Preserving your Old Movies
As everyone knows, the best movies, Hollywood notwithstanding, are those you or your parent(s) produced on the old 8 mm film movie camera, right? They bring back evening entertainments involving a noisy, flickering projector, a portable screen, and a splicing jig, with the heady scent of acetone. They also bring back those ritual comments and jokes that were the result of reruns, where everyone knew what the next person was going to say because it had been said so often and seemed so appropriate.
The problem is preservation. Your kids may not be interested in looking at these fuzzy, flickering phantasies in black and white or faded color on any sort of regular basis, but the technology of transfering these family films to a more permanent and less labor-intensive playback format will at least keep the memories alive and replayable.
The process can be simple or elaborate, depending on your skills and the results you want. At the simplest level, you can get someone else to do it. The advantages include the fact that if something breaks, they get to fix it. I once went through three projectors trying to convert a large collection. Also, many of the commercial services clean your films first, removing the mats of rodent hair and insect parts that typically fuzzified the edges of your dad's projector. However, this solution is not cheap, and results are not always predictable.
DIY
Assuming you have a projector and a video camera, a tripod and a screen or even a white sheet, you have the makings of a transfer studio. Locate the screen and camera in such a position that the projected picture is small and bright. Focus in on it, load the projector, and start the show. If your projector does not have a speed control, you might need to rig up a dimmer switch to plug it into, because the shutter speed needs fine tuning so that the resultant picture on the video doesn't show shutter bars (owing to the difference in speed between the mechanical shutter on the projector and the electronic one on your video camera. Set the video camera to its highest speed, and then experiment.
Good Advice, All in One Place
Once you have captured the old movies on your video, you can transfer them to your computer, if you have a video capture card. From that point, it's a matter of burning the files to your Video CD or to a DVD burner, assuming you have one. The best site I've seen with advice on this aspect: Tom's Hardware site. Pay special attention to the camera setup pages!
This site also provides good general advice on the various steps it takes to transfer home movies. Ultimately, you need to consider whether "priceless" is the best term to describe your memories on mylar. If it is, then a commercial solution will provide the best results. On the other hand, home movies started out as a hobby, and to continue in that spirit, you may want to play with the technology yourself. It's guaranteed to be a learning experience.
Saturday, Dec 27, 2003