So having unearthed yet more boxes of old tapes in storage I realised that I had more 8mm tapes than I thought. Most of them date back to the late eighties and early nineties, before I switched to using MiniDV and there is a lot of footage to capture if I’m going to archive them all.
So I’ve set up a capture station using a second Sony VRD, this one is an MC6 which is a slightly more compact unit that is small enough to sit on a shelf under my studio desk.
Initially I was planning to use one of my smaller Hi8 camcorders as a playback deck but then I found this Sony EV-C500e Hi8 video recorder going cheap on eBay.
The EV-C500e was a revised version of the EV-C100 first released in 1993 and externally it is almost identical to the earlier units.
The EV-C500e is a compact bookshelf style with front control panel including jog shuttle and rear connections for video and s-video in/out plus a lanc control point for use with editing controllers.
The supplied remote is a small RMT-V124c model which is similar to several other Sony handsets and is likely to be interchangeable with other models.
The model I bought seems to be in good condition with very little head wear and is fully working. I cleaned the heads before putting it into operation and so far I’ve had no trouble apart from one of my oldest tapes which had some pre-existing damage that caused it to jam while forwarding and unspool, I had to open up the recorder to remove the tape.
I’ve connected the C500 and MC6 using RCA cables as the MC6 doesn’t have an S-Video connection. Most of these 8mm tapes are being transferred to DVDR for archiving, but I can connect the C500 to my Blackmagic Intensity for S-Video capture on PC if needed.
Overall I’m very pleased with this new addition to my editing station. I love the dark grey colour scheme and the EV-C500e is built with the usual Sony quality so hopefully it will have a few more years of service left in it. Not bad for a machine that’s almost 30 years old.
