8mm Forum: Super 8 Digital Transfer Project

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Topic: Super 8 Digital Transfer Project

Jeff Miller
Junior
Posts: 1
From: Athens, GA, USA
Registered: May 2014

posted May 19, 2014 10:22 PM

When I was a young kid growing up in Rochester, my Dad worked for Kodak so we got to play with the new cameras and projectors. I used to make films at a very young age because processing and film was free. I recently found a box at my parents house of Super 8 film. About 125 or so and a mix of my stuff and my fathers work. I remember making opening title shots with a letter box from Kodak and cutting film to make movies. What fun I had as a kid working with Super 8.

Attached are some photos of the film I found.

My question. I want to transfer all of these to digital form and do it myself. I do not have a projector. I have a Mac Pro, FCP, Panasonic GH3 camera and an older 3CCD Canon GL1.

I would like to watch these during the transfer process. Would projecting to a screen and recording them onto my GH3 work out well? What projector is suggested so I can record the sound at the same time?

I have been reading this forum for only a day on this transfer topic and see many expensive methods, but I was hoping I could do a decent quality transfer job with only buying a projector and screen. [Confused]

Please advise me, I am having a great time looking over the Super 8 titles I wrote on each box and can't wait to start enjoying these and editing them into short videos once I have them on my computer.

Great forum and I look forward to learning a lot and hopefully contributing where I can.

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Pete Richards
Master Film Handler

Posts: 302
From: Australia
Registered: Sep 2010

posted May 20, 2014 10:34 PM

You will get better results with a cold-light and pointing the camera directly at the film-gate, than recording a projected image.

If you can modify your projector for speed control, you can run the projector at the same speed as your video camera, and keep them in sync (by tapping the video-out from the camera and utilising the sync pulse with a bit of circuitry).

Otherwise you can try a frame-by-frame process by slowing the projector down to a few frames per second, fitting a magnet and hall effect sensor so you know when each frame is 'in the gate' and trigger your capture software to capture a single image each time it gets the trigger signal.

You would need to replace the bulb with an led light source so that you don't melt the film [Smile]

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