Transferring 8mm film to a DVD takes several steps, including projecting and recording the film with a digital video camera.
Despite how popular it once was, 8 mm film has become archaic. The film format is seldom used, except by film school students searching for a particular look for their movie projects. For most people, it is beneficial to transfer these fragile and aging 8 mm films to digital or analog media. The longer these films sit, or the more times they pass through a projector, the more likelihood they will break or degenerate. Transferring the footage does not preserve the film itself, only the subject matter recorded on it.
Instructions
1. Place the film reel on the left reel of an 8 mm film editor. Place an empty take-up reel on the right side. Use the oil-based solvent on the lint-free cloth to gently clean the film as you slowly wind it from the left to the right reels. As you wind it back to the left, gently use the film lubricant on the film. Clean film provides a better picture and reduces the risk of breaks and scratches in the projector.
2. Set up your video camera on a tripod in a darkened area facing the projection screen. A cellar with the windows blacked out works well. The video camera should be near the projection plain of the film, off to either side of the projector. Set up the projector fairly close to the screen to project a small, bright image. Focus the video camera tightly on the projected image.
3. Start the video camera recording. Start the projector. Allow the entire film to project before turning off the video camera. If the video camera takes full-sized VHS tapes and you just want to convert the 8 mm film to VHS, you are finished. If the video camera records on some other format, you will need to rewind the tape. Hook up the camera to a video cassette recorder for the transfer. You will lose some quality in this process.
4. Connect the video out RCA plugs to the video camera and to the analog-to-digital converter. Plug the converter's USB or Firewire plug into the appropriate port on your computer. Start your video capture software. Start the video camera's playback. This recording, without compression, can take up a lot of hard drive space if you record many 8 mm films. For this reason, you may want to designate an external hard drive for the digitized recording.
5. Open your video editing software. Remove any lead-in or lead-out material you need to, and fix the image if it is needed. Export the digitized film to a compressed format such as MPEG if you need to get a lot of 8 mm films on a DVD. If you only have one, at between three and four minutes, compression becomes unnecessary.
6. Import the digitized film into your DVD authoring software. Set up the disk as you wish. Set the software to create the DVD image. Insert a blank DVD, and record the digitized film to it.
Tags: video camera, digitized film, your video, camera video, hard drive, Start video
