The camcorder is quite impressive for its time (it even has night vision!) and the video quality is pretty good. I have 25 of these cassettes in the closet behind me and already did plenty of work to digitize what we have. With about two cassettes, there was no audio (anymore?), and it would be a shame to have more of the material succumb to the elements.

Even though I will be focusing on 8mm Video Cassettes (Video8, Hi8, Digital8), the process should be nearly identical for other, comparable types of media. Essentially, you need to plug your camcorder into your computer and record the input with software. There are appearently modern, one-device options for digitizing a cassette, though they seem more expensive. This guide shows a process that does not rely on any such devices.

The Equipment

Firstly, you need a computer and a device that is capable of playing your old, analog media. I am assuming you have a  computer, and you likely have access to a playback device. If not, you can look for used camcorder or cassette player on the internet. I will be using our old camcorder, which still works well enough for the job.

The next thing you'll need is a way to plug your camcorder or player into your computer. Congratulations if this somehow works without the need for additional hardware! In my case, I bought something called a "video grabber" from amazon, which allows me to convert the signal from my camcorder's RCA and S-Video output to USB input. You can get one of these for about 10€ (about 12 USD) on Amazon. Here is what is looks like:

If your camcorder or cassette player has a different set of connectors, you will have to get a matching video grabber. Also, make sure you have the proper cables. I had to order the S-Video cable (the one without colored connectors in the picture blow), because I want to use it instead of RCA-Yellow. Though, I still use red and white RCA for the audio channels. 

And that's about it. The only other thing we need is a recording software. I think my video grabber came with some sort of proprietary recording tool, but I prefer to use OBS, since that is linux compatible, free and less sketchy. 

So in total, you may be spending something like 10 to 150 USD on everything you need, depending on what you already have and what kind of deal you strike for a camcorder or video player. Here's all of the hardware in one picture:

Getting Ready to Record

Now that we have all of our equipment, we can start with the actual "work". The first things you'll have to do are plugging your pieces of equipment into eachother and figuring out the proper recording settings. Since I use OBS for this, I will show you my setup and comment on it.

Put your cassette into your camcorder and use your cables to connect the player to your video grabber. Then, plug the video grabber into your computer. Note that I replaced RCA-Yellow with the black S-Video connector in the picture below. Your setup might look different, depending on the connectors of your hardware.

Open OBS  to set it up for recording. Add a video source and an audio source. Configure both to receive input from your video grabber. 

Get into your OBS video settings and set the proper resolution and FPS. Here you might need to do some research. 640x480p at 50 FPS looks good for my use case. This may vary for you depending on the kind of media you'll be recording. There even seem to be regional differences for the same type of casette, so you will probably need to do research. Also, you can right-click your video source and click the option "Resize output (source size)" if you can't quite fit your canvas to your video source.

Customize the rest of the settings to your liking. For example, I want my recording to be saved as an MKV video file. Remember that you can always come back later and review your settings if you are not fully satisfied with them. Here's what my OBS looks like, for comparison.

You'll probably want to set your recording quality at least to "Indistinguishable Quality" (like I did). This should offer you a good base for any sort of editing.

The actual recording process

Rewind your cassette to the very beginning, hit the play button on your camcorder and start your OBS recording. Make sure you remove or mute any unneeded audio sources. Else, you might accidentally record background noise!

This is the perfect moment to check if your settings are producing the proper result. Stop after a short while and see if the quality of your recording is looking good. If anything is wrong, try adjusting your settings or pop in another tape to see if the problem disappears.

If everything is looking good, proceed to do a full recording. You can just let your recording setup do its thing and come back to check the result later. It can happen that you come back to your desk long after the tape finished playing. In this case, OBS will have picked up plenty of black screen (or blue screen), since it does not know when to stop recording. In this case, you can just trim off anything unwanted from your output in a video editor. My choice for doing that is Kdenlive, which is free and open source.

Enjoy!

This is it! Even though it may take some time to figure everything out, the process is simple and straightforward once you get your recording settings down. Now, you can go on and archive your family memories for generations to come.

Though there are web-based and other tools that can help you to find the right code, using these can slow you down. With a bit of simple math, you'll be able to approximate color codes and insert them into your projects, or to edit an existing color code to shift it in the right direction.

The first thing to know is that these 6-digit codes are nothing more than red, green and blue values (RGB). The first two digits tell us how much red there is in the color. The two middle digits are the amount of green, and the last digits are the amount of blue.

Let us continue with #ff6087 as our example. The following graphic shows this color in decimal and hexadecimal notation.

At first, it may be confusing to see letters in the color code. There is a very easy way in which these letters function as numbers. The only letters that are used are a-f. The letter "a" is assigned a value of 10, "b" is assigned a value of 11, and so on until 15 ("f"). In essence, there letters extend our normal (decimal) numbering system right where it stops - giving us single digit representations for the numbers 10 to 15.

Once we identify the values behind the digits in our color code, we can do the simple maths to convert our hexadecimal code into a more readable, decimal RGB format.

Looking at #ff6087 again, remember that the first two digits are the amount of red in our color. You always need to multiply the first of the digits by 16. Then, you multiply the second digit by 1 and add the two results together.  This will give us a red value of 255 (15 x 16 + 15 x 1). See if you can follow the math in the following graphic with the information that I provided until now!

Here we go! After doing the same maths for the green and blue values, we arrive at our more readable, decimal RGB value. 

Multiplying by 16 and 1 may seem somewhat arbitrary, but the logic behind it is very simple. Remember that we are dealing with the hexadecimal system, which is the base-16-system. It gives us 16 digits, including zero. It makes us calculate with 16 and its multiples, just like the decimal system makes us calculate with 10 and its multiples. Our normal number 22 is nothing more than "2 x 10 + 2 x 1", if you break it down in the same way.

When you come across hex colors the next time, you can try to do some maths on them. And you can modify them by increasing or decreasing the red, green and blue values. The higher the values are, the brighter the color will also be. And vice versa. Also, you can use this knowledge to quickly come up with an approximate color code to quickly insert into one of your projects. You can start with a guess and fine-tune the value until you have what you are looking for.

Who came up with this system and why is it so widespread? Perhaps it has to do with the fact that 255 is the maximum number that can be represented by a single byte (11111111). Since any byte can be contained within just two hexadecimal digits, the resulting color codes are short and compact.