This is topic Need advice - Super 8 movie transfer/copying in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.


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Posted by sndrake (Member # 4941) on :
 
I have a super 8 movie I need to have copied/transferred to some other format. There may be others I need to do this with as well in the coming months. This paricular one is almost 30 years old. The images - if they're still intact - are of great importance to me personally and to at least one other person potentially.

I am totally clueless in this area. A google search yielded some highly technical and scary warnings about getting the wrong business to do the job and talked about differences in technology. The site in question was selling their own services of course.

I plan on sticking with the Chicago area so I can drive the irreplaceable item to a shop on my own and not trust to the mail, UPS or Fedex.

But does anyone know what I should be looking for, asking for and looking out for?
 

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Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
 
Not the same format, but my parents found a place in Geneva to convert a bunch of reel-to-reel tape to MP3 format. Let me try and get the name and a phone number from my dad tonight when he gets home.
 

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Posted by sndrake (Member # 4941) on :
 
Goody,

Thanks.

One thing I gleaned that seemed to make sense was to have the movie transferred to digital master tape and NOT directly to DVD, since the MPEG format means dropping visual data.

Get a high-resolution digital master and make copies off of that - does that seem right?

Anyone?
 

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Posted by Primal Curve (Member # 3587) on :
 
Yeah, that sounds good sndrake. You should easily be able to find a few places in town that will do transfers. Here in Milwaukee, there's a guy who advertises on the radio around the holidays to stir up some business for people looking for unique gifts. I'm sure if you cracked open your yellow pages, you could find someone who does it.

Transferring Reel-to-reel to mp3? Sounds flawed from the start.
 

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Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
 
Do you have your own projector? Just as a backup, a friend of mine once showed me a clever little box you could use to project film into, so you could point a video camera at the little reflected image to get a decent copy of the film onto video. Obviously the frame rate would be different, but it'd mean you'd still have the images in some form before you handed it off to a lab?

I guess my only other advice would be to find someone who's expensive and worth every penny. The best would be in NY and LA, I'd imagine.

Good luck!
 

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Posted by Zeugma (Member # 6636) on :
 
Oh, and for what you should be asking, you'd probably want to find a business that specializes in high-profile mission-critical type film projects, if it's that important that it be in good hands, rather than entrusting it to someone who runs a wedding videography/video conversion business out of his basement.
 

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Posted by sndrake (Member # 4941) on :
 

quote:

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Do you have your own projector? Just as a backup, a friend of mine once showed me a clever little box you could use to project film into, so you could point a video camera at the little reflected image to get a decent copy of the film onto video. Obviously the frame rate would be different, but it'd mean you'd still have the images in some form before you handed it off to a lab?

I guess my only other advice would be to find someone who's expensive and worth every penny. The best would be in NY and LA, I'd imagine.

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No projector. My parents have one that hasn't been used in years and it didn't work when we tried it out when I visited over the holidays.

I'm not in NY or LA, but I would guess there are some high-end services in Chicago.

I'll make some calls and do some research tomorrow when businesses are actually open.
 

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Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
 
My father-in-law dug up a Super-8 projector for cheap, then spent a weekend shooting the video onto a blank wall and filming it with a digital video camera. It was MUCH cheaper than paying a service.
 

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Posted by Goody Scrivener (Member # 6742) on :
 
Dad's digging through his files to see if he can come up with a name for me.

And yes the R2R->MP3 was flawed, but the real goal behind it was to obtain a playlist of what was on the tapes so he could then obtain clean copies and make CD's of that particular mix. The tape boxes were destroyed in a flood, tape got dampened but not so badly damaged that they were unusable, and Dad no longer had a player. The resulting MP3 file (and we got 70 minute long files cause the guy did no editing of any kind) were nasty but they were enough to identify all but one song out of four reels. Not too shabby.

Ooh, another thought. Try calling Legal Video (312-551-0595) in Chicago. They won't be able to do the Super8 conversion, but they should have names of companies that may be able to help.
 

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Posted by sndrake (Member # 4941) on :
 

quote:

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My father-in-law dug up a Super-8 projector for cheap, then spent a weekend shooting the video onto a blank wall and filming it with a digital video camera. It was MUCH cheaper than paying a service.

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