Super 8 mm film to Digital

[oneupper]

I "inherited" a collection of Super 8 mm home movies when my father passed. Mostly stuff from my and my siblings' youth.
Was going to send it to get digitized, but the cost is astronomical.

So I was planning on buying one of the machines and doing it myself. Anyone have experience with this? Tips?

[dougdirt]

It's been a very long time since I've done it. And I don't even know how we were supposed to be doing it, but here's what we were doing (and this was, at the time, for production - granted we were doing action sports productions for TV/DVD's): We had a projector in a dark room, a good screen, and a mini-dv camcorder set up to simply record the screen as it played. Then we'd just capture the video from the mini-dv tapes via firewire to edit the footage in digitally.

I honestly have no idea if the process would be any different today, other than the camera would be different today. While, of course you could scan every single frame and create a video file from that, unless you plan on making a million bucks off of what you've got, that just doesn't seem worth the time.

But, maybe what you're talking about is entirely different than what us idiots were doing in 2002-2003.

[BernieCarbo]

I would just buy one of those machines, do the conversions, and then put it on ebay. How many feet of film are we actually talking about?

[dougdirt]

So I actually looked up one of those machines - the Wolverine. It seemed like it worked well enough - but just know that the big gripe against it is that you can't just use it directly. You'll need to edit the video once you've got it. Those camera's shot at lower frame rates, but that machine spits out your video at a higher frame rate for modern time - so everything is going to look like it's sped up quite a bit if you don't edit the video to create a new file.

For someone like me, that wouldn't take much time. I've got the software. I've got a computer built to do that very quickly. For someone who may not have those things, it could be a real pain in the butt. Just something to think about.

[oneupper]

I would just buy one of those machines, do the conversions, and then put it on ebay. How many feet of film are we actually talking about?

I've got about 20,000 ft. People are charging 20 to 25c/ft, so getting a machine like the Wolverine, would probably make more financial sense than sending it away.

Yeah, and then sell it on eBay. I did that with a Betamax to convert my wedding video (yeah. I'm old).