8mm film to DVD

I've been asked about transferring old 8mm (film) home movies to DVD (old family wedding?)

Has anyone used a service that they would recommend or a horror story to steer clear of?

Thanks, Chebbie

Walgreens does 8 and 16mm to DVD.

I have hours of Canadian fishing trips my father and grandfather took.

I set up my projector and flip and recorded what was good. There would be 60 minutes of lakes and trees and 3 minutes of my grandfather. Nobody was interested in seeing the lakes along with the original quality so I made a 45 minute video of the fishing buddies. I also made a 45 minute family movie - cutting out hours of useless stuff.

I notice that in our era of "facebook" and "youtube" that the old 1957-1960 era movies my dad and grandfather made are more about the travels and scenery and less about the people. I even have 30 minutes of Chicago's Brookfield Zoo and 2 minutes of my mom and grandma.

I've got several reels of my dad's race footage (Mostly Stock Cars and Sprint cars from the late 60's) that I'm going to convert to digital someday.

The process isn't too terrible if you have a projector.
Do it yourself if you're crafty.

Wish I could remember the site I used for 35mm slides, they did film too. Dang.

My dad did this recently. Some of it has old Grand Prix footage from the '60s. I really want to put it on Youtube.

This is what I've learned:

http://www.just8mm.com/ - Has what may be the best rates

http://www.yesvideo.com/ - is used by Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, etc

and the local guy must fart gold dust and rainbows for the price they want ! I may try just8mm.com as they are the quickest and cheapest unless I get negative feedback prior. Stay tuned!

Cheb

Keep us updated. I have a bunch of Mini DV tapes I want to convert as well.

My wife is the Head Photo Specialist at a local Walgreens. Her store does not use yesvideo. She says they suck. Her store uses iMemories and they are 100% better.

I would also bet there are several local companies that also do this. It's not that difficult to do and many video production companies do this for extra income. The one I used to work for did this and we employed someone full time to do it. Not hard, and a big money maker.

Keven wrote: Keep us updated. I have a bunch of Mini DV tapes I want to convert as well.

MiniDV is not too bad to DIY if you have a firewire port on the computer. Easy to do on a mac (hw/ and s/w already included). for a windows box, you'll need buy the firewire card. Some folks like windows movie maker, but if you can spring for it, Sony Vegas is the low cost king. A dvd burner helps. :)

Regardless of s/w, it's the editing that can take a while. A straight transfer will be however long the footage is plus time of conversion to dvd format then burning.

In reply to heyduard:

Yes I have done this with my older Sony Digital 8 to a Vaio PCV RS530gG just using the "Click to DVD" Sony software.

Contact Sonalyst studios in waterford, ct; for service or info; it's a professional production house that can help you out.

I actually used to do this for a living. If I can make a plug, ThreeH.com in Lafayette, IN does it all. I can tell you how we do it. I guess technically I may still be employed they just haven't had any work for me since this spring, but my alarm code still works and I have a key. For the film, we put the reel onto the projector and project through a mirror box straight into a 1080p camcorder. Any type of magnetic storage media it's just a matter of having the right kind of adapters to hook up to a computer. For VCR's, any format you can think of, we had a converter box to turn signal from standard RCA jack to firewire signal. Cassette to CD is one of the easiest, headphone jack to mic jack. Vinyl record to CD is pretty easy nowadays what with usb turntables available on the market. Slides we did have a special type of scanner for, but that was just to make things faster. We also had a light box / slide holder taht we mostly just used for damaged slides that wouldn't run through the other scanner. For video capture we just used Windows Movie Maker. We then ran the raw AVI's through a different editing suite. Movie Maker you can edit with but it is cumbersome, fine for at home but a pain in the ass for doing say 206 4-inch reels of 8mm (that was a fun project.) Then just render the edited AVI to mpeg2 viola DVD.

Sorry for the rambling, but it's 6am and I am tired. Any specific questions ask away. ThreeH also does web hosting for those of you looking for a site host.

Griffin, could you tell me more about this mirror box? I have been planning this project for a while but haven't made any headway with it. I'm handy, but maybe not handy enough to rebuild a projector to have a digital output like I saw in another post, but I'm pretty sure I can build a box with mirrors in it.

I have two projectors, one has an adjustable speed, I was concerned about the frame rate of the projector and the frame rate of the camera causing jumpiness in the playback. I have an hd video camera and a whole bunch of film, and I want to do it myself. I've shot video and done editing with Adobe Pro, so I just need to get the raw footage off the film and onto the computer.

We used two different boxes depending on the projector. The box is the easy part though, but since you already have a variable speed projector taking care of the flicker should just take some fiddling around and experimentation.

For our 8mm projector setup, the projector was mounted to a base and also mounted to the base was a frame to hold a mirror at 45 to the path of the projector beam and a lens at 90 to the line of the projector. Then it was just a matter of getting the camera aligned with the lens to get the image properly lit and fully in frame.

For our 16mm and 35mm setup we had an old surplus school projector same institutional green casing and all. We setup the projector up on a table and in front of that we had a telecine box much like this. The box was basically a mirror set at a 45 degree angle again and a rear projection screen. Just off the table we'd setup the camera on a tripod and get it set so that we could zoom in onto just the image on screen. This setup is easier to manage, but the trade off is lower image quality, you lose a bit with the screen. The image is normally a bit grainier and color balance was trickier to get right. Though with Adobe Pro has some nice auto filtering capabilities for color correction. We pretty much only used Adobe for slides and stills. We found working with video was easier using Corel VideoStudio Pro X2. Then again we pretty much used a different software suite for each step in the process. Each one of them could have done the entire project it was just a matter or which was most user friendly for doing that task. Windows Movie Maker to capture, Corel to edit, another program I can't currently remember the name of to assemble the DVD menus and burn the master disc from, and Adobe or Photoshop to print the DVD covers, and another piece of software to actually print the discs themselves (disc labels suck).

Essentially I'm thinking a telecine box is most likely the easiest solution to make or acquire. As for capturing if your going to use Movie Maker I do remember that the XP version of Movie Maker was easier to make work. On Vista, well we never used Vista for any of our projects. We had Vista on two machines in the store one of them was only used for invoicing. Windows 7 is hit or miss you can do it but have to jump through more hoops. If you using a MacOS machine to do the capture then I have no experience to help, but it's probably gonna be less of a hassle to do, maybe.

Hope this helps. Any more question? Hit me up again or try e-mailing keith@threeh.com

Thanks Keith! That sounds very doable. I am definately going to make headway on this project in 2011!

Actually, Keith was/is my boss and the owner of ThreeH. He is more knowledgeable than I am with the specifics of the setups. I was more of a tech that used the system. He built it. I'm Joe. Keith may try having you send the work to him, but it should be a very light sale and he'll give advice regardless.

Thanks Joe, sorry for the mix-up on your name. I appreciate your advice and I can't wait to start this project.