Media conversion

Digital Media
#1

This Christmas I got to thinking about all of the many movies my family has taken over the years at Christmas time. Many of them are 8mm and some are on DV tape. I began to think about the longevity of these medium and that I should consider converting them to another more durable digital format. (This is another discussion I know but I’m considering a 4TB drive I have hanging around for this purpose)

Doing a little research I discovered that there are really four ways that this can be done.

  1. Project the films onto a screen and record them digitally from directly behind the projector. This has some major disadvantages though, not the least of which is the quality of the projection. It has the advantage though that you could watch all of the old movies in the process.

  2. Purchase a piece of equipment to play the film and record it digitally. This eliminates the actual projection but the quality of the recording is based upon the quality of the equipment.

I saw this one at Best Buy and at Amazon, but the reviews are mixed. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KA32HH0/_encoding=UTF8?coliid=I3HAJXM51Q4DFI&colid=12RIKKVV3OA5M&psc=0

Converter
Converter.jpg1500×859 141 KB

Professional equipment runs about $2,500 to $25,000. This is too cost prohibitive to consider for me.

I’m sure there are lots of others, but this is the most affordable I’ve found.

  1. Contract out the work to a professional company that converts old film to digital (DVD or BluRay). This ranges from $25 a reel to $1 a foot to have it done. Since I have a lot of 8mm film this would most likely be cost prohibitive, too. The advantage is you would probably get a much higher quality recording.

  2. Rent professional equipment. You can do this for $100 a day with a $500 minimum rental. This seems a possibility, but I’d have to probably be entirely focused on the task of conversion for the time the equipment is rented.

I thought 1) I’d ask the opinions of my fellow makers about your suggest solutions and 2) ask if DMS has any equipment that would facilitate the conversion. I’d love to do this sometime in 2018 so as to preserve the many memories captured on old home movies.

Regarding the DV tape I can extract these onto a hard drive (MPEG4) easily enough by connecting the camera to one of my older laptops via firewire, but this a lot of wear and tear on my aging camera.

I’ve investigated DV players like this one. http://midtownvideo.com/rental/recorders-storage/sony-hvr-m15u/Sony-HVR-M15U-1
They seem to be out of stock at the popular places like Amazon, but I’ve not really found another player/tape deck that makes sense.

I’d be interested in any suggestions or comments on a plan of action.

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#2

There is a project somewhere - Instructables or Make Magazine maybe - that I’ve come across where they take an 8mm projector and mount a digital SLR to it so as to film the actual film. I think they used a macro lens so essentially shooting each frame full size - results were high quality. It was a fairly complicated build.

#3

We had…

…perform our conversion (8 mm to digital).

I HIGHLY recommend them. I believe they used the “Wetgate system” on our film. In any case, the digital form / after conversion is much better quality.

For A/V equipment rentals we have used…
https://www.lensrentals.com/

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#4

There’s a very makery way of doing this: http://www.instructables.com/id/35mm-Slide-Converter-with-Cellphone/ will give one the basis and a little modification be scaled to 8mm or other film sizes.

As for the audio track, if there is one, and software side, I’d lookup https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/sample_workflow_for_tape_digitization.html for audio and adobe AfterFX for post processing.

#5

I put my old DV tapes in a home DV player and ran the RCA outs into a capture card I used to own. Required some babysitting, but simple enough. USB capture cards are cheap these days

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