8mm DIY Telecine

Introduction - why do it at all?

Probably like a lot of people, I have a family archive of 8mm silent cine films. These were all taken between 1962 and 1982 (though largely 1962 to 1970) with a variety of cameras, some standard 8, some super 8. The quality varies between the reasonable, to the questionable and then to the downright poor, they haven't been looked after very well and are starting to deteriorate, have little value to anyone not involved, but nonetheless, they are a family archive.

Our family is pretty widely spread around the globe, and the proposal came up recently to convert the lot onto DVD for easier dissemination. We have quite a few films, over 150 in total, nearly 15,000 feet, spread over reel sizes from 50 feet to 400 feet. Looking into it, it seemed the price could be around £2,000, and if one looks at the more professional labs as opposed to Ebay advertised services, a lot more than that. As well as that, a lot of the providers will stitch the films together into long reels for transfer, and that didn't seem ideal as we have an indexing system. I was also a bit worried about losing them in the post (no monetary value, but completely irreplaceable) and how they would be looked after - the film is pretty tough but splices tend to break quite easily now. The price was the real killer, though.

I thought of buying some equipment (it starts at around £2,500), doing the transfer and then selling it again - but what if I couldn't sell it? Seemed a bit risky.

In the 1980's I had one abortive attempt at transferring them to video tape, simply with a (vidicon) camera pointed at the screen. The quality was awful: flickering, washed out colours (and a nasty cast on what was left), contrast way too high - and then most the tapes got lost anyway. Just as well, really.

However time has moved on, cameras (CCD and CMOS) are much better and cheaper, computer processing is cheap, and I'm an electronics and software engineer by profession. I also have a lot of still (mainly 35mm) photography experience, albeit zero for cine. So in the end, I thought I'd have a go myself.

However, my knowledge of all this started from virtually zero, so, as one does, I had a search around the internet. Many people are doing similar things, but two stood out: Freddy van de Putte, aka VideoFred (www.super-8.be) and Frank Vine (http://www.cine2digits.co.uk). The results they both get are just astounding. I'm not really after anything as good as that, but it does show what can be done. I contacted both, and am indebted to them for their help and encouragement.

So, this is how I went about it.

Why am I writing it at all? Simply as a guide to others who might be wanting to follow the same path. I'm not trying to show how it should be done, or to publicise how good my results are (they aren't at the moment). I have learnt a lot along the way, and experience tends to cost money. So, I'm simply trying to put down the thinking process I went through, the decisions I made and why, what worked and what (occasionally expensively) didn't. I am not trying to justify any of it as 'the way to do it' - it is just what I did.

This is however a work in progress: it is early days at the moment as this all only started in November 2011 and now (February 2012) I have just going the first attempts going (with pretty poor results), and as I continue, I aim to keep this updated. Meanwhile, any questions, suggestions or otherwise - feel free to email (see below).

Note also that where information is given, it is merely the result all my experiences and what I have discovered along the way - I make no claim for the accuracy of any of it.