Steve, my wife has 70 super 8 tapes she wants to digitize. Is it worth having the company 'improve' the film, or should I do that? Also, where did you send your old film?
I'm going to buy some cartridges and try out her old camera!
Ed I had some old super 8 movies my grandfather took when we were kids. I was able to borrow a projector and played it on a screen as I recorded it on a camcorder and it turned out pretty well. The key component was that it was free.
Sidd
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." ..... Ferris Bueller
She has a projector, but I don't know if it works. She wants to make it available to the kids in a modern format. I figured I'd make an edited movie for her from the digital files. I'm defiantly going to to buy some film for that camera though.
Professional digitizing of old movies isn't cheap but the results are excellent.
I've tried doing it myself with my old movies and it's a lot of work getting it right. Making sure your camcorder is manually focused so that it doesn't shift focus. Making sure your camcorder is recording at a frame rate that the picture doesn't waver. It's not impossible. Lots of people have done it with no problems. But I've never found it fun. And I'm never fully happy with the results.
But as Sidd suggests, it's worth a try. All you need to do is project your movie onto a sheet of smooth, white cardboard and lock your camera down, aimed toward it. Or you can do it by aiming at a movie screen. It won't take you long to figure out if it's going to go smoothly or if is it's worth sending the box of movies off to Memory Box.
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I did have to mess around with the frame rate on the camcorder so that is would synch. I also made sure the room was really dark and it too awhile to get the camcorder squared to the movie screen so the picture was not distorted. But for me at least it was worth the effort. Once set up I just sat there and played the movies while recording.
Sidd
"Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." ..... Ferris Bueller
So my wife really wants to have these digitized, and I can afford it. She has a lot of links to companies that do this, they all seem to be about 39 cents per foot. Legacy Box is has a 45% off thing going, but I don't if they are like a mattress store and it's always this sale price. Plus that's for standard def.
Has anyone used this service and have suggestions?
So we found a local place (about 5 miles from the house) that does this in house and has great reviews, and a recommendation from someone at work. I took two tapes yesterday as a trial, outdoor and indoor video. If it works out I told my wife we can collaborate on a nicely edited video with some text and maybe voiceovers.
So I took two of the oldest tapes a few weeks ago and got them back yesterday. These didn't have sound, but a majority of the remaining tapes do. My wife is very happy with what we got back, so I'm taking the other 68 reels this afternoon to have digitized.
I made an edit of the first tape of my wife and her beloved dog Pippin so you could see the quality. I didn't make any corrections to the video.
So the shop is going to do the rest of the reels for 18 cents a foot, which is amazing. I asked each real to be a separate file, so that's going to cost me an additional $70. Couldn't be happier.