How do they transfer the old 8mm Reel-to-reels to a VHS tape? Curious.

[Xenogear900]

My mom brought her childhood 8mm reel-to-reels (filmed in the mid 1960s) into this place and they transferred them onto a VHS tape. She did this a few years ago if you're wondering why she didn't get a DVD.

Just curious, how do they do that?

Xenogear900@yahoo.com

[redwudz]

Here's the method from one site: http://www.homemoviedepot.com/film/8mm/transfer.php

Step 2: Digitizing During 8mm Film Transfer

A trained operator uses our own custom engineered telecine equipment which passes the light image of the movie film directly into a professional video camera, hence the term "film to video". A single high quality photographic lens is used on our projectors. No screen or frosted glass is used in the conversion (such as the consumer film to video box from the 1970's). The entire frame of film is visible during the conversion. The standard film gate of an 8mm or super 8mm film projector would cut out some of the image, but our capture extends to the edge of the sprocket holes. Our cameras are professional 3CCD cameras from the Sony DXC series. This setup is optimized for recording very small images such as 8mm film frames. We do not use the Elmo Transvideo telecine projector or Goko telecine projectors designed over 20 years ago, which are unfortunately still used by some in film to video transfer. Likewise, we do not use DV camcorders. Our DXC camera with 1,140,000 pixels offers 40% higher resolution than any MiniDV or DV camcorder. We are capable of focusing on the individual grains of film which makeup each frame. Because the grains of film are visible we can know that the resolution of the transfer is limited only by the film itself and not the camera or transfer process. Your picture will be the absolute best as the film allows it to be.

BTW, this is no endorsement of that company, just the first one I found that had a reasonable explanation.

[oldandinthe way]

You used to be able to buy an adaptor which included a mirror at right angle which allowed you to place your video camera lens in one end and a projector in the other.

This is one of the processes the above vendor claims to be superior to.

[thecoalman]

From the link:

Your movies are never double compressed such as the conversion of 8mm film to DV (digital tape) and then to DVD

:P

If you do a search here or on Google for telecine you'll get many results. Haven't tried this myself but some have simply pointed a projector at the wall and recorded the projection, only trouble with doing it that way is I've seen it posted many people run into flicker problems due to the different framerates.

If you google it you might even run across the one "home brew" method that I would consider the best. Using a scanner they scanned a few frames at time then reassembled them, with a scanner you can for all intents and purposes get a lossless copy of each frame. Not sure what the equivalent resolution of 8mm is but if it's higher than the current DV or MPEG standards this of course would be a superior copy for transfer to a higher definition format. This process however is very time consuming cause each frame has to be individually cropped... Haven't seen any machines that would automate the process by automatically cycling the frames and scanning each to sequential image, which frankly this surprises me.

[Marvingj]

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/archive/t93740.html