16mm film to DVD

haze2 wrote on 7/30/2003, 9:31 PM

I have a lot of 16mm family film, from the 1940's and 1950's, that I would like to get onto DVD. I have an ancient 16mm projector, Vegas4 + DVD, Sony DRU-500A, and a Canon ZR25 Digital Camcorder. Any suggestions on the best way to get from film to DVD?

Frank

Comments

TomG wrote on 7/30/2003, 10:39 PM

I just converted 4000ft of 16mm family film (from the 30s to the 80s) and it turned out great. At first I tried to convert the 16mm myself and that was very frustrating and the quality was poor. I found a good lab and had it digitized professionally. Now this is not cheap!!! The cost was $0.11/foot to convert, $0.03/ft to clean (I highly recommend), and $49 for the DVD. But the film was in good shape and the transfer was excellent.

I then transferred the DVD from the lab to V4, edited (removed splices, burn marks, bad scenes), sequenced, combined, titled, and added sound and authored on DVDA. It looks fantastic. It is great to watch "home movies" on the big screen TV. It's amazing the things you "didn't see" the first time around, especially since setting up to watch 16mm is reallyl a pain and we didn't do it very often.

Good luck,

TomG

johnmeyer wrote on 7/30/2003, 11:16 PM

If you want the ultimate in professional results and want to do it yourself, nothing beats the Workprinter. Not cheap, but you can sell it on eBay when you're finished and get most of your money back. See:

http://www.moviestuff.tv/index.html

haze2 wrote on 7/31/2003, 12:04 AM

TomG, what lab did you use?

Frank

TomG wrote on 7/31/2003, 7:28 AM

It's a local lab in Cincinnati: Advanced Video Data Services http://www.advancedvideodataservices.com/

There is another lab in Connecticut (I think) called Home Movie Transfers that has been mentioned before in this forum.
http://members.aol.com/filmtotape/index.htm

I felt more comfortable in dealing with people I could talk to rather than shipping my films out of town.

TomG