I was dubbing some shows from Hi8 to DV. The material would play fine from the DV cam corder but when I pulled the DV in through firewire the audio would clip or just drop out. Both capturing from the Mac and PC vielded the same results.

The audio did not seem particularly hot – in ways the audio was low – but it still clipped.

The problem was that my original source was a Stereo source (Hi8) which had all of the audio on the left track and effectively silence on the right track – except for a touch of noise from time to time.

The solution was to only connect one of the plugs on the Hi8 camcorder – (White was the mono-only plug) and the DV camera was much better after that. I connected the white plug to the white/mono output plug on the Hi8 camcorder and left the red plug dangling.

So, if you are dubbing some older source up to DV, do it as mono unless you are absolutely sure that it is really stereo because the secont silent track can confuse the DV recording badly.

I am only putting this up in hopes that some person who has this problem can save the 10 hours of frustration figuring this out. Happy Googling…