We sure have had some bad luck when it comes to our memories. Ever since my husband and I met we had been collecting personalized Christmas ornaments and handmade our ornaments every year with our children. We started with barely anything on our tree and ended up with many beautiful and special additions. Unfortunately, these ornaments were mistakenly placed in an artificial tree box and the tree was sold at our garage sale. Please, if you ever buy something at a yard sale that contains something possibly sentimental that may have mistakenly been placed inside another box, please please double check with the family and return it if at all possible.

Anyway, next I thought I was going to be smart and put all of our pictures from our digital camera on an external hard drive for safe keeping. Yeah, it hurt when I dropped the hard drive on the floor and it never worked again. There were approximately 2-3 years of pictures on there.

We’ve gone through a couple of video cameras in the last 12 years. The first was a full sized VHS camera. Yep, used VHS tapes and everything. Then we upgraded to an 8mm camcorder, and finally to a digital camcorder. Of course, we didn’t consider how we were ever going to watch those 8mm tapes from an analog camera that didn’t hook up to the computer without a video capture card that I have never been willing to purchase.

Now I have a bug up my behind to get everything digital backed up on external hard drive, zipped on CDs and burned to DVD along with keeping the original tape in a safe place. Overkill? Maybe, but I am not taking any chances.

After hooking everything up, we found that our 8mm tapes were destroyed. We don’t know how it happened but everything was wiped out. But we did learn how to do the transfer after a long search on the interwebs turned up nothing helpful. We don’t have a VCR and I wanted to get everything onto the computer eventually so here is how we made due with what we had and hopefully it will be of use to someone out there.

This tutorial uses very specific equipment. I am not an expert in this area, but it may work for other cameras as well. The equipment used was the following:

Panasonic PV-GS120 Digital Video Camera with power cable

Canon ES8600 8mm Analog Video Camera with power cable

2 Mini AV > RCA Composite Cables

Dual RCA Fem=Fem Adapter

What we are going to do is hook the cameras up together so that what is played on the Canon will be recorded on the Panasonic. First you are going to make a slight adjustment to the DV cam settings. Go into your menu and select AV IN/OUT. The first choice on the list is AV JACK.

Go into that selection and you will have 3 choices which are IN/OUT, OUT/PHONES, and OUT. Make sure you choose the first option, IN/OUT. This will ensure that you are able to receive the video that the other camcorder will send you.

Now you will hook one of the composite cables into the AV IN/OUT jack on the Panasonic.

Then do the same with the other Canon and other composite cable.

Now, because I am going from an analog camera, I’m going to use the yellow and white RCA jacks on the cables with the fem=fem adapter. Simply take the camera on the left and plug it in to the left side of the adapter. Then do the same with the second camera on the right. They will meet at the adapter, just make sure you go straight across with the same color, ie yellow on top and white on bottom like shown in the picture.

Here is a picture of the total hookup.

Set both cameras to the play setting, including the receiving camera.

When you start playing the tape in the Canon analog camcorder, the picture will show up on the receiving Panasonic camcorder. Yes, you will also have sound. Now in order to record you will have to push two record buttons simultaneously on the control panel inside the viewer compartment. Don’t know why the regular record button doesn’t work. Don’t care. I just know that these two buttons successfully recorded. You will find the two gray magic buttons on the very inside to the left, right near the swivel mechanism for the viewer.

This method will allow you to record the content of the 8mm tapes in the Canon onto the miniDV tapes in the Panasonic. From there you can connect your camcorder to your computer and upload/edit to your hearts content. And backup. Be sure to always backup.