8mm Film Transfer?

Eric^2 asks: "My family has over 50 spools of 8mm (real non-magnetic no-audio developed) reel-to-reel film that I would like to get converted over to a digital format before it deteriorates any more. The majority of the solutions I've seen involve an expensive (frame-rate-adjustable) projector and a miniDV camcorder. Even the services I've looked into (while quite expensive) use this scheme. The film speeds are not 30 fps (i.e. NTSC), so there are some synchronization issues that must be overcome."

"The more expensive equipment does some of this, but it's not perfect. I would rather get the best quality out of the transfer, so I looked into a film scanner. Firstly, all the film scanners sold today are primarily designed for 35mm, with attachments to do other film sizes, but none of them seem to be designed to handle movie film - they're all single frame scanners. Scanning a frame at a time with a high-quality scanner seems like the best way to retain as much detail as possible, but I'm not going to sit in front of a computer for days manually advancing each frame of film. Has anyone had success transferring reel-to-reel 8mm film to a digital format and if so, how was it accomplished? Do I need to build my own capture device that moves the frames through a scanner, or should I just do the common projector-camcorder method?"

Comments

Rank Cintel Transfer

[cwhittenburg]

I suffered through this same process, trying to figure out the best way to get a good digital transfer. After much research, I went with a company in California, used to the be called The Transfer Station and is now Film and Video Transfers, Inc..

You can get a Super 8 transfer on a Rank Cintel machine done there (with color correction) for $150 per hour. (half hour increments). This is really a professional transfer. Places like pro8 charge $250 per hour. F&V will also clean your films and splice them together so that you don't have to deal with all those 50 ft reels anymore.

They did 24 reels for me, a mix of super 8 and regular 8 for $260. This included the two Mini DV tapes, and FedEx shipping back to me. I compared the results with an older VHS transfer I had done, and it was like day and night. Great stuff.

I did a digital duplication of the Mini DV tapes, and I'm putting the original film and a minidv copy in the safe deposit box, while I work on editing the Mini DV footage on the PC and then have it transfered to DVD. Maybe at lifeclips.com?

Do a search on Deja News for The Transfer Station... They've gotten lots of good mentions. I don't work for them, just happy with their work.