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Old 3rd Aug 2019, 9:35 am   #1
Tazman1966
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Question Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

Morning all.

I was wondering if anyone had recently had any 8mm cine films transferred to DVD by a specialist company. We have quite a few that my parents and grandparents made many many years ago and would like to get them professionally transferred.

There appear to be quite a few firms to choose from so any recommendation would be welcome.

Thanks
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Old 3rd Aug 2019, 9:41 am   #2
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

Used these very successfully. I think another forum member did too. No connection etc.

https://www.memoriesonvideo.co.uk/

Ken
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Old 3rd Aug 2019, 10:42 am   #3
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

I'm a member of another unrelated forum but a member there highly rates this company

http://www.videoimpactuk.com/
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Old 4th Aug 2019, 9:43 am   #4
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

Don't destroy the originals...... they'll probably outlast the DVDs, unless you do conscientious backups!
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Old 4th Aug 2019, 6:29 pm   #5
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll check them out.

As for the originals, they won't be chucked out. It's not as if they take up much space.
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Old 5th Aug 2019, 7:11 pm   #6
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

Have you considered a DIY approach?

I have a couple of wedding films that I would like to digitise,
I was offered the loan of a film scanner, this one I think
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflecta-fi.../dp/B01MYE5KPS
but when I did some research I discovered each of my 120m reels would take 26 hours to run through, and I wouldn't want to run it unattended in case one of the splices failed, or some similar disaster ensued.
Also I would need to make a jig to take the 17.5cm reels.
I have seen plenty of perfectly acceptable transfers done in real-time, simply by projecting the film onto a small screen and recording the picture with a camcorder
Even the owner of the Reflecta scanner concedes that the results aren't noticeably any better than the projector-camera method if set up with care.

So I've currently got a saved search with an email alert for a half decent projector from Ebay
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Old 6th Aug 2019, 8:26 am   #7
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

If you do use the camcorder method you'll need to turn off the autofocus. I found this out when I transferred a couple of my in-laws cine films about 15 years ago.

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Old 6th Aug 2019, 9:13 am   #8
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

I would suggest you pay a bit extra and get it done properly, you want cutting edge and that means goodbye to the projector and hello digital scanner. So look for a facility that promises that in HD.

Have a look at this one it's just stunning compared to all that flickery old nonsense that everyone assumed was how amateur film was. There is so much information in film that only these days is being brought out to be seen.

Amazing

https://www.alivestudios.co.uk/cinefilm-examples.html
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Old 6th Aug 2019, 12:52 pm   #9
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

That's really interesting up-date Charlie-thanks for posting. Much more detail I agree. I suppose the yellowy effect may sometimes be more nostalgic but the clarity of faces, in particular, is impressive. This has been a common subject in the past with people getting impressive results videoing a small image onto a white sheet stretched over a chair but the digital scanning HD results take things up to another level. I liked the emotive music behind the moving image section. That will pull in the punters

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Old 6th Aug 2019, 4:34 pm   #10
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Wasn't that blonde lady with baby quite astonishing?

I thought 9.5mm would be just the French sticking their fingers up to everyone else again (SECAM etc), but it looks rather splendid here what they have got out of it, and having heard a musical short elsewhere, the optical soundtrack possibly sounded better than a 16mm one. Sigh, sometimes at first we just do not see the French genius at work.
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Old 6th Aug 2019, 5:26 pm   #11
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

I remember the magazine "Movie Maker" criticizing a "Which" test on home movie films that had given a relatively low ranking to Kodachrome, a film generally acknowledged to be the one having the finest grain. The test data was comments by home movie users, and "Movie Maker" pointed out that the lenses fitted to most home movie projectors were incapable of resolving the grain structure of Kodachrome, the exceptions being the later Eumig models from the Mark M on, Bolex, Heurtier and the top end Japanese models.
Many home movies were projected on glass beaded screens for a brighter image, the bead structure giving a coarser grain structure than Kodachrome. I have always used a plain white matt screen, and have got acceptable capture off-screen using a DV camcorder. A shutter speed of 1/50 and adjusting the projector to 16 2/3 frames/sec will eliminate flicker. I made a post here a few years ago on modifying an old APC UPS kindly provided by a forum member to generate a variable frequency mains supply for a projector that ran at a fixed speed.

Last edited by emeritus; 6th Aug 2019 at 5:34 pm. Reason: Correcting "corrections" made by my phone!;
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Old 6th Aug 2019, 5:34 pm   #12
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

9mm has almost the same frame size as standard 16mm, no wonder it is good.
 
Old 8th Aug 2019, 9:48 am   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by emeritus View Post
I remember the magazine "Movie Maker" criticizing a "Which" test on home movie films that had given a relatively low ranking to Kodachrome, a film generally acknowledged to be the one having the finest grain. The test data was comments by home movie users, and "Movie Maker" pointed out that the lenses fitted to most home movie projectors were incapable of resolving the grain structure of Kodachrome, the exceptions being the later Eumig models from the Mark M on, Bolex, Heurtier and the top end Japanese models.
Many home movies were projected on glass beaded screens for a brighter image, the bead structure giving a coarser grain structure than Kodachrome. I have always used a plain white matt screen, and have got acceptable capture off-screen using a DV camcorder. A shutter speed of 1/50 and adjusting the projector to 16 2/3 frames/sec will eliminate flicker. I made a post here a few years ago on modifying an old APC UPS kindly provided by a forum member to generate a variable frequency mains supply for a projector that ran at a fixed speed.
When I did one of these transfers a long time ago, IIRC I found no flicker problems at all with Standard 8 which from what you said was down to the 16 2/3 speed? Super 8 was a bit more troublesome but if you kept tweaking you eventually got there.
Someone at the time also said it was down to having a 3? or 2? bladed shutter for the larger formats whether it flickered or not.
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Old 8th Aug 2019, 1:25 pm   #14
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

I remember there was a record shop in Stockport (the 78 Exchange) that also sold films for home projectors, including some in 9.5mm. They might have had cameras & projectors too.

Apparently it's 1/3 of the width of 35mm with the sprocket holes cut off.
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Old 8th Aug 2019, 2:51 pm   #15
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

Quote:
Originally Posted by merlinmaxwell View Post
9mm has almost the same frame size as standard 16mm, no wonder it is good.
The snag with 9.5mm is the centre sprocket hole - any fault with the projector claw mechanism and you have a wide scratch down the middle of the film.
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Old 8th Aug 2019, 3:57 pm   #16
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

The first cine transfer I did was to VHS for my cousin, using his morher-in-law's camcorder as a camera for an ordinary VHS recorder. The camcorder was an early Panasonic with a CRT imager whose persistence provided sufficient integration between successive frames that no flicker was visible regardless of projector speed.

AFAIK the first cine projectors were effectively cameras in reverse, and the resulting one flick per frame (16 per second) certainly did produce the flickering images that gave early cinemas the name "The flicks" . The invention of multi-blade shutters more than a century ago, eliminated flicker, but the name persisted. When sound came in, the frame rate of 24 fps was chosen, not to reduce flicker as some sources state, but to provide enough linear speed to get acceptable sound quality from an optical sound track. At 24 fps, a two-bladed shutter provides 48 flicks/sec, the same as a silent film projected at 16/sec using a 3-blade shutter. Showing a silent film at 16/sec using a sound projector with a 2 blade shutter will give only 32 flicks/sec, and this does result in significant flicker. Bell & Howell did supply their sound projectors with 3-blade shutters optimised for silent films to special order, but I never came across any. I suppose the flickering images that TV producers often use to represent the "realism" of home movies has come about by them having only seen silent film shown using sound projectors. It makes me wince.

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Old 9th Aug 2019, 12:20 pm   #17
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

[The following comes from speaking to others with experience, as I've yet to transfer my films.]

If you want to get your films transferred in a way that won't make you want to transfer them again in a few years when technology improves, you really, really should get them scanned frame by frame. That way you're not losing anything from the projecting device, no fuzzy lenses, no blur from incorrect frame rates. In it's most basic form, the output you get will be a single (high-resolution) image for every frame of film.

Of course, most companies doing this sort of thing will then convert these raw images back into video for you.

And it is always worth noting that if you pay for an HD transfer and then get the results on a DVD then you're doing yourself a disservice because you'll have lost a lot of the quality when converting the footage to the DVD.
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Old 9th Aug 2019, 1:24 pm   #18
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Default Re: Home movie cine film transfer to DVD

Quote:
Originally Posted by andrewferguson View Post
And it is always worth noting that if you pay for an HD transfer and then get the results on a DVD then you're doing yourself a disservice because you'll have lost a lot of the quality when converting the footage to the DVD.
Not necessarily - if you have the transfer-to-HD done and the resultant digital output stored in a format such as MP4 then provided you don't do any compression in the process the resolution can be whatever-you-want-it-to-be and the files get written to the DVD without further change, they're just digital bitstreams.

If though you want the results to be viewable on a normal DVD-player (rather than just using the DVD as a storage-medium) things may be different though, as the files must be converted to a resolution/format that the DVD-player will handle.

Given the minimal cost-difference, I'd ask for the files to be written, uncompressed, to a Blu-Ray disc. And/or supply a USB Flash-memory drive for them to do a copy to as well. These are dirt-cheap these days (128Gb ones for not much more than a tenner) and are much more convenient than legacy moving-mechanical-media.
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