@DMT3

Hi,

I have the Wolverine Movie Maker Pro. It records to 1080, 4:3, or 1440x1080 at 20fps. If you go for a Wolverine, get this one, not the less expensive one that records at 720 and can't take large reels.

I estimated that it would cost me more than 2000$ to digitize everything that I have, so cost was a factor. I have S8 (silent) footage from a relative that was done commercially, at 720 with the file at 29.97fps. I don't see anything better or even as good as what I would do myself with the Wolverine. However, other commercial services may be better. I don't know which service the relative used for digitizing.

Commercial digitizing services have varying rates, depending on their services. Some will just take the material, run it throught the digitizer and give you the files. Others will clean and repair first. Some, like Costco, want the material in good shape on 200ft reels. After that, and in any event, you're on your own for editing, denoising, dust removal, fixing colour, stabilization, etc. Neat Video is a must.

I suggest that you look at how much material you have to do and evaluate the cost.

With the Wolverine, I first ran many of the films (reels) through my Goko film editor just to make sure that there were no breaks or splice problems. If any, I made my own splices - 8mm or S8 with/without sound. I had reels of varying sizes as I had spliced many films a long time ago.

In some cases, I cleaned the film first using a commercial cleaner (PEC-12) and lint-free cloth (or the felt pads in the Goko), but I was afraid of material damage or loss of emulsion from using the cleaner. Turned out that there were no problems with what I used.

File management is important. I labelled the reels from 1 (or S1) onwards and kept a spreadsheet with a description of the contents for later use.

I suggest that you download and read the Wolverine manual, especially the FAQs and look at the linked material and watch the reference videos before making a decision.

Kodak film works the best in the Wolverine. Some other manufacturers had film that was slightly off-size and this could and did cause problems - see the Wolverine information on how to handle this.

In most cases, I could start the process and let it run unattended. It takes quite a while to scan image by image if you have a 200ft reel. However, I would check back often as there were occasional problems with splices.

For the most part, it went very well. I did have to redo some reels or parts of reels.

For S8 Sound, I did a second run with the S8 projector using a film-video transfer box and a video camera. I connected the audio out to audio in on my computer and recorded the sound, so I had a good sound file along with the sound on the camera-captured video file. I did this to be able to better align the digitized video with the audio. The camera-captured video/audio was not perfectly at 18 fps, so I had to make adjustments during editing to get the same duration.

Once done, I opened the file in the video editor. I use Magix Video Pro X so the process is somewhat different than with Vegas. In VPX, I used settings project settings of 29.97, 1920x1080, instead of 1440x1080. Your choice. I found that I often had to zoom in a bit to remove bad parts from the top or bottom of the image as sometimes the gate was slightly off in the Wolverine (my fault usually).

In VPX, under the Speed effect, it shows the video as 20fps. I simply changed it to 16 for 8mm film, or 18 for S8 film, interpolation set for on. The video is thus adjusted for 29.97.

For S8 sound, I imported the captured video and the audio file, aligned them using the audio alignment feature in VPX (it works properly and quickly), grouped them, aligned the captured video with the start of the digitized video and then made adjustments for differences in speed. Again, file management is important to know which filename corresponded to which reel. As I mentioned, running through the projector does not always give a perfect 18fps speed. Once aligned, I ungrouped the audio and grouped the good audio with the digitized video and removed the captured video. Edited.

John CB

@john-brown Thank you for your very detailed reply, I appreciate the time you took to respond. A lot of good information and will definitely help in our decision. I am not sure of the exact amount of footage that he has, but it sounds like it might be enough to make it worthwhile buying a unit rather than send it off. I don't think there is any sound involved. Again, I thank you and will let you know how it works out.

@DMT3

Hi,

I forgot to mention that I'm retired, so on my own time. I'm not sure that I would want to spend a lot of time doing this for someone else. So, that is a consideration.

John CB