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That would be a poor choice in this case. The data on the MiniDV tape is already digital. Any FireWire interface (cheap dongles also available) will allow mos
by Symbiote 5y ago
That would be a poor choice in this case.
The data on the MiniDV tape is already digital. Any FireWire interface (cheap dongles also available) will allow most operating systems an easy way to read the tape, and as well as retaining the original video quality, metadata like dates and times and each scene (each startrecord-stoprecord bit) are also transferred.
I transferred family MiniDV tapes in this way. It took about three sessions, spread over 3-4 years, to complete the task, and I used Linux, Windows and MacOS to transfer the data, depending on what computers were available. The output is the same regardless.
- _def 5y agoCan you recommend a cheap firewire dongle?
- epakai 5y agoIf you have a thunderbolt 3 port then the apple adapters are reasonable second-hand, but you need a tb3->tb2, and tb2->firewire adapters. They work fine in Windows and Linux. OWC used to make TB docks with firewire, but they're rare and expensive now. Anything that claims to adapt plain USB to firewire is bait for unsuspecting buyers, or maybe supported by some ancient obscure sony camcorder models. The cheapest options for firewire these days are pci, cardbus, pcie, and expresscard in about that order. G3/G4 era macs up to 2012 models are common firewire machines. I know Sony and IBM had laptops with the interface in the core duo times.
- Symbiote 5y agoI was rather sloppy with my words there. I used a cheap PCI card, some years ago, with Windows and Linux. I had a Thunderbolt adapter for the Mac.