Teeming millions: I need your help.
Over many years I took literally thousands of 35mm Kodachrome slides. They were taken on various travels, of the kids as they grew up etc. No one wants to see them after 20 min or so…and thats when the slide projector works.
What are your suggestions as far as transferring them to video tape? I’d really prefer to have them transferred to CD’s if that isn’t cost prohibitive. I should say: What would you advise (period)?
There used to be a company here that did that. They also advertised the ability to digitize and videotape 8mm home movies, photo albums and the like.
My guess is it involves some specialized equipment, so “do it yourself” is out.
If you live in or near a sizable city, the yellow pages should get you started.
You could do it yourself - you can get film scanners for under $400, and CD-R drives are under $200. If you decide to do it, I strongly recommend using the VueScan software - good automatic color correction, and makes batch scaning easier. Check http://www.hamrick.com/ for more info. Actually, check the site anyway, it also has info on several scanners.
Kodak has a PhotoCD service which has great quality. Last time I checked, it was about a dollar per image, so if you really mean ‘literally thousands of photos’, it may get a bit expensive. Ask about it at a local photo/camera shop.
I should have figured that there would be a low cost periphial for this sort of thing.
Modern electronics, does it ever cease to amaze?
Computer scanners boast they can make picture-quality images from negatives. If this is true, then slides shouldn’t be a challenge…and then you can save these images onto a CD.
I haven’t tried to scan from negative, though, but you have nothing to lose if you have access to a scanner. Many quality scanners are not that expensive and worth the investment for such purposes as preserving family photos in general.
I bought a Nikon slide/negative scanner for work several years ago. It works fine.
We used it like you intend. We had training classes that used slides. We scanned then, then wrote them to a CD.
My husband uses a Nikon film/slide scanner. It was a little spendy. HP has one that’s very good at a more reasonable price. check their web site.
IMHO, stay away from the multi-purpose scanners, i.e. flatbed scanners that have an adapter for slides. IMO, multi-purpose devices do one thing well and the other functions not very well.
I read the cheapest way is get a white card, project onto that & video it from that.
You can get a mirror thing for about $10.00 does something similar.
Either way you can set the slide projector to change slides for ya.
17 minutes is supposed to be the amount of time that people can watch something before getting bored.
I used a slide/negative scanner to put some very high-res stuff onto CD for my masters thesis (to do negatives you just scan it as usual and invert the colors). Ask photo shops in your town that do slides and computer stuff if they do that (if all else fails, go the the art history department at the nearest big university and woo a starving student that works in the slide library…) Works very well, although it’s hard to find printers which are good enough to put the results on paper-- the best thing I found was to find a place (University, say) which had computers hooked up to a color xerox machine-- smooth photo quality instead of the pixilated look even the best laser printers give. Said universities should also have CD burners around. Outside the Ivory Tower, though, aside from photo shops I’m not sure where you should look.
Handy’s “mirror thingy” is sold as a Telecine Chain. In the basic configuration, it consists of a hole you shine your projector into, a front-surface mirror mounted at 45% to the axis of the projector beam, and a ground-glass “display” screen, at 90% to the projector beam. Cheaper versions use a common, “back-surface” mirror that works, but can produce a “ghost” image in addition to the one you want.
The Chain works for movies as well as for slides.
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