Just a thought that might be different, but very efficient. I backup all my years of video and pictures to removable hard drives. You can get a docking station that would plug into a spare slot, if you have one, where your DVD drives would go. Then you purchase a couple of internal hard drives. I back up everything to one drive, then slide it out and insert the other and back up everything to the other. The first HD I take to the bank and keep it in a safe deposit box. Every month or so I switch the hard drives. This way I have everything current and in a safe place in case of fire.

Hard drives are pretty inexpensive and files transfer to them very fast. I use 4TB hard drives and it is easy to view your entire library from these drives without having to search for the right DVD or BluRay disc. Transporting a single hard drive is easy to do and has proven an efficient method to protect my precious pictures and videos.

Feel free to send me a private message and I could tell you the brand of docking station I use. Mine is 3 docking stations (Backplane) that take up 2 slots in my PC. You can pull the drives right out as long as you are not writing to them. There are also external docking stations that connect with a USB plug as well. So there are some options that might work well with your specific setup.

I initially started backing up to BluRay but found this cumbersome for me. I find the convenience of being able to simply pull the hard drive out and go is awesome.

I hope this helps give you another tactic to investigate.

Kevin
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Quote: I've got a lot of older (1996-2007) video tape to edit and convert to disk. I'm starting with 8mm. Is there any benefit to outputting to Blu-ray over DVD?

How about Mini-DV? It's not high def, but it's digital.

Cap'n Kevin gave some very good advice for back up of the files. Perhaps I missed something in that reply.

I may have misread your question so ignore my answer if that was not what you were after.

You old video tape is standard definition. You would capture it using a analog to digital converter as standard definition. If you want to burn it to a disc to watch, trying to convert it to high definition may result in very poor quality. You wound want to capture and convert the videos to a standard mpg2 file. If you have about 1 hour of video, you can fit that on a standard DVD. If you have more, you can burn the video files to a blu ray disc. You will fit more on the disc.

I have made and burned AVCHD, high definition mpg2 files and standard definition files to a blu ray disc. They all play at the native format.

I'm surprised that a mini-DV is not high definition In that case, you would just copy the video files to your computer and deal with them as above. You could copy directly from a camcorder or just from the disc. Most computers would be able to handle a mini-DV disc. Double check if you have a slot loading optical drive. .
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Anything I post unless stated with a reference is my personal opinion.

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Thanks Cap'n Kevin and stevek,

I'm not looking for back up, rather editing the tapes and saving to disk so that we can easily view them on the family TV. I've already started capturing, editing, and outputting to DVD. But I'm just wondering if there would be any improvement in picture quality (and perhaps sound) if I used Blu-ray disk instead. I understand Blu-ray has higher storage capacity, so I'd use fewer disks.

Once I start editing video captured in high def, I presume outputting to Blu-ray will yield a better picture than DVD. So is the same true when starting with analog and non-HD digital sources? PowerDirector 365, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core processor 4.05 GHz, 32GB RAM, Windows 10 64-bit OS, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER

Quote: Thanks Cap'n Kevin and stevek,

I'm not looking for back up, rather editing the tapes and saving to disk so that we can easily view them on the family TV. I've already started capturing, editing, and outputting to DVD. But I'm just wondering if there would be any improvement in picture quality (and perhaps sound) if I used Blu-ray disk instead. I understand Blu-ray has higher storage capacity, so I'd use fewer disks.

Once I start editing video captured in high def, I presume outputting to Blu-ray will yield a better picture than DVD. So is the same true when starting with analog and non-HD digital sources?

I have burned my hi-8 and VHS captured tapes to both blu-ray and DVD. Since I captured these tapes using a DVD resolution 720x480 there wasn't much improved quality by burning to blu-ray with a 1920x1080 resolution.

But.....

There is an advantage to burning your captured video to blu-ray and selecting the SD720x480 profile. You will be able to fit much more SD video onto this larger capacity disc. That may or may not be an advantage to you.

One tip when burning to either format. Once you capture the tapes and convert them into a digital file, import it into Power Director and you can produce a new video that you may or may not like the quality better. If you apply the fix/enhance tools, especially the video enhance tool, this will apply an up converting enhancement that I have had some moderate success with. Try it and see if you like it. The video enhance tool tends to sharpen and smooth out some of the rough edges a bit. Then you can burn this improved video to DVD or Blu-ray and enjoy the improvements you made when playing back.

For me personally, my PC is hooked directly to my TV so I tend to view all my camera video, pictures and completed productions directly off the hard drive instead of on a playable discs. The advantage for me is that I don't have to look for any discs in order to watch something. The PC has become my playback device for all our TVs in the house. I have also converted my commercial DVD and blu-ray collection onto hard drive. I use Cyberlinks Power DVD 13, and I can view my whole library of available movies using their software. It really pretty cool. The software imports all the DVD covers so it is easy to select what to watch. And my 5 year old twins can never scratch a disc putting it into the player!!!!

The method I described above in my first response is what I do for backup but it is also my method to watch all my captured movies.

Kevin
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