Sorry-I forgot how to get 8mm film to editable form - please help!

[Mr Curious]

I imagine this must have been discussed a bit, and I had done it before with DVD's but I seem to have had a brain fade (have mercy) and can't remember how to get 8mm film to an editable form. My Dad took some old family 8mm films and had them transferred to 3 one hour (approx) VHS tapes about ten years ago and just found them in a box. No one had ever watched them and they are pure family gold. Great stuff of me, my sister, and brother growing up in the 50's and 60's.

I can transfer the VHS tapes to DVDs with our household Panasonic DVDR. Then what? Rip the DVDs? Convert to QT? It would be great if I could load them into iMovie (my level of video editing capability) so I could trim and rearrange (chronologically) the dozens of short clips. Then add music, commentary, etc.

I would greatly appreciate it if you of the forum could help me with some links, tutorials or experiences on how you got this done. THANKS A TON IN ADVANCE!

G4 PPC DP2.3 2GBRAM
QT Pro
No FCP

[BigGuynRusty]

What I did was played the VHS tapes into a Sony Analog to Digital box (or FireWire Camcorder) plugged into firewire into iMovie. It was the cheapest because I had the hardware.
But if I was going to do it today I would take it to Walgreens and have it transfered.

BGnR

[GGD]

Your subject is a bit misleading, this really has nothing to do with 8mm film. The film to video transfer was already done, so this is really just a VHS to editable form question.

If you have a Mini-DV camcorder with FireWire, then if it does pass-through you can go from the video out of the VCR to the video in of the DV Camcorder, and FireWire to the computer.

Or you can record it onto Mini-DV tape first (which gives you a digital backup too), and then import into iMovie.

[Mr Curious]

OK - you're right - my Subject is a bit misleading - sorry.

I already transferred the VHS tapes to DVD format with our DVDR.

How do I make a DVD into an editable form? THANKS!

[MacMagus]

> I can transfer the VHS tapes to DVDs with our household Panasonic DVDR. Then what? Rip the DVDs?

Yes.

Try Handbrake. It doesn't work with the results of every DVR (Sony and Toshiba are notorious for making difficult VR DVD's). In that case, you may have better luck using the media browser from Toast 8 to extract the video.

[Don Kiyoti]

Do you have the original film? If so, be sure to preserve it! It's nice to have digital copies but (assuming it's Kodachrome) the film is essentially permanent. I've collected a good number of reels of old home movies from yard sales and thrift stores. It's made me wonder if the original owners made tapes and figured it was safe to let go of the film. Tape and DVD are temporary.

[Mr Curious]

Yes, I do still have the original 8mm films. They are currently in a storage container in a dark, cool place. Thanks for the tip.

I do have a Mini DV camcorder and will use that to digitize the VHS tapes and import into iMovie HD.

BTW - While helping a buddy make a slide show of 30 year old slides, I had a few hundred slides scanned at Costco and they came out great. Good time saving resource with about a 2000dpi pro scanner.

[Mike Sellers]

Is there any way to transfer the original 8mm film directly to a digital format? Seems a shame to go through the VHS step when that degrades the picture quality so much.

[MacMagus]

> Is there any way to transfer the original 8mm film directly to a digital format?

Ballparks... no guaranty that any particular place will follow this pricing...

Really high quality: Professional Hollywood telecine. We're talking $ dollars per frame with labor charges factored in, but professionals supervise every step of the process, including cleaning and color correction and the equipment is top of the line CRT scanners with precision optics and usually the services of an engineer whose main purpose in life is to tweak it all to optimum performance.

High-quality? Professional local (outside of CA or NY) telecine. They'll probably use popular 3-CCD scanners. Maybe a per-frame charge or a flat $.30-.50 per foot (and up). Add 10-15% for sound, unspecified technician time, cleaning, color correction and media.

Medium quality? Send it off to a mail-order transfer place @ roughly $20 bucks per reel for unsupervised transfers plus media. (Media: $100-400 each for the hard drives to hold the digital transfer.) They often use obsolete equipment with scratches and other defects that will show in the transfer, but you're not likely to notice with ancient home movies.

Cheaper than that? There are lots of small shops (even local drug stores) that'll do it for less, but most of those are scams and the rest... well, you get what you pay for.

Even cheaper than THAT? Make your own telecine unit...
http://homepage.mac.com/onsuper8/diytelecine/

...or project the image on a wall or screen and record the image to DV.

[Sam3]

I've used these guys before: http://www.greatlakesvideo.com/film_phot...sfers.html I needed to transfer European 8mm videotape to our standard so that I could edit it. They gave it to me on my choice of format, which was Digital8. I see they don't offer that tape format any more. They did a really nice job!

I'd take the origianl 8mm tape to this kind of outfit and have them make a digital tape of the film which you can then import into iMovie and edit, then burn using iDVD. Ripping a DVD will get you a slightly lower quality file, as the original has been compressed to be put onto a DVD.