Entertainment Center: TVs, Stereos, VCRs and DVDs - Video editing: How to capture date from camcorder?

I have over 100 Digital8 tapes and am looking for the best way to get them on a better format since Dig8 is basically dead. My Sony camcorder just died [again] and on ebay it's now selling for 2x what I paid for it. Spending $450 for a playback-only machine is getting real old.

Full DV resolution would be desireable but I'd settle for DVD quality. I use Premiere Pro 1.5/2.0 for my capturing but am open to anything at this point.

The problem is I cannot lose the date/time stored by the camcorder. How do you usually handle this?

Ideally I'd like to capture the Dig8 tape and then save it right back out to a DV tape _with_ the timestamp info. I don't believe PPro can do this, or can it?

If I go the DVD route, I still need that timestamp somewhere. I'm thinking maybe an additional subtitle stream for this info. Is there another option?

Since the clips are relatively short, entering this info manually at the start of each clip would be a complete nightmare, but that might just be what I need to do. Actually I can't even get P.Pro to display this info for me so I have to look at the camcorder viewfinder during capture and write it down. Even a manual copy/paste would be infinitely better than that. Am I missing some setting in P.Pro? Is there a better capture applciation out there?

Thanks!
-core

Can't you just copy directly from the Dig8 player to the DV recorder? It'll save hours of capturing & outputting. If the time code doesn't transfer you may be stuck with an on-screen display.

If you capture and output to DVDs, you'll have to author the DVDs so you can navigate. Name the chapters with date & time.