For photos you definitely need a scanner, but for films and slides here's another solution that works well: for slides put a carousel slide projector and a digital home video camera side by side in a blacked out room aimed at a good quality screen but not on the same table or mount due to the clunking of those old machines that could blur the camera's picture. For films use a film projector the same way. Mute the camera's rec audio. Turn on the projector to let the camera's systems adjust to the light level. Start recording, but for the slide projector set the carousel on automatic with about a 2 second* delay per frame. When the slides come around full circle just pause the camcorder (and of course back up to remove duplicates if you have to), then put in the next round, and so on.

Just make sure nobody barges in and ruins everything! :)

When you are done you have lots of options on what to do with that video: dump it to VHS, burn it to DVD, convert it to MPEG, etc. etc.

* if you intend to dump the video to VHS I would set the delay to about 10 seconds so that people can try to get a good pause-frozen image. On DVD or MPEG the 2 second delay should be perfect so that the viewer can just hit pause to dwell on an image.

I've tried this with film and it works great. I found that by projecting the images really small (12" X 12") and then zooming in with the video camera I got a much brighter, clearer picture than projecting at a large size. Not really sure why but it was a pretty big difference.

Woa! You're not seriously suggesting this for replacing slides? That would be one precipitous drop is resolution. Most slide have an effective resolution of 12 MP or more, a VHS, or even DVD would be 720x480 at best (0.33 MP). Thats a 36 times loss resolution!! It would be a solution for easy slide shows, but I would NOT throw away the original slides. If you ever want prints from the slides you'll be out of luck.

Even typical consumer scanners with slide adaptors will give you only about 5 MP at best. In order to avoid a dramatic loss in resolution you'd need a GOOD 4800 dpi film scanner. There's simply no substitute for the resolution of film (especuially slides) at the moment.

Hey all,
My mother has boxes of old film reels from the 60s and 70s which she would love to view. I mentioned that it could be transfered to DVD most likely.
That said, I am not sure how you would go about this.....so, I have to ask, who would do this...big chains? small retailers? Bob down the street?
:o
Thanks for any input.
Take Care

This might help.

http://digitalhomecanada.com/forum/showthread.php?t=32973

And this.

http://www.digitalhomecanada.com/forum/showthread.php?t=32929

Thanks guys.
Now I know as those links were great.
Take Care,
Craig :D

My dad has done a bunch of this with old film, using the new dv cam to record what is played on screen and then transferring from that. I think the biggest problems are 1) screens are usually too reflective for videotaping, may want a flat white wall, 2) need to minimize parallax, getting the projector and camera close together, 3) finding working bulbs for old projectors - mostly just scouring eBay.

Thank you for the quick responses. I will check out those links. My video capture card, to my surprise, only has this description "Dell Movie Studio Audio Device". It, and my computer, were purchased in 2004. I used the S-Video input for my video capture.

Has anyone recently transferred regular or super 8 mm film to DVD media? What is the best quality capturing technology these days?
Some companies offer frame-by-frame transfer and luminosity adjustments; is this recommended?
If I want to capture entire 400 foot reels and do my own DVD creation and editing, what is the best storage format to use? I have about 3000 feet to convert. Thanks!

I believe the recommended thing to do is to use a personal video capture card and record the movies to a hard drive. If they are very precious, you might want to invest in a 120GB drive that you could then take and store somewhere like a safe deposit box. You can, of course, record to DVD, but any consumer DVD media will eventually wear out. So you would want to make multiple copies and then make new copies in a few years and rotate out the old copies.

Just like the old tapes, our DVDs are not forever.

If you store the files on a hard drive, you could keep them as MPEG 2 or 4 or AVI format. They should be usuable in the future if you ever wanted to do anything with them. You could also just copy the "VOB" files from your final DVD and put them back on to a hard drive for safe keeping.

Good luck!

Tanta, I've merged your post into an existing thread that has lots of info and links to show you how to make the conversion. :) See Post #1.

For super 8 transfer you may want to check this site:

http://www.foreverondvd.com/

But keep your original films. They probably will outlive all present digital medias.
Good luck. jean