Robin Watson
Junior Posts: 4
From: Lisburn, Northern Ireland
Registered: Nov 2014
posted August 31, 2016 04:03 PM
Hi everyone, I hired a Reflecta Super 8 scanner and was able to convert all my old family super 8 cine films over a period of about a month. The results are very sharp but the age of the film has meant that the images need some digital processing. I am considering purchasing adobe Premier Elements, but wonder if anyone out there has a better or cheaper alternative to suggest. I also would like to further complete the files, possibly convert to mp4, so that I can provide single dvds (or possibly 2) containing all the recordings to my children and relations of our family memories. I have about 80GBytes of avi material. Would be interested to hear your views. Robin Watson
Posts: 506
From: Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK
Registered: Mar 2016
posted August 31, 2016 04:48 PM
Hi, Robin. I captured some family footage as digital files a few months ago. I used the free VirtualDub package to edit them. It allows you to advance a frame at a time so that you can be precise when cutting out naff footage etc. I used the XvidMPEG-4 codec to compress and ended up with some 46GB of avi files. You can use free software like Any Video Converter to convert to other formats. Good luck!
Posts: 139
From: La Mesa, CA, USA
Registered: Nov 2008
posted September 01, 2016 02:23 AM
Standards DVDs are made from MPG2 files. AVI files are 13GB per hour. I usually try to limit my single-layer DVDs to two hours, compressing the 26GB AVI to two hours using an MPG2 bitrate of about 4,600,000 bps for the render. I have used Sony Vegas for years to do my post production and their DVD Architect to author the DVDs. Their lower priced Studio version is good as well for this work.
Posts: 506
From: Shrewsbury, Shropshire, UK
Registered: Mar 2016
posted September 01, 2016 01:16 PM
Hi, Winbert. I positioned my Eumig 501 about 16" from a sheet of photo paper. Then I set up my old analogue camcorder which has output sockets. I positioned this so that it was as close as possible to the front corner of the projector. I fed the output to a Pinnacle Dazzle DVC101 analogue to digital convertor which I'd used to digitise VHS videos. I used the Pinnacle Instant DVD software to monitor the picture as I adjusted the camcorder to get the best possible picture. Although the software is designed to burn the video to DVD, it can be saved to a hard disk instead. Once captured, I was able to load the video file for each film into VirtualDub and edit. The "frames" in VirtualDub aren't the same as those on the cine film. A 50' super 8 film digitised has about 5,200 "frames" in VirtualDub.