09-14-2007, 01:11 PM
> 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.
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.