'The problem with this method is that you need to work with a very clean white sheet or wall,' Arias says, 'and even with a pristine projection surface, you could end up with lower contrast than the original, color shifts, or a softer image. Then press Play on the projector and Record on the camera to capture your footage. Project the film evenly onto the wall or screen, then adjust the viewfinder in your digital camera so that the image being projected fills the whole view. In a dark room, set the projector and video camera up next to each other.

You'll need a film-reel projector, a digital video camera, and a clean white wall or a projector screen. 'There is another way, but it's a bit of a project,' says Elias Arias, Consumer Reports' project leader for audio/video testing. This is an analog process: If you have 5 hours of film, the conversion will take 5 hours. These machines can be expensive-the Wolverine Data Film2Digital Moviemaker Pro, for example, costs about $400, though you might find other models for closer to $100.Īs the film runs, the new files are recorded to a small SDHC memory card, just like the one you find inside digital cameras. First, you can buy a film-to-video converter, which looks like a compact version of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel projector. The good news: 'Film is a pretty sturdy medium,' says Ashley Blewer, an archivist, developer, and moving-image specialist, 'so old home movies on 8 mm, 16 mm, or Super 8 reels are likely to be in decent shape.'ĭo it yourself. There are two DIY methods. Once you've identified the kind of film you have, you can turn it into a digital format-but it's going to take some time and money. If the film strip is roughly two pencils wide-and on a reel that looks like the kind you might see in a documentary about the Golden Age of Hollywood-it's probably 16 mm. Each 3-inch reel contains about 50 feet of film, good for only a few minutes of action. 'Regular 8 film is about as wide as a pencil on a small reel about 3 inches in diameter,' says Howard Besser, professor of cinema studies at New York University and founding director of the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. If you have old reels of film in the attic packed in iconic yellow Kodak boxes, they're probably Regular 8 or Super 8 film. Although Kodak released 16 mm Kodachrome film in 1935, then 8 mm (aka Regular 8) film a year later, home movies didn't really take off until the 1960s, when Kodak released Super 8.

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