8 mm tapes converted to DVD and digital

[Alucard999]

I am trying to get my mothers family 8mm tapes converted to digital and DVD they go back to the 1950's with no sound but my mom will never get rid of them and they have talked about converting them.  so I am looking for help on how to do that.  The picture is not all of them I just can't find them they are in the middle of moving so I would take one thing off there list.

[dalekphalm]

Doing this yourself at home is going to be... difficult. You could possibly find some sort of attachment to a dSLR to record the film strip. 

 

Or you could essentially CAM it. Play the film via its projector. Record the projection with a digital camera. 

 

Ideally, you’re gonna need to send these into a professional that has the right equipment to do it in high quality. 

 

In theory you could also scan each frame one by one on a scanner and “reconstruct” the footage with software. I’m not aware of any specific program that does this, but I’d be shocked if none existed. 

[Donut417]

3 hours ago, Alucard999 said:

I am trying to get my mothers family 8mm tapes converted to digital and DVD they go back to the 1950's with no sound but my mom will never get rid of them and they have talked about converting them.  so I am looking for help on how to do that.  The picture is not all of them I just can't find them they are in the middle of moving so I would take one thing off there list.

http://www.yesvideo.com/ 

 

This is the company Sam's Club Photo department sends out customer film to. I used to work there a while back. But I think they might be up your alley. 

[Kisai]

9 hours ago, Alucard999 said:

I am trying to get my mothers family 8mm tapes converted to digital and DVD they go back to the 1950's with no sound but my mom will never get rid of them and they have talked about converting them.  so I am looking for help on how to do that.  The picture is not all of them I just can't find them they are in the middle of moving so I would take one thing off there list.

You said tapes, but those look like celluloid reels. 8mm tapes are a completely different thing which is magnetic tape. There are technically two ways of doing this, but it will be miserable.

 

1) Setup of a projector in a dark room (a basement preferably), get a proper projector screen, and run the movie at the right speed and just capture it with a camcorder or DSLR

 

or

 

2) Scan each frame individually. This gives you the best quality, but unless you're hellbent on remastering the video, I'd suggest not doing this.

 

If you do not have a projector, and can't borrow one (check out a local high school for one) then option 1 might be impossible. Option 2, would take a very, very, very long time.

 

An automated process likely scans the film negative one frame at a time, you'd end up with a series of images that you'd then have to re-time too.

 

[Thanatopsis]

If you are in the United states then one of these are what you want,  I work for a company that used to do this back when VHS and DVD's were the delivery method,  You can definitely setup an 8mm projector and scan that way but that can induce its own set of problems.  

[Kisai]

On 6/3/2019 at 9:32 AM, Thanatopsis said:

If you are in the United states then one of these are what you want,  I work for a company that used to do this back when VHS and DVD's were the delivery method,  You can definitely setup an 8mm projector and scan that way but that can induce its own set of problems.  

Looks like those are basically a camcorder mounted with a fixed focus to run through the film. Probably not the worst option. I noted that all of them say 720p, which means it's probably super-cheaply done. They don't transfer sound, but it's not that likely they contain sound unless they were commercially produced. The frame rate might be an issue if doesn't align with the 30fps capture.

 

At any rate, film can be resolved at like 8000lpi, not that these films are worth doing that.

 

https://www.pro8mm.com/blogs/blog/pro8mm-purchase-new-software-which-renders-a-better-viewing-experience-for-8mm-super8mm-and-16mm-archival-footage-originally-shot-at-18-frames-per-second

 

That site claims they can do 4K HDR scans of 8mm films. That might be stretching it if they're home movies. Even when I scanned negatives on my flatbed scanner, the best I could get out of 110 film (16mm) wasn't 4K worthy. 

 

So it really depends if the person with the film is trying to preserve the contents, or just make a quick transfer. I didn't really care for the transfer quality of the slides that these tiny film-to-sdcard devices did.

[Thanatopsis]

On 6/6/2019 at 2:18 AM, Kisai said:

Looks like those are basically a camcorder mounted with a fixed focus to run through the film. Probably not the worst option. I noted that all of them say 720p, which means it's probably super-cheaply done. They don't transfer sound, but it's not that likely they contain sound unless they were commercially produced. The frame rate might be an issue if doesn't align with the 30fps capture.

8mm film was never run at 30fps in home movie cameras and is already considered and there are pull down options if the devices record at 30fp  but there is a 24fps 720P frame rate that is common.  

Home 8mm equates to ruffly SD in resolution Quality when talking about the common Film types run through home Cameras of the era.  While yes you could run 8mm through a Cinetel or something similar and get higher quality scans its limited by the quality of the emulsion and Glass of the original cameras.  High speed Film has more grain and less detail due to the larger size of the emulsion grains along with this even a Cinetel is still at the end of the day just running light through the film onto an imager its just a higher end imager that they use.  

That being said It may be cheeper to send the film off to be commercially scanned on a higher quality system than buying your own but that is a question of how many 8mm reels you need to have scanned and the quality you are expecting out of it.

 

Quote

At any rate, film can be resolved at like 8000lpi, not that these films are worth doing that.

That is from Panavision or ArriFlex talking about 35mm film which is definitly true for those formats its also true that by the time that a 35mm film made it to final projection the effective quality in a european movie theater on average was just 800 vertical lines of effective resolution.  These LPI/VL equivalent numbers ware irrelevant/unimportant for anyone other than the camera manufacturers and film manufacturers as the end resolution is not important in regard to visual enjoyment with how analog/traditional movie projection worked you simply got to enjoy the movie how the theater projected it and that was it.  In a modern context its important only in understanding how much you will be able to blow up a film if you are using the best quality lenses on a properly setup modern camera.