Movie Film Scanner / Variable Power Controller

Factual Questions
1

Over the last year or so, I’ve been working on converting my family’s movie films to DVD. (So far over 14 hours of 8mm/super 8 footage) I’ve had pretty good results taking the projector and using my miniDV cam and shooting it off the wall. The 8mm/super 8 projector I have has a variable speed control and my video camera has a setting to adjust the shutter rate. Between the two of them I was able to get a fairly flicker-free picture. Recently another family member gave me some 16mm footage and none of the projectors from ebay had a variable speed control.

This has brought me back to my original idea when I started this project. I would think he best result would be to scan in each frame. I have a film scanner to scan my 35mm negative and slides but I can’t seem to find any kind of device for scanning movie film. Obviously it would have to be fairly high resolution to for the 8mm frames (although the frame size would only have to be 720x480) but the important part would be something that I can place the reels on that would automatically advance the frames. Ideally it would save the frames as a movie file as it scans, but if I has to deal with that manually that wouldn’t be a big deal. Has anyone heard of such a scanner?

The other solution I could think of to get my current projector to work is to slow the speed of the projector down very slightly. I would think there would some kind of device I would plug into the wall, and then plug the projector into this. Although this might cause problems with the bulb being too dim (although it would be that much). Any ideas how to do that?

2

My concerns would be:

Projecting a single frame of film for an extended period might melt it - those lamps run hot - this isn’t a problem when the frame is exposed for 1/nth of a second, but it might be if you kept it there for longer.

Simply turning down the power (if that were possible) might cause different parts of the system to respond in different ways, as their responses probably aren’t linear, so you might find that reducing the power by 25% causes the lamp to dim somewhat, but causes the fan that cools it to stall completely.

What might be possible, though, to modify the optics of the projector so that, rather than projecting the image, it goes directly into a CCD imaging chip, then you wouldn’t need such a bright light source.