8mm conversion

skibumm101 wrote on 6/15/2004, 1:54 PM
I have a friend who i would like to do a project for. He needs his 8mm film converted to digital. I am not looking to purchase any equipment to do the conversion, since this is the first one of these i have done, and i am not planning on doing another. My question is, has anybody filmed the projected film with there miniDV camera and had good results?

Comments

HeeHee wrote on 6/15/2004, 2:00 PM
I have never done it, but if you search this site you could find a couple good threads on the topic.

I heard of some guys shooting the film on white card stock fairly close so the resolution is good. Then they setup the camera on a tripod next to the projector. This is fine if the 8mm has no audio because you can just remove the audio track from the film or you can leave it in and get a nostolgic projector sound effect.

You will get black frames from time to time that will appear as flicker. I'm not sure how they edited that out. I'm sure someone here will chime in on the specifics.
sacherjj wrote on 6/15/2004, 2:30 PM
I've never had good results doing this by just running the 8mm and filming. I had enough to do that I purchased a Workprinter, which captures a single DV frame for each frame of 8mm. I then encode this as a 24 fps DVD (or 60i DVD is the original was shot at 18 fps). The results are outstanding. This is one of the professional video services I offer.
HeeHee wrote on 6/15/2004, 3:21 PM
Don't you need Adope Premiere in conjunction with the Workprinter or does V5 have the technology now.
johnmeyer wrote on 6/15/2004, 4:35 PM
Doing it yourself will probably not look good. For a one-time project, I would recommend sending it out, as already recommended. If you are determined to do it yourself, check out these brief recommendations on how to do it:

Transferring 8mm film to another format
cbrillow wrote on 6/16/2004, 7:00 AM
Adobe Premiere not needed...

There are a couple of inexpensive programs that work with the Workprinter. (One's called DODCAP -- don't reall the other one I've evaluated) They will write to an AVI file, with pulldown, if you need it. Or you can adjust the playback speed in your NLE software.