Help: How can I convert 8mm film to DVD ?

[RWANDREWS]

Does anyone have a method at moderate cost to capture 8mm film to DV ? Projecting the film onto a screen then recording it with a DV camcorder doesn't seem to be a very good idea to me, but I have not tried it. Is there any Prosumer equiptment available at reasonable cost ? How do the various copy services do it?

What has worked (or not) for you ?

[borghe]

If you have a projector, the easiest way is to project onto the brightest surface you can find (most modern day white walls are brighter than most older projection screens) and record it with a good DV/D8 camera. If the film has sound and your camera outputs from a 1/4" headphone jack, then just run a cable directly into the camcorder.

Your other option is to take it to a conversion service. The catch here is that most services will, you guessed it, do the exact same thing. This is fine if you don't have access to a projector, and the pricing is usually reasonable, but otherwise you could do the same thing yourself. The final option is to find a place that can do 8mm telecine. This is usually (as far as I can tell) much harder to find and much more expensive. The difference though is that the quality should be significantly improved over the other method.

Getting the film to video of some sort is the hard part. After that, making the DVD is just a matter of capturing and encoding the video, and authoring the disc.

Oh, as for the quality of recording the movie to videocamera, as long as your projection surface is a bright white and you have a good powered bulb in your projector, the quality of the video is pretty decent. Not as good as telecine, but not as bad as you are probably thinking.

[FL350innh]

RWANDREWS,
I have extensive experience with this as I do this as a service. First, If you want to do it yourself you will need what is called a video multiplexer. Basically it is an L shaped box with 2 mirrors and a screen in it. They range from $200.00 and up. After you get one of these, you need the setup the camera and get the shutter timing synched between the projector and the camcorder. This is the hardest part, the frame rate can cause strobing... It just takes time and a lot of patience. Every projector is slightly diferent I went through 4 used projectors before I found the "one". You can also use the poor mans way and play with paper, a box and set the camera up like a rear projection tv using the paper as the screen. I had pretty good results doing this before I spent good money on my duplexers. But again, lots of trial and error.. Patience most of all.. If you want to discuss what I may be able to do for you let's take it off the forum since It's not my place to use the forum for my personal biz.... Either way reel film xfer is a lot more fun IMHO....