Converting 8mm/Hi8 to Blu-ray

[BPHusker]

I am contemplating buying a BD burner to convert all my old family videos to Blu-ray. I am leaning towards Blu-ray over DVD because it can offer me the highest quality - even if the source is in SD. I just picked up a Digital8 camcorder which will allow me to capture my older tapes through Firewire and was thinking about getting Sony Vegas HD Platinum to do the editing and conversion to HD.

Anyway, has anyone done a similar project?

[KrugStillo]

Just figured I'd chime in since I have tried this. I had a screening of a film that I am working on and before the feature presentation I put a few older shorts on the disc I ran. For my money I did not find the Blu-ray quality of the SD material any better looking than a decently compressed DVD. In fact I actually found them to look a tad bit worse, softer. I believe this is because it needed to be upconverted to support 1920 by 1080. Now I know that you can use 480i or p on a Blu-ray but for whatever reason my software only allows you to use 1080 so hence things need to be upconverted and don't look any better than DVD. Like I said I think they look worse. I use Adobe Encore CS5. It seems to not allow you to mix formats so if your main program is 1080i, everything else needs to be as well or it's upconverted. Not sure how Vegas does it so I can't comment on that. However my 1080i footage from the movie I'm making looks gorgeous but that is native HD. I would suggest that if you are going to use SD footage just put it on DVD. You can get the burner for future use but it seems rather pointless to bother putting SD footage on a Blu-ray (at least at a home spun level). Just my opinion but I hope it helps a bit.

[OrlandoEastwood]

If you're going to telecine 8mm film, it would be best to do it with an HD camera to get the best results.

[notman]

If they're just standard definition video tapes (not 8mm or better film) there's no reason to spend so much money on blu-ray discs and a blu-ray burner. You can get a spindle of 100 Sony DVD+R (or DVD-Rs) for around $20 plus tax at Staples when they have sales (which they do on a somewhat regular basis). The software to make blu-rays is much more expensive than the software to make DVDs. (I have an HDV camcorder and haven't even bothered with the expense and headache of installing a blu-ray burner on my PC yet.) Blu-ray players will always play DVDs. If you really think it's worth the expense to put them on blu-ray then go for it, but I don't see how you'd get any better picture out of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8mm_video#Video8
"In terms of video quality, Video8, VHS/VHS-C, and Beta-II offered similar performance in their "standard play" modes; all were rated at approximately 240 horizontal lines, depending on speed, quality of tape, and other factors."
I'm not an expert at this, but since it says for 8mm video had 240 horizontal lines, it seems to me DVD is just fine.

[ninel]

I used to have all my old memories on Hi8 tapes, couple of years ago I transferred them to DVD with a Sony DVD-recorder standalone, via S-Video cable, one hour / disc, highest quality (HQ+) mode, the quality of the original preserved quite well.
I don't know how many tapes you have, but you know that rendering takes A LOT of time (with Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere , you name it), and the quality gain is NOT impressive at all (transferring to bluray) if any.
The ONLY advantage in your case would be getting in the end of the day less discs, if you plan say 2-3 hours /bluray disc.
One advice, keep the tapes secure & rewind them once in while.

I was having a library of irreplaceable home movies shot on 8mm film, before the film disintegrates i transferred them to DVD. Blu-ray provides you an nice quality but are a bit expensive comparatively. Although the DVDs are good enough to store the memories and maintain the quality as well.

[Damage Inc.]

I agree with most above, DVD is the most appropriate to store that kind of source-material on.
Blu-ray and upconverted to HD is basically "overkill" so to speak, both technically and in costs.
And as said, it might even show the flaws of the source-material even more.
I would just leave it at its original state and put on DVD in the best quality as possible.
Myself I also still have DV-tapes and stuff, and I wouldn't bother trying to force it "better than DVD".
As long as it's not compressed more than it is, so the bar is the source-material.

And also a tip:
Maybe it would be better to just digitize all those tapes 1:1 and just burn them to DVDs or maybe BDs as files.
So not as in a playback-disc but as storage, in case you don't have it on an HDD and/or other backup-container yet.

[OrlandoEastwood]

A nice compromise would be to have stuff encoded in 720p.

[TM2-Megatron]

I'd also just go with putting them on a regular DVD. Playing them back on an HDTV through an upscaling player won't be appreciably different, by and large, from any kind of scaling job that a consumer version of Sony Vegas could manage. You might try investing in something like Magic Bullet's Instant HD, which is specifically made to upscale and probably does as better job than Vegas alone, but you still probably wouldn't get a particularly great result with Hi8 material. There's only so much information to work from in something so low-quality, and any kind of interpolation algorithm is only as good as the original information that it's given.