I've been searching this board for a bit, because I thought this was asked before, but I can't find it (and once again my Google skills seem to be lacking).

Does anyone know of services that will take old home movies (I have a boatload of Hi8 tapes) and digitize them? I recently tried doing this myself, and I'm just not up to the task of capturing so many hours of video. It's tedious. Now I just want to give them to a service, and a while later get them back along with a set of DVDs or a hard drive. I guess It'll cost a good amount, but it might be worth it.

I did a search for:

home movie to dvd service

and the first link came up as www.crispcd.com . Another search I did was:

home movie dvd convert

and the first link is www.homemoviedepot.com . Not sure if either of those will work for you, but its a start.

Thanks! Following your train of thought, I did "home movie to hard drive" and came up with the second of your links (I guess I didn't see their hard drive services before).

It's expensive, so I'll have to think it over, but it might be worth it to avoid the hassle.

I've seen signs on hole-in-the wall business here in Seattle that will do precisely that for you. Don't remember their names though. If you're in any major city, I'd expect these guys would be in the phone book. They're just guys who own a telecine system and turned it into a quick little business.

I was faced with the same dilemma: 23 years of home video in 4 different formats! In the end, I just borrowed machines for the formats I no longer have and just put all the tapes on to a hard disk using Plextor, backed it up, unedited on to DVD's, before returning the machines.
I then treated editing as an, as and when I feel like it, project. But it's been great fun for the whole house, breaking it down in to usable bites: coming across forgotten and faintly remembered events.
Your professional transfer service can't do that editing and transferring is the easy bit, you just set the tapes running and go away, whilst they read on to your hard disk.
N.B. Don't forgrt to edit out the bits with your first three wives/girlfriends before letting the family look over your shoulder!

The only problem for me is that I can't just let it run and walk away.

I bought a video camera for the sole purpose of backing up these tapes. You know how when you're out and recording, you'll just append to tapes you've already recorded on? Well this video camera/capture program has the annoying habit of stopping when it senses that the playback has stopped. It won't let me just record the full tape, which is what I want. I can edit the blank video out later! So I have to monitor the whole thing. I like looking at home movies, but not that much.

I don't know, maybe I'll give it another go, but it's pretty tedious.