Digitize just to advertise a film for sale?

[Brian Harrington]

I see this guy selling stuff all the time on the bay -- other people's home movies, which in and of itself I find odd (even though many do it), but...

The screenshots in the listing show the film being shown on his PC monitor! So he digitizes the films, then snaps a shot of it playing on his monitor with his cell phone? Make no sense.

Why not grab on screenshot of the video while it is paused, and use that in the listing? Why bother to digitize the film at all if you're just selling the film? Unless he wants to keep a copy for himself, I guess.

If he has the knowledge to digitize film, then he certainly should know how to get a screenshot on his PC, right?

VLC media player (which is free) also has a function to grab a screenshot while a video is playing -- you just click the camera icon!

[Joerg Polzfusz]

Hi!

Are you sure that the screenshots are from a PC monitor? Some sellers are using a rear-screen-projector or an editor as they usually produce less visible hotspots.
In any case: screenshots from a video are worthless for any potential buyer as the video might have been altered (colorized B&W films etc.).

[Brian Harrington]

Yup, since you can see at the bottom of the screen the play/ff/pause/stop icons, the mouse cursor, and the video progress bar. Believe you me, I've looked closely and have scratched my head. And I've been seeing this guy's lisitng for a long time -- perhaps more than a year.

People on eBay do the weirdest things. Sometimes I think selling on eBay requires you to check your brain at the door.

I just saw a listing for films where the guy took a pic of his hand holding 3 boxes of films, overlapping each other, making it hard to see the titles of the films, followed by pics of the reels themselves. The color or sound stickers were not viewable on all the boxes. The title for the listing was vague and didn't specify it was just 3 films, but a "lot" with a mention of the genre. The description was AI-generated and didn't list the films' titles -- basically useless. Would it have killed him to take a pic showing the full cover of the films??? He has 7 pics altogether.

BTW, eBay needs to get rid of that AI feature -- it's useless. People who think AI will take over the world in the next few years are grossly mistaken. I've talked to some otherwise intelligent people who bring up AI out of the blue and then spew their spiel like they are experts, and what they are saying is laughable. They are not in the IT/Tech industry like I am. They never wrote a line of code in their lives!!!

This is not a listing I'm interested in anyway, but when I am, and I ask the seller for more details, sometimes they're good and will update the listing, sometimes not.

Once I asked a seller if a film had sound, and he replied, "I thought all Super 8 had sound."

[Ken Finch]

EBay is always good for a laugh where our hobby is concerned. I gave up on it years ago. 😊

[Brian Harrington]

Yes, but that's been my only source for buying films for many years now.

[Ken Finch]

Have you not looked at the dealers lists on the forum? There are at least 3 u k dealers who would ship films to you I should think. Are there no longer any in the U S ?

[Brian Harrington]

I've seen those websites from the U.K., but shipping and the fact that most don't accept paypal make it undesirable for me. Plus, I haven't seen anything I need. At least one of them uses terrible formatting, all upper case for everything not just titles. No spacing -- really an eye test to read through unless I import into into Excel and play around with formatting -- way too much trouble.

Only one US seller that I know of, but he charges at least twice as much as the going rate on eBay. And like 5 to 10x that amount for projectors. You probably know who I'm talking about without naming names.

Love it or hate it, eBay has the best selection and I've had pretty good luck getting what I need and some real bargains, to boot. I've bought from U.K sellers there if they don't use the International Shipping Program which is way, way too high a price. If I'm in the mood for a color film I look at the U.K. since for whatever reason they used better colour (note the spelling) stock, especially Disney who shafted US collectors with Eastman color prints.