Recording 8mm film media to video?!
Question: I have a lot of 8mm movie film that I would like to transfer to video. What is a good procedure to do this? Can one use a video camera, and is so, what is a good approach?
Answers: I have a lot of 8mm movie film that I would like to transfer to video. What is a good procedure to do this? Can one use a video camera, and is so, what is a good approach?
You can use an 8mm projector with an adjustable speed control. If the unit has a 3 blade shutter and you can adjust it to run at 20 fps, you can synch with the TV. Even if you can't adjust the speed, normal 8mm projection speed is 18 fps, so this is only a 10% difference, and it isn't noticable to most viewers if there's no audio to deal with.
Project the image onto either a telecine transfer box (mirror and ground glass), or onto a white screen, and you capture the image with your digital camcorder, like with the Goko unit. You typically project the image to a size of maybe 4" or 5" square. With the high quality digital camcorders, if you use the ground glass approach, resolution can be high enough to show the ground glass texture, so some people prefer to forget the telecine transfer box and just project onto a clean white sheet. If you're using the telecine transfer box, your camera will be at an angle of approximately 90% to your projection. If you used the clean white sheet approach, your camera will be located very close to the axis of the projector lens.
Of course, if you don't want to fool with any of this, you can take your film to any decent camera store and they should be able to transfer it for you. Ritz Camera (or other stores like it) will do the job for about $25.00 per film.