Cine film conversion

crescent

Does anyone have any experience of converting cine film to DVD? We have several cine films (family holidays, weddings etc) from the 70s and early 80s somewhere in my mother's loft and I would like to investigate transferring them onto DVD, ideally before Christmas. I know it's unlikely to be a diy operation (although perhaps someone will advise me differently) so probably looking at a specialist company, preferably in the Glasgow area but not essential. The handful of companies I've looked at seem to vary from ultra-slick professional standard to slightly dodgy bloke In a garden shed knocking out pirate movies - neither of which are ticking my boxes at the moment. Cheers for any info.

pblakeney

If you have the equipment to play the films then I would set up a video able camera/phone on a tripod and simply record it that way. Then convert the digital file to DVD. That is probably all a "professional" outfit will do.

capt_slog

PBlakeney wrote:

If you have the equipment to play the films then I would set up a video able camera/phone on a tripod and simply record it that way. Then convert the digital file to DVD. That is probably all a "professional" outfit will do.

What he says.

If you think about it, there's no other way. (Okay, not strictly true, but whatever is the 'professional' process, it has to rely on shining light through the original film and then recording that electronically.)

CiB

I did this a few years ago (13?), simply by pointing a video camera at a projection screen on to which I was showing the film. It took a bit of trial & error to get the lighting correct but a lot of the film was dark badly lit anyway. There's also a slight bit of parallax too as the camera by definition has to be slightly offset from the centre of the image.

The capture was one part of the job; editing it was the other. I used Pinnacle Studio as I had it at the time, but it was v useful to tidy up a few glitches that were part of the original film and to chop out shots of feet, sky, floor etc that inevitably occur in home movies, and to improve the picture a bit - the edit tools like sharpen, colour balance etc were really useful to lift it. It took a couple of attempts, including checking to see what it looked like on a tv, and the final step was to burn it all to disk - PS did that with the built-in titling & menu options. End result was pretty good, considering the source footage.

Doable, and you'll get better results if you can do a bit of editing along the way.

thistle_

A friend has some cine film recordings put onto DVD maybe 5-6 years ago by a local photography shop. It cost quite a lot of money and the quality was awful.

He went back and complained and the staff weren't initially interested but when he showed the output to the shop owner they redid it and the final version was pretty good.

I expect they just had some fancy equipment for doing what everyone else has suggested. I assume you still have a projector for playing them back?

crescent

Thanks for the replies. Amazingly,I fired up my Dad's old Bell &Howell projector and it still works. There are a couple of connections for connecting to external equipment but we are talking 35year old technology so not really compatible with any of today's devices. First impressions are that it is definitely doable just by using my GoPro and pointing it at the screen. I can then look at editing them all and burning to DVD or save to a memory stick. The few places that I looked at quote by the foot - Boots wanted about £20 per 100 feet of film. There are dozens of films so would probably be prohibitively expensive. Thanks for the input folks.

crescent

Worked a treat, set my iPad up just in front and slightly below the projector and zoomed in on the screen. Only took a few hours to copy about 24 films and quality is fine, well as good as the original films anyway. Cheers.