Transferring 8mm & 16mm film to DVD

We get a lot old format film transferred to DVD work and I wanted to take the time to discuss this and our perspective on it.

Lots of you have boxes of old film laying around in the closets. Some of you have projectors but most of you don’t and therefore haven’t viewed the film in many years. Some of you may be reconciling the estate of a parent and didn’t realize how much footage they actually had.

Regardless of the circumstances and whether you have the projector or not, you’ll likely want get this footage transferred at some point and put on a medium that is easier to view and share with other members of your family. While we live in a digital age, our family history is sitting in shoeboxes under beds, or stored on closet shelves in formats that are difficult to access. We believe that these mementos should be viewed and enjoyed regularly by all family members so that the past family home movies aren’t some special item like Grandma Rose’s fine china, dusted off and trotted out on rare occasions, but a living and well tended family history that is known by all.

Now, how to accomplish that. There are a lot of services that specifically focus on the conversion of these videos, typically 8mm and 16mm film, but also some of the newer formats such as VHS and VHS-C straight to DVD. These services can be very competitive in price and if you are looking at this service strictly from the perspective of the lowest price, there are some good options available on the internet as well as through some large-chain drugstores and wholesale stores. Many of these send the film off to other locales, sometimes as far as India or China. You get the footage transferred to a DVD. Usually there is a thumbnail menu of either each reel or a thumbnail image at 10 minute marker points. Some companies will add a soundtrack of their choice, usually some innocuous classical or contemporary acoustic pieces. We recommend that if you do this type of transfer, you make sure to have an extra copy made to put away somewhere in case your original copy gets damaged. While DVDs can hold a lot of data and have a fairly long shelf life, you get one good scratch on them and you may as well use it for target practice.

The transfer process: Most companies use a Telecine projector which converts the analog film into a digital signal.
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