If you have a box of old camcorder tapes, a folder of .MTS files that won't open, or an SD card from a decade-old camcorder that nothing will read — this blog is for you.
The plan here is simple: we write the guide we wish existed when we sat down to rescue our family's old footage. Plain language, real instructions, no "transport stream demuxer" jargon unless we have to. If a step requires hardware you don't own, we'll tell you what to buy or where to rent it. If a service does it cheaper than DIY, we'll say so.
What you can expect
- Format explainers. What is AVCHD, actually? Why does your
.MTSfile open in Premiere but not iMovie? The kind of answers that come from working with this stuff, not from a Wikipedia summary. - Recovery workflows. Step-by-step for the common starting points: a box of Mini-DV tapes, an old AVCHD SD card, a stack of Hi8 tapes, a hard drive of MTS files from a dead camcorder.
- Honest hardware reviews. What to buy if you actually need a FireWire capture rig or an analog video converter — and what to skip.
- What to do with the footage once you've rescued it. Cloud backup options, DVD-to-archive workflows, family-share pages.
Where to start
If you already know what format you have, jump straight to the matching guide:
- Convert MTS to MP4
- Convert AVCHD to MP4
- Convert M2TS to MP4
- Get Mini-DV tapes into MP4
- Rescue Hi8 / Video8 tapes into MP4
If you don't know what you have yet — that's fine. The next few posts will cover exactly that.