Help me preserve my pics/films!

Factual Questions
1

Why I haven’t posted this question to the dope before, I’ll never know.

In cleaning out our catch-all room in preparation for a remodel, I have once again come across the box that contains my grandfathers’ Super-8 movies: film of all the grandkids from many moons ago (it’s possible some are on regular-8), and a mini-library of Super-8 prints of Laurel and Hardy shorts and other Silent-Era gems.

Question 1: Suppose I get a hankering for a night of retro home entertainment, which is not unlikely. What model(s) of Super-8 projector should I be looking to pounce on on e-Bay? Something that might sell for less than $200.00 in decent condition, but I’m willing to entertain the extravagant suggestion. Pitfalls to watch out for are most welcome.

Question 2: What is my best optionfor transferring Super-8 to a digital format (at least for the stuff I have the copyright to)? I have been warned against DVD-only transfer (and the warnings make a great deal of sense, given the codec involved), so what equipment do I need? I hold a degree in Computer Science and I used to be semi-pro sound man, so I fear no tangle of wires and equipment. I just need to know what will get me the most faithful, long-lasting digital copy. Money is less of an object here, as there are a number of interested parties amongst my family who might be willing to chip in for something that works.

Question 3: Later this year, it is possible that the 40-odd carousels of 35mm slides my father took of our childhoods will emerge from my mother’s storage. Assuming they are not deteriorated (and I hold out no false hope), what’s the best method for transferring those? There are no negatives or prints, just the slides.

Help me, Dopers. You’re my only hope.

2

I’m certainly no expert, but having actual film as an archival source is an excellent means of preserving what you have. In my opinion, you should focus on archiving the film originals you have and transfer them to digital as an “easy to access” bonus. Film is certainly not perfect, but its track record is leaps and bounds ahead of any digital means of preserving images. Properly stored film originals have lasted for 100 years… the best digital record pales in comparison.

As regards your questions…
Question 1- I have no specific recommendation,but many super 8 projectors will also run regular 8. (The difference between the two formats is that regular 8 has perforations running down both sides of the film, while super 8 has perforations down one side only, with the other available for the sound.) Dual use projectors of this type are sometimes considered suspect, so if you have only one type of print (either super OR regular 8) a format specific projector would be your best option. Getting one for under $200 should be a cake-walk.

Question 2- Your best option will be to take the footage to a professional lab (i.e. Technicolor) and have it transferred to a DV or miniDV tape via telecine transfer. The cost will be prohibitive (I’m talking really, really prohibitive). A cheaper and excellent alternative is to project the footage in a darkened room on an actual screen and film it yourself with a miniDV camera. The transfer will be very good if done carefully, and will save you a bundle. If you are insanely serious about archiving this footage then your best option will be to take it to a professional cine lab and have them give it to you in a digital format of your choosing AND get them to make you a clean print you can archive on film ( in either 8mm, 16mm, or 35mm). If you chose this option you are either as rich as Midas or as crazy as a sack full of ferrets.

Question 3- As I said above, the slides themselves are a great means of archiving the images. Film is a very high megapixel source material with a proven track record and the hardware to view it is cheap, plentiful, and simple enough that the machines will be around for another hundred years at least. What digital format can honestly match that? You can easily scan them at very high res, but keep the hard copies in case of technical failure in hard drives, formats, etc.

Clearly, where film is concerned, I am a bit of a luddite. That being said, slides and old home movies are all on a format (film) that has been around for a hundred years+. They need to be very carefully stored, but you needn’t wrap them in acid free paper and rent an air conditioned vault. Transferring them to digital as a means of preserving them is at this point (IMHO) an unknown factor where the consumer market is concerned. Projecting slides and movies contributes to their degradation, so if you are mad serious about preservation, you should make copies before projecting them.

3

We recently went through this exact scenario. YMMV but here’s my take.

Buying or renting a projector and using a high-quality camera to capture the film is the most practical solution. You can have it done commercially but it’s basically not worth it because of two reasons:
1. You are converting unedited movies. Paying for a lotta junk footage to get the gems is pricey.
2. The quality of Granny’s moviemaking is not exactly The Wizard of Oz. The gap between the original quality and your digital home-made copy is going to be minimal.

For the slides: it is very tedious to do this, except commercially. Sam’s Club will do it for about 20 cents a slide, but you get a fairly compressed jpeg on the order of 50-100 Kb/slide. Fine for most casual uses. A professional lab will get you much higher quality scans but will cost about 6 times as much. You may want to get the best ones done professinally and have all of them also done by Sam’s or the equivalent.

Of course you aren’t going to throw out the originals in either case. The difference is going to be simple: the digital ones are going to get seen and distributed and the others are going to sit in storage. So do it.

May I make two practical suggestions?

  1. We rounded up our senior generation and did the slide show in front of them, capturing the projected slides on video and their comments on audio (we miked them up for this for about $30 from RadioShack). This is a great way to get commentary on the family history.

  2. There are a ton of services out there that let you upload or send in photos (digital or otherwise) and create a perfect-bound book instead of just parking photos in a traditional album. For less than a couple hundred dollars you’ll get a book that can sit on the coffee table and actually get looked at.

4

If you have enough slides to make it worthwhile, you can get scanners which transfer slides to digital format (typically, these will also convert negative film to digital as well, and also do the normal copying of positive prints). 40 carousels means thousands of slides, so investing in a scanner is going to be cheaper than Sam’s Club at 20 cents a slide.

5

I would have thought that the “project on the wall and tape it” method wouldn’t yield good results, but I like the idea of the narration.

6

There are quite a few flatbed scanners on the home market now that can scan slides and 35mm film negs, in addition to paper documents and photos for under $200. Or, there are dedicated slide scanners that may have better resolution, such as the ones made by Plustek and Nikon. The downfall to these is that they only scan 35mm negs or slides.

Flatbed or dedicated, the newer scanners come with automatic restoration wizardry that will fix things like fading and dust/scratches with a click or two that used to take lots of twiddling in PhotoShop. Look for terms like Digital ICE or FARE.

7

My dad was confronting the same issue, with some rather old home movies. By good fortune, he works almost next door to the Smithsonian film preservation lab. So he asked their advice, and they basically told him that unless he was addicted to spending money, he should just project the old movies against a white foamcore background and capture it on video. It’s almost as good as what the professionals would charge a fortune for, at a fraction of the cost.

8

I would suggest an actual movie screen (I’ll bet you can find one at a garage sale or junk shop for under $20) but other than that this is BY FAR the most bang for your buck. The narration idea from the folks in/making the movie/slides is nothing short of brilliant. Thanks for that gem Chief Pedant.

9

Super 8 is usually shot at either 18fps or 24fps. I’m going to assume it’s 18fps, as most home movies are.

There is a problem with just projecting the film on a screen and videotaping it.

Many people think of projectors as showing one frame, then blocking the light, advancing the film, then showing the next, but that’s not all there is to it. A projector like that would have an intolerable flicker. Rather than a one-bladed shutter, like this projector would be, most home movie projectors (and all film projectors in general) have three blades, so each frame is shown three times. The result is that the overall picture is darker, but flickering is no longer a problem.

So, while 18 distinct frames may be shown per second, what you’re actually seeing on the screen is 54 frames with lots of duplicates. This is no problem for you, but for a video camera, it is. A video camera records 60 fields per second (in North America, at least). 54 frames being shot 60 times, some of those times, the video camera is going to record a blank screen because it’s catching the projector’s shutter.

There are special projectors designed for transferring film to video, called telecine projectors, that don’t use three bladed shutters, but be prepared to spend as much as a $1000 on eBay for one. The next best method would be to get a variable speed projector, then adjust the speed until it matches the video camera and the flicker goes away–with a three bladed shutter, this would be at 20fps, since 20x3=60. If your film is silent and shot at 18fps, then speeding up to 20fps will be an almost imperceptible difference. If it’s sound, the pitch will be shifted a little upwards, but not too much.

You’ll need to use a video camera that you can manually adjust to get the best results. Set the shutter to 1/60, lock the gain at 0, focus on the screen, then turn on the projector with no film in it and hold up a medium gray card in the light to set the exposure.

I would advise against using a proper screen to transfer film. Just use a regular piece of bright white copy paper. The smaller the image, the brighter it will be, and video needs an awful lot of light to not look terrible. If the video contrast is bad–and it may be, contrast isn’t one of video’s strong suits–turn on a little ambient lighting in the room. The image will be flatter, but at least you’ll bring out some detail in the dark areas.

Super 8 equipment goes through phases on eBay–sometimes terribly overpriced, sometimes quite reasonable–but a variable speed projector should be easy enough to find on a $200 budget. I would also advise getting one that uses actual sprocket wheels to move the film and not just rubber rollers, since those are prone to scratching, especially if the rubber’s dried out. Clean it thoroughly with alcohol before running anything through it and pay particular attention to the film gate, unless you like dirt and hair jumping around on the screen. Get a newer model from the late 70s or 80s that uses a halogen lamp, it will be much easier to find cheap replacements when it burns out and it gives better color reproduction. Don’t be tricked by what someone might say on an eBay listing–a 1000w tungsten bulb isn’t any brighter than a 100w halogen one. Depending on how the projector’s reflector is made, it might be a good deal dimmer.
If the perfs are badly damaged and the film jitters in the projector, here’s a little trick: rewind the film onto a new reel so it’s tails-out and run it through the projector backwards. Damaged perfs are almost always only damaged on one side and the opposite one will be fine and jitter-free. Then, just reverse your video and flip the picture upside-down.
As for archiving, I agree completely with what has already been said here, worry about keeping the film itself in good condition. It will long outlast any video media you transfer it to. It wants to be kept in a cool, dry place, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to drop a bit of camphor into each can to ward of vinegar syndrome. If it’s Fuji film, it’s on a polyester base and insusceptible, but Kodak and most other film is on an acetate base that can decompose if improperly stored (giving off a strong vinegar smell as it does, hence the name). If any of your film has gone vinegar already, keep it separate from the clean film. Though it’s never been proven that vinegar is contagious, common wisdom for the past 40 years is that it is. You can’t reverse vinegar syndrome, but camphor will stop it from progressing further.
Someone above said there are projectors that can show both 8mm (also called Regular 8 and Double 8) and Super 8. This is true, they’re called Dual 8 projectors, but the explanation given for the difference between 8mm and Super 8 is not true. Both have only one row of perfs, but 8mm has large 16mm-style squarish perfs, whereas Super 8 uses much thinner rectangular perfs, leaving more room for a larger image. Both can be sound stripped with magnetic tape, and Super 8 can also have an optical sound track, but these a pretty rare, mostly just being used for in-flight movies. There are some excellent Dual 8 projectors, like the Eumig 810D, but on the whole, Dual 8 projectors are crap and very bad on film.

10

Thanks for not calling out that idiot. That idiot being, of course, me. :smack:

Very informative post Dusty.

11

Seconded.

The point about the frames-per-second differential was mentioned to my father by the Smithsonian people, and I think it’s fair to say that the difference between doing it yourself and having it done the expensive way is that nominally, the expensive way reduces or eliminates the flicker. But in actual practice, doing it the cheap way, you may find that the flicker is not too intolerable. You can just set the thing up and let it rip, then see how it looks, and if you don’t like the results, experiment along the lines Dusty suggests.

12

Sorry if this has already been corrected here but - BOTH regular 8 and super 8 film had sprocket holes running down one edge of the film. The holes in super 8 were much smaller than the holes in regular 8, which allowed for a bigger picture area, but were also more prone to damage. With the jump to 16mm you get your holes along both edges.

13

Thank you Dusty, that’s exactly the kind of info I was looking for. Synchronization flicker might drive me bats.

And thanks everyone else as well, for all the good tips.

14

Presumably to get an “as near to perfect as you could get” translation of film to digital, there would be machines that would would scan each frame (like an automated slide scanner), and you could then turn the series of images back into a digital movie. I suppose you could even clean up each frame using ICE, adjust brightness etc. Are such things available to the home market or are we talking megabucks?

15

Megabucks. That’s what the Smithsonian guys do, frame by frame, using Photoshop or the like to clean up and restore each frame.

16

Seeing as ICE is now appearing on home-level scanners, I think we could safely swap “megabucks” with “megatime” to scan in each frame, clean it up, then ultimately pour all the frames into something like Final Cut to re-assemble them into a moving image.

17

I recently went through this process when I converted lots and lots of 8mm and Super8 home movies to DVD for Christmas presents.

The easiest thing is to outsource the conversion. There are places on the net which will do it from .10-.25 cents per foot. Those small 4" reels are about 50 feet. It would have cost me over $500 to convert the films I had, so I decided to try it myself.

Find the brightest white paper you can find. Photo printer paper will usually have an ISO rating and you can use that as a guide to determine which is brighter. Attach the paper to the wall and project on that. You want the projected image to be small. I think mine was about 5" or so. Place the camera and projector in line as much as possible. If they are at an angle, the image the camera picks up will be a trapezoid instead of a square.

You’ll want to capture straight to the computer from a camcorder with DV out. Find a capture program which can capture/display DV. Don’t use the camera’s LCD to to figure out the video image–use the computer monitor. The image on the LCD won’t look like what is captured.

You’ll have to use manual focus on the camera. I would put an X on a piece of masking tape, stick it to the projector paper, and manually focus on that. You’ll also need to be able to manually change the camera’s brightness setting while the movie is being captured. My video camera had trouble with the contrast, and I continually had to change the brightness so that the image looked okay. Again, look at the computer monitor during the capture and not the LCD.

Initially I had a normal projector which only did 18/24fps. I had the flicker problem described above. The flicker looks like the image gets brighter, dimmer, brighter, etc. I tried to fix it using VirutalDub with a Deflicker filter. The results were okay. The flicker was reduced, but the image got more blurry. And it took a loooooong time to process. So I had to chose between a sharp image with flicker or a blurry image with no flicker.

Luckily, I found a variable speed projector on Craigslist. That worked great. I was able to tweak the speed so that the flicker disappeared.

I used a lot of free tools described on VideoHelp. I used Stoik Video Capture to capture the DV. Once I had the video captured as avi, I used Cuttermaran to edit out the parts I didn’t want.

So what lessons did I learn? The conversion is just a way to make viewing the movies more convienient. The films are holding up great. Movies made 40+ years ago still have bright, vivid colors. However, my camera did not pick up the contrast that well. Most of the colors look muddier in the DVD. Also, burnable DVD media will not last forever. It’s not unusual to start having CRC errors after 5 years.

18

Ooh, great link, sharpay! And good tips too. A very warm welcome to the Dope for you!