# Dubbing analog 8mm to digital without triggering "copy protection"



## khuminis (Nov 15, 2009)

First off, very sorry if this is the wrong forum -- perhaps an admin can move it to the right one if it's not?

I have many old home movies on 8mm analog camcorder tapes, including some of people who have passed away. I really want to turn them into digital files. 

I have a little analog-plug to USB-plug device I use to dub the videos from an analog camcorder to my PC using Powerdirector 11. Because of the built-in copyright protection in powerdirector, which is looking for macrovision, it's a real hassle to do this. Apparently the sound and other qualities of home movies are almost identical to macrovision. 

I've noticed with several of my analog 8mm I just CAN'T get it done -- powerdirector keeps shutting it down over and over and over. Very, very frustrating -- they are my home movies!!! I know how to just keep trying and that usually works, but with some of my vids it's just futile. 

Can anyone recommend a different and fairly easy to use program I can use to input my videos -- I really wish I could just use PD because I can then input them as AVIs of high quality, to try to retain as much of the original video quality as possible, so the alternate program I'd want to use should be able to do that. I searches on the Internet but many of the products seem iffy/shady. I'm willing to pay for a good program. 

Thanks....


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## zuluclayman (Dec 16, 2005)

I have no experience in doing this - so all I can offer is to try other video editing software via trial versions and see if any allow the easy import. A couple of suggestions:

Adobe Premiere Pro or Adobe Premiere Elements (note that Premiere Pro is now cloud based - not sure how this will affect trial versions)
any of the Sony Vegas range


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## khuminis (Nov 15, 2009)

Thanks! This whole thing is going to give me a nervous breakdown I think -- spent an hour downloading the adobe program only to have it not work -- apparently Premiere absolutely never inputs video capture from a USB cable -- and guess what my bridge device is? 

Now downloading Vegas....fingers crossed!


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