Transfer Your Old Home Movies to DVDWhen is the last time you got out your old home movies and watched them? No, not the ones you shot with your camcorder last week. I mean the ones you shot with your Super8 windup film camera 30 years ago. You remember: that film that is in the shoe box in the back of the closet. Here are four ways you can transfer (and preserve) those old classics to the modern convenience of DVD. | |
#1. Shoot the Screen You still have your projector, somewhere in the basement, but the bulb is probably toast. Surprisingly, your local photo shop often still has the right bulbs in stock for popular models. And your screen is still looking good, although it is awfully tight to unroll. Check out a few feet of your film. It's probably brittle and will only play a few more times, so you better make this good. Line up your camcorder as straight as you can, center the frame and hit record. Advantages: Cheap, uses equipment you own. Disadvantages: Skewed screen, can be dark, nasty flicker. |
|
#2. Rear Projection - DIY A couple of companies sell a product that will display your movie onto a screen positioned directly in front of your camcorder. A mirror reverses the image so it displays correctly and the smaller screen will show the output from your projector more brightly than method #1. Unfortunately, no matter how you play with the shutter speed of your camcorder, your movie will probably flicker a bit. While some people may find this to be acceptable or even quaint, it isn't the best transfer. Advantages: Flat image plane, brighter than #1, only roughly $50 for projection device. Disadvantages: Flicker. |
|
#3. Rear Projection - Professional There are quite a few companies that offer to transfer your film to video or to DVD for a fairly low fee. I have only one caution on this: make sure the company isn't just doing #2 and charging you for it. This seems to be the most common transfer method I've seen on the Web. Since the folks who do this know what they are doing, they can probably execute #2 as well as possible, but the technique itself is less than ideal. Advantage: Convenient. Disadvantage: Flicker. |
|
#4. Frame-By-Frame Scan There is one final method, and this is how I'd do it. Instead of simply filming the screen as in #3, there are a few companies that have a special projector that advances the film one frame at a time and snaps a digital picture. It isn't a terribly high-res scan, but it is certainly high enough for DVD. The resulting digital frames are then processed by a computer and converted to a standard digital video format. A proper telecine is performed and the video is encoded and burned to a DVD. Basically, all you get is a straight transfer to DVD with a chapter point every five minutes. YesVideo (or YesDVD in this case) offers a very interesting service of this type. Advantage: quality transfer, reasonable price Disadvantage: not editable or customizable If you want to edit, I'd highly recommend a slightly different solution. A few companies, mostly smaller ones as far as I can tell, will perform custom work to transfer your film to a format other than MPEG-2 DVD. I have been very intrigued by DigiNovations services, although I have not tried them. There are probably other companies offering similar services. The reasonable price (e.g. $15 an hour to Mini DV tape) and the necessity to carefully archive and restore your irreplaceable film make this a very attractive option.
|
|
|
|
References:Here are some places to start, although I have not researched and am not endorsing any of these companies. |
|
