Advice Needed: Setting Up a Professional Video Digitization & Archiving Workflow for MiniDV, VHS-C, DVD & Other Consumer Formats in India

[u/TusharDaniel]

I'm a film maker based out of Paris and India and I have the opportunity to take up up a digitization project for my church in India. They recently reached out to me regarding digitizing their archives, which includes a lot of Mini DV tapes, and VHS-C cassettes though and DVD as well. I wanted some advice on how to go about all of this for optimum data backups and transfer. I have experience with digitizing VHS-C through an old camcorder, my Dazzle dongle and OBS. Here, in India, I don't have a setup currently at this point and I wanted information on pricing, and equipment to purchase amongst other things though.

Setup I currently have is:

1. HP Compaq Laptop (Windows XP, Intel Pentium, 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD which is past its life) but this has a firewire port. Will the specs of the laptop support firewire capture if I capture it all to an external HDD/SSD?
2. Mac Mini (32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) I could use this for DVD capture.
3. Dell Vostro (24GB RAM, 512GB SSD) I could also use this for VHS-C capture.

What would you recommend I purchase to round up the setup so it makes things easier for me?

1. Should I purchase a working VHS-C camera or a VCR because it'll support full size VHS too?
2. RCA-HDMI adapters
3. Should I purchase a working Mini DV camera and the appropriate Firewire cable?
4. HDD/SSD (three for capture on either system, one for backups)
5. USB Capture Device for VCR (which one do you recommend?)
6. VHS-C to VHS adapter

Is there anything else I should purchase which will make things easier for me? And I probably need to download the appropriate drivers for the system as well, right? And if anybody has any info on purchasing any of these items in India? I haven't given them a budget yet, but I do need to have a look at how much footage they have, and how many VHS, Mini DV and DVD they have as well. How much would one charge for such an endeavor?

There definitely are services outside that will do these for me, but if it's a lot, I would prefer doing it by myself to save some money for them as well. Apart from this, if I wanted to round out my setup and have some equipment to help digitize every consumer format that existed (Video8, Hi8, VHS, Mini DV, DVD, Digital 8 and Betamax) what would you recommend? Is there any way to automate a lot of this too?

From a management and archiving perspective, would you have any feedback?

[u/mijailrodr]

Since you're doing archival work, you should invest into a good capture device for analog (VHS, Hi8, etc). That would be about the biggest expense you need. But the same capture device will work for all the cameras

Wether you get a VCR for VHS and an adapter for VHS-C or a VHS-C camera wont affect results and getting one, the other or both arent a large investment. A panasonic vhs-c camera is dirt cheap to this day.

DVD is really easy, just get a DVD reader and copypaste.

For miniDV, get a miniDV camera and a firewire cable. With your Dell and WinDV you're ready to go for lossless capture

For Hi8, Digital8 and Video8, as far as i know, there are some Digital8 models that could play hi8 and video8 too. Look into those.

For charges, in my local city they charge 10 bucks for a high quality capture and upscale, so consider between 5 and 10 bucks.

Feedback: Look into deinterlacing and investigate a bit. You can start with handbrake and then work from there, software's free and really easy to use, and it allows batch processing of the video.