I have a reel of 8 mm film that is very brittle and can’t be run through a film projector. Is there a way I can enlarge and capture selected stills from the reel?
Thank you in advance
I had Costco transfer some old 8mm films on to DVD a few years ago. They did a good job.
Single images from 8mm are typically blurry. The image depends on your brain processing the image as the movie plays to get an acceptable result. Bottom line is, if it won’t play you just can’t recover much worth keeping. If it’s brittle and falling apart, it’s probably too far gone. If the sprocket holes are just tearing apart, there are friction drive systems that can still play the movie. 8mm runs at about 15 frames per second so if you can salvage 15 frames of an image you can get a 1 second image that might look OK, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Blue Moon Camera in Oregon specializes in film and print services, and I’ve had some stuff done there. I’d highly recommend contacting them to see what they can do. Talk to Zeb Andrews:
Locally, you can check out Lone Star Dark Room. I have not worked with them before.
Thank you for the input. I have no hope that any moving images will come from this reel because it too far gone. I was only hoping to get selected stills. I was wondering whether there was a way to enlarge and capture the stills on a digital format.
I rather suspect that digital will be what you get nowadays. I know the company that advertises on KRLD (forgot their name) sends you a digital version of whatever they’ve done.