[Discuss] OT: 8mm to dvd

[Shirley Márquez Dúlcey]

On 10/21/2011 3:18 PM, Jack Coats wrote:
> My brother had it done in the Austin TX area by a local guy going into the
> business.
> They did pretty good for lots of our old family 8MM, super8, and slideshows
> of slides.
>
> Wife and I purchased a gadget that is really a small rear projection screen
> with a
> mirror (use your own projector and camera).  Kind of lame.  It worked but
> not real well.
>
> I think Walmart has that service.  If so Fuji does it for them.

Doing it with a projection screen would be a really poor way to go. The 
right way is to use a video capture board if we're talking about old 
fashioned analog 8mm tape; if it's Digital8 you just do a FireWire 
transfer to the computer. After that you've got a bit of DVD mastering 
to do (at the very least, converting the video to MPEG-2 if the capture 
board doesn't capture in that format and creating a minimal DVD menu 
structure) and burning a disc.

Big commercial services offering transfer service are likely doing it 
with minimal attention; they toss the tape in and start up some kind of 
automatic process, and you get a DVD that automatically plays the video 
from the tape when you put it in your player. Small independents might 
do something a bit fancier, including trimming dead air from the ends of 
the transfer and maybe menus and chapters.

If you have a video card or TV tuner card with analog capture capability 
it can be done at home, but it's a tedious process. Video capture is 
inherently limited to real time, and then there is more work to do when 
it's done.

Some high end Digital8 cameras will convert analog 8mm tapes to digital 
data and send them over the FireWire port. If you have access to one of 
those (and a FireWire port to connect it to) it can be used in place of 
the video capture card. It isn't any faster; the transfer is still real 
time.

There were combo VCR/DVD gadgets that could do that kind of transfer for 
VHS tape automatically. I don't know of any for 8mm.