8 thoughts on “super 8 to mini DV conversion”

  1. Hey, Grant!

    I’ve done this for my parents and for a few people that I work with. OUCH! I’s a heck of a project. It really depends on how much of it there is!

  2. I believe National Camera offers this as a service. No telling what their price happens to be, but they should be equipped to do several in bulk and perhaps do a better job besides.

  3. Yeah, I agree–on small batch type stuff, it can be quick to do it yourself if you have the setup. I transfered roughly 30 hours of reels over, and the setup filled my apartment living room for close to a week and a half. Lighting, framerate/film speed strobing, focus, and hardware issues regarding bulbs from these old Super8 projectors all get in the way, none the less the issues of old film breaking an resplicing the stuff. The film can degrade pretty easily, and doing it yourself can allow you to get a precompressed/clean source with settings that work best for you, but the trade off is that you don’t have to do it!

    I think if you would rather go non corporate, I believe that there would be tons of little shops around that can do this stuff as well, but I don’t know of any off hand.

  4. Regardless of how you do it, I think it’s great that you are thinking about doing it. My Mom had a ton of 8mm movies of me and my brother growing up. She waited too long to transfer them onto another media and they eventually deteriorated so badly that they became unusable. I should have taken care of it when I had a chance to.

  5. Ooops. Didn’t mean it that way.

    Was really just a general observation that unless you do stuff like that on a regular basis, the pros have the advantage of tons of gear on hand and lots of practice.

    I’ve a small amount of audio transfer and restoration. It sucked. Big time. I was helping a friend convert some ancient 45 RPM records, and even a couple old cylindars, into digital media so he could preserve some old family recordings. Getting the gear together was a monumental task, but that was nothing compared with the cleanup/restoration work afterward. On many pieces, the source material had deteriorated to a point where it was more noise than signal. We spent 2-3 hours sampling each item and at least a couple evenings each trying to improve the audio quality.

    Hindsight being 20/20: never again. It would be well worth it to send that job out to the pros.

    Then again, there are better tools than when we did this back in the late-90’s.

  6. Hahaha! I knew what you meant! I just wish there was a better way to future proof this stuff. Let’s come up with something so we can all retire!

  7. The beauty of analog signals was typically, that they could be read with primitive means – no fancy hardware and better yet, no ever-changing software required. Transfer that to digital and you’ll have something to retire of. This particular subject was part of my thesis work – what an interesting subject. Maybe we’ll discuss this at one of our get-togethers in more depth. What gets in the way here are industry standards vs. proprietary corporate interests. Let’s see how long it takes for Joe Blow to adopt .odt over .doc ;)

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