Converting old 8mm films

Converting old 8mm films

  Saturday, October 14, 2017    Ron Field

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I inherited some old 8mm family movies from my mothers side of the family and want to save them for future generations.  In the past I had converted a two minute film from my dad's side of the family from 1958 using some software and a scanner.  This film had my great grandfather, grandparents, parents and aunt and uncle.  It turned out so well I decided to tackle it again.  This time I had six rolls of film.

Since there were more rolls this time I decided to build some additional components to help me out.  I first built a pair of reel holders out of wood with bolts for spindles.  Next I needed a way to advance the film a precise number of frames for each scan.  The one I built moves the film ahead 16 frames for each scan (1 second).  I also needed a gate to keep the film straight and in the same place for each scan.  The gate was built using a plastic ruler and an old plastic CD case which I cut to form a path for the film with a separate piece to hold the film against the glass of the scanner but not block the light or interfere with the image.

Each reel takes approximately 230 to 250 scans which takes 1 min and 25 sec. each.  It works out to about 5 and a half hours of scanning.  Once the scanning is done I need to split all the strips into individual frames.  That's about 5,500 to 6,000 frames.  I then create a master non-lossy avi file at 16.6666 frames per second.

The next step is to run a script against the file to stabilize the image, remove dirt, increase the frame rate to 25 fps using frame interpolation, and fix the white balance and levels.

So far I have scanned all six rolls of film but discovered a hair in the gate for two of them so I'll need to redo those ones.  There is a way to automate the advancing of the film and scanning and if there were more reels I would probably build it.

I've also started to included subtitles for some of the films to provide details on who everyone is in the film.  Not for the example below.






The following video displays the results of running a cleanup script against the original video.

Software Used:

• CineToVidPro (free)
• Virtualdub (free)
• Avisynth (free)
• 8mm restoration scripts (Fred's scripts.  free)