I have a number of 16mm films shot by my Dad which I’d like to restore. Any experience of getting this done here? Good service providers, do/don’ts?
ta
ATM 16mm transfer
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Sorry I can’t help you @Twang.
A few (10 or more) years back I used a little place in Bournemouth to transfer a box of old 8mm footage onto VHS (!), and from there I used a video capture application to convert the footage into mpg files – it worked very well, and the 8mm resolution wasn’t significantly better than the VHS, so we lost little or nothing in the translation, and they did a very good job indeed for – from memory – about £40 for about an hour’s worth of film. Sadly, the business isn’t there any more (as far as I can tell from Street View).
I believe that back in the day such shops used a method of projecting the film stock onto a very high quality screen and re-recording it from there onto VHS. These days you can get similar commercial conversions that use a high speed scanner to pick out every frame from the film stock and then transmogrify the output into a DVD stream (.ts files and so on). I imagine that the cost is somewhere in the same ball-park i.e. not as astronomical as you may fear.
Obviously, the most important factor is getting your original film stock back in the same condition that it was in when you consigned it into their care!
We have enjoyed watching the resulting DVD of our own legacy (1960s) footage. The shop put a generic library music soundtrack over the silent film – and I have to say they managed to produce something rather special; I’m sure you’ll be able to find a place that will do the same for you. Good luck!
Yeah I’ve look at one who transfer it to .avi files which sounds good. I need to dig out the films. Sadly I don’t know what is on a few of them which are not labelled. Will be interesting to see though! Sadly guess they can’t replicate the smell of dust on projector valves which I remember so well!
Haven’t you got a nice old valve amp that you could bring into the room for replicating that aroma?
Mmm, several, but they don’t smell the same. 😁
I went through dozens of old standard 8mm films (4 min long I think) using a hand operated editor that we still had in a cupboard somewhere, then just put them in rough, chronological order and numbered them after dumping a few damaged ones. These were transferred to VHS by a local service about 30 years ago and then subsequently to DVD which I did myself using a hybrid VHS player/DVD recorder. Think I watched them twice after all that! Would allow my daughter to see her late grandparents who she never met, she didn’t show much interest before, but I will try again.
As a lockdown project last year I used http://www.blackcatvideo.com/cinefilmtransfer.html in Potters Bar in Herts. to convert my shoebox full of 8mm films. They’re local to me so I did it in person, but they’ll do it mail-order too, of course (turnaround time was about a week.) I had them put straight onto a USB stick as .avi files, but I think they’ll put them on DVD too. Quality was very good allowing for the source material. Specify if/that you want each reel as a separate file, not as one long file, unless you have your own computer editing set-up.
It wasn’t cheap (about £110 for approx. 45 minutes total footage), but in terms of the fun my family’s had watching and re-watching them since (they hadn’t been seen for at least 30 years, and had footage of a number of recently-deceased family members), it was pretty much the best money I’ve ever spent. Hope that helps!
I used to deal with Black Cat for Hi8 camera hire in the mid 90s. They were really good in those days. The fact that they’re still going speaks volumes.
Perfect, they are 30 mins from me and in fact now you mention it I remember them. Black Cat it is.
Now you mention it, I had dealings with them in the mid-/late-90s.
Where are you then MM?
Epping, since you ask – how about yourself?
Hitchin