The journey began while I was building my family tree on Ancestry. Static images, though invaluable in their own right, left me wanting more. Photographs, can capture a moment, but they don't quite capture memory. I wanted something richer, something familiar, something that could awaken the senses in a way only moving images and sound can.

That search led me back to a stack of Hi8 video tapes collecting dust in my grandma's closet, and to our old Canon ES50A camcorder, first released in 2000, a camcoder I myself remember using to record on these very tapes. The camera had aged alongside the footage; its battery pack was long dead, with a soldered power cable directly where the battery once sat. It wasn't elegant, but it was a start. The past was waiting to be brought back to life, and I finally had to the tools to try.

As any novice would, I turned to Amazon in search for a cheap video capture device. I wasn't thinking about bitrates, signal quality, or archival standards, I just wanted something that could get the footage off those tapes and onto my computer. With little more than curiosity and nostalgia driving me, I bought the UCEC VHS to Digital Converter kit and waited for the first piece of my digitization setup to arrive.

I began the archival process by rewinding the tapes, sliding them into the camcorder, and wiring everything together, the camcorder to the capture card, the capture card to the computer. With the hardware set, I opened OBS Studio and added the video capture device. I didn't dive into codecs, file formats, or bitrates, frankly, I didn't know enough to. I simply chose the defaults and moved on.

In my eagerness, I even recorded straight to MP4. Hardly archival quality in hindsight, but at the time it didn't matter. I hit record, pressed play on the camcorder, and sat back as each tape ran in real time, hour by hour, memory my memory. When I reviewed the first recordings, my excitement quickly gave way to disappointment. The footage was washed out, the colors muted and lifeless, the contrast harsh to the point of obscuring detail. Faces blurred into shadows and highlights, moments I knew were there seemed just out of reach. Each frame carried a kind of haze, not just in the literal film, but in the memory itself.

I blamed it on the limitations of the medium, tapes degrading with time, and the less-than-ideal state of the 25 year old camcorder. Perhaps this was simply the price of memory preserved on fragile magnetic film: imperfect, distorted, yet still carrying the echo of the past.

Once the tapes were captured, I uploaded the videos to a private YouTube playlist and shared them with my family. For years, I would return to those recordings, replaying the old memories in my mind. Yet I was never quite satisfied with what I saw.

There was the birthday cake, but its frosting had lost its color. There was the river, but the riffles looked pale and flat. The moments were there, but the life within them felt dimmed. Still, I let it go, grateful to have anything at all, even if it wasn't everything I had hoped for.

Until one day, I stumbled upon a video about QTGMC deinterlacing, a process that takes the interlaced fields of old video footage and weaves them into a smoother, more natural-looking image. In short, it breathes new life into the jagged, flickering lines of analog video, making it feel cleaner and more fluid.

This is where the obsession began. I wanted that for my footage. So I went back to the old MP4 files and ran one through Hybrid, using QTGMC deinterlacing via Vapoursynth to test it out. The results were somewhat better, but still far from what I had envisioned. The washed out colors, the lack of detail...it wasn't enough.

That's when the research began. I dove headfirst into the world of video preservation, reading forum posts, guides, and videos from archivists and hobbyists alike. If the past was going to be preserved properly, I realized, it would take more than just hitting "record" in a cheap capture card.

My search quickly led me to a wealth of resources. On YouTube, I found Archival Media Digitizing - The Basics and Deinterlacing and Upscaling with Vapoursynth in Hybrid by Zachary Halberd, as well as Neat Video vs. Hybrid: Best Tools for Denoising & Degraining Hi8 and VHS Home Videos by Video Capture Guide. I also came across a detailed whitepaper, Guidlines for the Preservation of Video Recordings by the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA).

From these, I learned just how much my first attempt had missed. If I wanted true archival quality, I needed the right tool and methods:

• A high-quality capture device such as the BlackMagic Intensity Pro 4K.
• Using S-Video instead of composite, to preserve greater clarity anad color separation.
• Recording with Apple ProRess 422 codecs inside a QuickTime .mov container.
• Fine-tuning filters and settings in Hybrid, from deinterlacing to denoising, which I'll cover later.

It was eye-opening. What I had once seen as an inevitable loss of quality was, in fact, avoidable, if I was willing to put in the work (and money).

But even with all that new knowledge, something still felt lacking. The truth was, I was trying to squeeze life out of a camcorder that was already on its last legs. The Canon ES50A didn't even have an S-Video output, which meant I was limited before I even hit record. So I made the leap and found a Sony DCR-TRV460 camcorder, a model capable of playing both Hi8 and Digital8 tapes. Unlike the Canon, it offered S-Video output and reliability of hardware that wasn't limping along after two decades of neglect. It felt like the proper tool to begin again, this time the care the tapes deserved.

With the right camcorder in hand and a clearer understanding of best practices, I began the archival process in earnest. This time, I wanted to do it properly. The workflow I settled on looked something like this:

Hardware Setup

Camcorder: Sony DCR-TRV460 (Hi8/Digital8 playback).

Connection: S-Video for video, RCA for audio.

Capture device: BlackMagic Intensity Pro 4K

Software Setup

• Media Express
• Hybrid
• DaVinci Resolve 20

Capture Configuration

In BlackMagic Desktop Video Setup, set Input Connection to S Video.

In Media Express preferences, set Project Video Format to 525i59.94 NTSC and Capture File Format to QuickTime Uncompressed 8-Bit YUV. Make sure to also disable Stop capture if dropped frames are detected.

Post-processing with Hybrid

In Hybrid, set the following settings:

• • Base
    • Processing
      • Video: ProRes
      • Audio: passthrough all
  • ProRes
    • Profile: ProRes 422
  • Copy/Resize
    • Base
      • Resize: Enabled
      • Picture Resize
        • Auto adjust: Disabled
        • Target resolution: 1440x960
  • Filtering
    • (De-)Interlace/Telecine
      • Overwrite input scan type: Enabled
        • To: bottom field first
      • Auto deinterlace handling: QTGMC (Vapoursynth)
        • Preset: Slower
    • Vapoursynth
      • Color
        • Matrix
          • Color Matrix: Enabled
            • From: Rec. 601
            • To: Rec. 709
            • Adjust by resolution: Disabled
      • DeGrain
        • TemporalDegrain2: Enabled
      • DeNoise
        • MC Temporal Denoise: Enabled
      • DeHalo
        • FineDeHalo
          • Strength: 1.50
      • Sharpen
        • CAS
          • Sharpness: 0.200
      • Frame
        • Resize
          • Resizer: Enabled
            • Neighborhood: 32x6
            • Neurons: 256
            • GPU: Enabled
      • Add Grain
        • FilmGrain(GLSL)
          • Intensity: 0.10

Final Touches with DaVinci Resolve

With the footage processed through Hybrid, my next step was to bring it into DaVinci Resolve for some final polishing. Resolve gave me more precise control over trimming and color work.

First, I cut away unecessary frames, mostly blank screens or camera shake at the start and end of clips. Then, using the color wheels, I fine-tuned the brightness, contrast, and color balance. This helped bring out more natural tones and made the footage feel closer to how I remembered it. But I caught myself chasing perfection, nudging sliders back and forth, convinced there was some magic combination that would unlock the exact way those moments once felt.

Once I was satisfied with the adjustments, I exported the project as an H.264 .mov file, ready for long-term storage and easy playback.

Before and After

To really see the difference this process makes, here's a comparison: on the left, the raw digitization from the UCEC capture device; on the right, the version after using the new workflow. The change is striking to say the least. What was once washed-out, noisy, and flat now has depth, clarity, and color.

The lesson here is that quality isn't just about hitting "record", it's the combination of the right hardware, the right software, and the time invested to bring out the best in the footage. And, just as important, the storage space to actually keep it all. Lossless video files take up a huge amount of room, but that space is the tradeoff for perserving archival media in the highest quality possible.

Personal Reflection

After hours spent capturing, encoding, and processing. I realized the technical side of this project was only half the story. Sitting in front of the screen. tweaking sliders and filters, I began to notice how strangely personal the work felt. The tools I used weren't just about video, they mirrored the way I thought about memory itself.

Deinterlacing, noise reduction, color correction, sharpening, the same way I sometimes replay old moments in my mind, trying to induce the forgotten edges. Each adjustment felt like brushing dust off a photograph, trying to reveal the memory underneath. But the more I worked, the more I realized I wasn't just improving the footage; I was fighting against the erosion of memory itself.

There's a cruel symmetry here. Memories fade in much the same way old footage degrades: slowly, subtle, until one day you notice entire details have gone missing. And just like the restoration process, my mind sometimes tries to fill in those gaps with guesses, coloring in the past with approximations.

But restoration has limits. I could remove the grain, yet I couldn't bring back the heat of that summer air. I could make the faces sharper, but I couldn't make them turn toward me again. I could deepen the color of the frames, but it would never sound like it did when I stood there.

And that's the unfortunate truth: the image on the screen will always be a shadow of the thing it once was, just as memory is always an echo of the moment.

Still, I keep restoring. Not because I believe I can make it perfect, but because the act of preservation, however flawed, is my way of saying these moments mattered. That I mattered to them, and they to me.