[sabkisscrue]

Originally Posted by lordsmurf

VHS or 8mm makes more sense.

Honestly, 8mm, VHS and Betamax are all about the same for quality. You need Super Beta, Betacam, S-VHS or Hi8 to jump up in quality.

8mm/Hi8 doesn't really "track"

Thats a good thing then.


-- that's both a benefit and a problem. The benefit is when the tape plays perfectly because it was recorded in a perfect deck. However, as with all other analog video recorders, gravity shifts things over time. When 8mm/Hi8 is misaligned, all hell breaks loose -- the tapes become paperweights, unless you can pull out a scope and manually misalign another player to match the badly-made tapes (and good luck with that!) Here's a more technical explanation on 8mm tracking.

Some recent hi8 transfers ive done the guy who I got the tapes from said that he couldnt get the sound to track on them or they had sound problems.
Now I dont know if its because the tapes he bought were bad or the camera was going out of alignment, but I was able to get the tapes to play and the audio was okay using the trv-740.

Let me just say without showing proof, that there does indeed seem to be some quality differences between a vhs dub and an 8mm dub.
Maybe its because you said it best that 8mm/hi8 tapes dont really need to be tracked. But I have seen both vhs and 8mm dubs from the same masters and the 8mm dubs appear to contain more detail than the vhs dubs, in other words they looked closer to what the master would look like but not exactly what the master would look like.
I can only suggest that maybe 8mm is a better and more reliable format than vhs for dubbing purposes.