on my case and I even have an metal weave cable plugged into it to keep it less dusty.
Thank you for doing the things that must be done.
I have an old "Dazzle" video capture device, it's got S-Video and composite and outputs Firewire. I used it to convert a bunch of VHS tapes back in the day.
Next episode suggestion: Parallel SCSI connecting a late 1980s hard drive to a modern desktop PC (it is doable). :)
This was really cool. Thanks for doing that. Love your voice.
This has an ungodly amount of charm, so good
hehe thank you!
I loovveedd this, can't wait to see what else the Emporium has in store!
What do you mean the FireWire port is broken? Those don't usually break, you know. And even if they do, the breakage is catastrophic, meaning your PC will not detect a camcorder at all.
Also, I am amazed that you didn't just try ScenalyzerLive (which does not need installing or anything complicated) after transcoding the video with ffmpeg or Handbrake. You don't even need to press play on the camcorder, because it controls it all through the Firewire connection. 🙃
Yes it broke... the PC won't even recognize it. It will recognize other FireWire devices, though. Going to be fixing it soon!
These obscure devices you use to solve obscure compatibility problems with old tech - I use on a daily basis. 😁
Tip: You should get an "AVerMedia Live Gamer HD2" and some decent HDMI adapters to record old footage. That S-video to USB adapter you have is pants.
Oh I know it wasn't a very good choice, but I didn't want to wait to order something because the project was taking too long for my taste, and it's what I had on hand!
3:10 - Nope. Not invented by Apple, regardless of what they advertised. Firewire came from Intel. Firewire didn't die off, it's what evolved in to another Intel created system, Thunderbolt.
Now, let's see, PCIe based firewire card, meaning modern PC, then installed XP, that must have been fun, finding the motherboard drivers for as OS that was out of support before PCIe was in shops,.. Even so, XP supported networking, why mess around with burning a disk when you could just have created a Samba share and copied it across the network?
If you got the footage in to the camera, then the firewire port on the camera isn't broken. More likely is you needed to power cycle the camera, hook it to the PC, put it in Playback mode, press Play/Pause, and then let the software take control of when the tape rolls. Some cameras used to be a bit flakey about which mode they were turned on in, to have video out or video in function on the firewire port.
I'd bet on the fastest NLE, Edius, still supporting it, with the transport controls still available.
Now, if you'd wanted to save time and stay in the Apple ecosystem, a secondhand 2012 Mac Mini 'Server' would probably have cost less then the PC, firewire card and software, and would have the hardware drivers for FCP-X to access the camera.
There are many ways to do this more efficiently if I wanted to save time, but I wanted to specifically use similar equipment to what I used as a kid in the early 2000s. This is merely an adventure through nostalgia. :)
@@harkeofficial I still have the AMD 3200+ based full tower (yeah, the ones that are more then three feet tall,..) with firewire and IOMega Zoom AV capture card that I used for editing weddings from '98 to '02 on Premiere 3.5 LE, with two 14" CRT screens,... I don't miss tape!
@@harkeofficial Oh/And,.. the Mac Mini Server 2012 I mentioned earlier,... is my 'portable' Raw capture via Thunderbolt for an AJA Cion,.... Raw 'in camera' is so nice. :D
Some Firewire audio interfaces still run circles around modern usb ones. In some RME interfaces, you could use all inputs of the Interface at the same time. And record all of them.
i'm going to do something i never do, subscribe after first time seeing one of your videos which turned out to be a nice stress free change compared to everything else we're being bombarded with right now besides, who else is going to get excited over firewire, you even had me thinking about grabbing a card out the drawer and installing one too, well for a minute anyway...
That's quite an honor!! Thank you!
There are tons of super nice audio interfaces / preamps, which are dirt cheap because they're FireWire. I desperately wish they could be used because it would make owning an 8-channel RME interface affordable
You could just an older macbook with firewire builtin, they're very cheap & many would likely still be easily powerful enough for audio processing(with an i5 cpu for example). Windows would be fine too, but the software/drivers for firewire audio interfaces more often seem to be for Mac.
got recommended this after a f4mi video, the algorithm did me good 🙏
Substancial, real, magical and NO SUBSCRPTION. 😍
Windows XP. I loved that OS for many years.
What about putting the old PC on the LAN? Maybe blocking it's internet access on the router, so it doesn't go online.
I still have a Shuttle XPC barebone with an Athlon XP CPU, AGP graphics and Firewire, which I keep for retro games.
With some luck, the Firewire port on your camcorder might still be fixable.
I must say I like the original 4k footage better.
The question is if the camcorder as well as the cheap converter both really used the SVideo signal.
I miss the no subscription days :(
It looked really good. 🔥 I'd mix the footage together to see how them combined would look.
I bet I’m not alone in wanting to know more about that PC.
All the specifications!
Starting in elementary school, I read through every line of every PC ad I came across. That’s not weird, right?
I will add a video to the pipeline about the computers I am using! Thank you so much! And no... not weird at all :)
I have been using a MiniDV cam recently and broke out my old Intel Macbook to capture video. I just get the *.dv files and then copy to my modern Mac. I had tried to do DV to FW 400 to USB but that ends up being a ridiculous amount of money on Apple adapters including things they don't make anymore!
I have all those adapters, and they worked splendidly up until two weeks ago, when I stupidly updated to Sonoma on my current MacBook and now it won't recognize it. :(
the end result looks great, digital 8 is so cool
thank you!!
Just some suggestions:
You probably could've connected your Windows computer to the same LAN as your Mac, enabled the SSH server on your Mac (and port 22 on your local firewall if necessary), and used a program like WinSCP on your Windows computer to transfer files.
Also, DV video is encoded by the computer. Therefore, although it stinks that your camcorder's FireWire port broke, sending video to and from the camcorder via FireWire probably just sent the already encoded DV video back to the computer - just downscaling and converting to DV video on the computer would've had the same effect. Obtaining via S-Video and analog audio involved digital-to-analog operations on the camcorder, increasing the retro effect further.
By the way, is your camcorder a DCR-TRV340? I've got one too!