I recently discovered around a dozen 8mm cine film reels in a cupboard at my Dads house, some have labels on describing whats on them and some do not. Having no longer a cine projector and for sheer convenience I was looking into getting the films transferred onto DVD, plus it'll be a nice surprise for Dad.

There appears to be a lot of companies online claiming to offer the best service and I'm stuck as to who to go for. I just want a reliable, value for money service and the original films returned. I'd like to be able to edit the DVDs and add music myself on my PC when returned.

Was wondering if any of you out there have any advice, experience or reccommendations.

They sound irreplaceble so I personally wouldn't risk all the lot in one go with any company.

But I would first try and get a cine projector and film off the screen with a camcorder and then maybe consider sending them away to get properly converted.

So if they got lost some copies would then exist.

If you can find somebody local that you can deal face 2 face with would be best.

Second-hand projector and a (preferably 4:3) camcorder would be the cheapest and safest route. The learning curve with capturing footage, editing and adding music is fairly straightforward. And once you get your setup how you want it, you should be able to whizz through a dozen reels.

A dozen reels - commercial serivce might be reasonable ?

Just give them 1 reel at a time!

Well now, reliable should be easy if you go by recommendation or customer's testimonials.

"Value for money" is a somewhat more flexible term. It means different things to different folk.

Have you looked at prices for professional transfer? They seem to be around the £10 mark per 3" reel. Having done pro-cine transfer myself using TRV-8 machines (cine direct to video) and babysat the process by riding the iris and the colour correction joystick and the speed control, and also dealing with the odd resplice then £10 per sounds like pretty decent VFM. Those transfer machines cost £2000+

This Ebay guy gets very good feedback and has done hundreds of transfers without one neg.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Cine-Film-...item255a6ede30

Looks good, I've got a bit of cine film of my wedding that I've never seen. I might give this a go.

I'm sure you can pick up a nice Rank Cintel Telecine for less that $80,000 these days

Oh happy memories...

Thank you all for advice. I think I'll send one reel to this guy and see the results. If all goes well (looking at his feedback it looks promising) I shall send him the others.

Interesting that he has so much good feedback, considering the two examples he posts on YouTube are mediocre.

This chap doesn't do professional transfers, but there are some example of the quality that can be achieved...
http://www.super-8.be/s8_Eindex.htm

Cheers,
David.

I found bags of cine film at my Mum's house 4 years ago and discovered a company based in Nottingham who transferred the 8mm reels to a digital video format for me. I decided to do it this way so I could edit the Quicktime files on my computer, then burn my own DVDs. The results were very good!

Anyway, Alive Studios can also output your cine straight to DVD if you require.

http://www.alivestudios.co.uk/

All my reels were returned intact via registered post. I used Alive about 3 times in total - like you I was too nervous to send all those precious memories in one go in case they got lost on the way there. It's worth sending a reasonable amount for them to work on because of their pricing structure, but their website will clarify that.

My only caveat is that every 2-3 months Alive Studios have a 20% off sale and on one of the occassions I used them I realised I was going to miss out on this offer because they were already processing one of my orders. I rang them and they kindly offered to honour the 20% offer! So if you do go ahead and decided to use them, keep checking out their website's landing page until you next see the 20% offer. It normally runs for about a month, I believe.

Good advert there.

Yes, I was thinking that was shameful plugging, but it looks like they go great work (though I'm unconvinced that most 8mm films really deserve an HD transfer).

I don't think the amateur film taken at my wedding in 1980 will.

There seem to be only a handful of companies that can transfer cine to full HD successfully. One such company is iMemoryBox.co.uk. They too have an eBay store they do a 99p sample transfer so it won't actually cost much to really find out if your old cine films are worth the slight premium for an HD transfer. I also note they are offering to put the transferred cine on DVD as well as HD, so all in all not bad.

They offer?

You mean you offer!

I saw a firm at the BBC who do you think you are show that do HD from cine film. There was a lot of interest in their stand and they seemed to be using some very hi tech equipment.

www.cine2dvdtransfers.co.uk

Lol at the 1 posters...

Join date 2008 and 1 post...lol

Hello, just joined the forum to meet and chat with other film makers like myself and found a distinct lack of up-to-date info regarding the technology available today for converting 8mm, 9.5mm and 16mm cine film to digital formats.
Lots of threads talk about 'transfer to dvd' and other antiquated methods, but I'm more interested in brand new tech like 4K scanning and 3D scanning etc.

Hope it's ok that I drop a link here, but my site is really informative about this area and discusses the current techniques of frame-by-frame scanning in great detail.
hope people find it helpful: http://www.alivestudios.co.uk/cine-film-to-dvd

Would love to hear from other members about the technology they're using, and where this exciting industry is heading next.

Nice advertising,well done.

Google cine to DVD and guess who has paid lots of money for the top search spot.

http://www.alivestudios.co.uk/cine-f...zhYaAm2K8P8HAQ


For those of you without deep pockets Max Spielmann will probably be very very considerably cheaper.

Nice try.