How to add maintain sound from Converting 8mm film to digital

[Stephen Strauss]

Hello, I just joined. My mom had a ton of 8mm film in the attic and my dad got a "8mm and Super 8 Reels Movie Maker Pro" and I converted all of her 8mm film to digital. Her and her sisters loved he memories from the 50s and 60s.

There are copper lines along the lines of some of the film which I have read online mean they contain sound; however, none of the converted 8mm films (now digital) have sound only picture. Any idea how to keep the sound?

[Janice Glesser]

Welcome to the forum. You will have to run the films on a sound projector to see if sound was actually recorded onto the sound strip. If there is sound you can hook a digital recorder or connect the sound output from the projector to your computer. Then using a video editing program place the video and audio files on the editors timeline to sync up.

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

In addition to Janice's comment...

- If possible, use a camcorder to "film" it. The captured video will give you a visual aid when editing the audio to the image. Even better, if you can managed to get the projector's audio output into the camcorder too, that would make it a lot easier.
- When editing, edit the audio track to the video track. Keep the video track strictly untouched.

This is just the general principle. If more detail needed, feel free to ask!

[Stephen Strauss]

Thanks, what digital recorder would you recommend? I know nothing about them. Here is a pic of the back of it.

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

Unfortunately your film scanner CANNOT capture sound from the film, it will scan only image and that's it.

That means you'll need a separate Super8 sound projector (in good working order) for the task of getting the sound from the film. Once you have both video and the sound, you will need the third process to marry them up together in an editing program.

In other words - still a ton of to-do-list for this job, but still in possible realm as well.

[Janice Glesser]

This is the digital recorder I use to capture audio from my film sound tracks.