Copying 8mm films to laptop

phil-k

phil-k

phil-k

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I have a few old 8mm home movies of my children when they were little and would like to copy them to a digital file so I could give thwm copies. There are people who do this professionally, but they are quite expensive for the number and length of films I have.
Ages ago I bought from a boot sale one of those contraptions with a prism inside to play the movie into one side and film it from another with a movie camera. I do have an old video camera which I could use but have the idea of getting a good webcam instead and saving it directly to a laptop to then save onto DVD.
I do know I could just play the movie in a projector, set up my camera beside it and film it from the screen, but I thought the webcam idea would give better results.
Thr films have sound so I imagine I could just plug a cable from the output of the projector to the microphone socket of my laptop.
Has anyone experience of copying films and could give me any tips
Thanks
 
Most webcams have pretty ropey quality - you'd need something fairly decent as you aren't going to have great results in the first place with that kind of method.
 
If you've got a projector and a half decent camera that can record video that will give a better picture than a webcam.

I'd project it on a screen and play with the position and settings of the camera myself, or if I had the time/energy try and work out a way to do rear projection where you have the film playing on one side of a surface and the camera on the other, then flip the image in a suitable bit of editing software (this is basically one of the ways they used to make films that needed things shown through car windows etc back before the CGI days except they had to reverse the projected film before it played onto the screen).
IIRC most of the companies that transfer the film to tape or DVD will be using some form of rear project system as it allows for fine adjustment of both the projector and camera (although dedicated machines will likely only have/need minor adjustments).
 
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I don't know if this is possible, but I'd use an 8mm film scanner and scan frame-by-frame then record the audio separately.
 
That Costco service seems to be pretty decent. The machine that does this conversion is a telecine and they're pricey.
 
phil-k said:
Has anyone experience of copying films and could give me any tips
Click to expand...

I just bought a post Y2K 8mm camcorder with S-Video and composite video/audio output off eBay for a tenner then connected it to a capture card. I believe you can get 8mm camcorders with firewire which makes it easier (but ofc more expensive.

IIRC the lifespan of 8mm tapes is rated at 15 years so depending on age the footage may not be amazing.
 
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