Super-8 cine film conversion methods

We have some old Super-8 cine film reels and have been looking around at places that will convert it to something newer e.g. DVD.  It looks like there are two main methods:

  1. Frame-by-frame conversion, where each frame is scanned separately and the frame rate adjusted by occasionally doubling frames.  This seems to be quite expensive!
  2. Filming a projected image.  This sort of conversion is done at (for example) Aarchive.  This is much cheaper of course and there is a shop within walking distance that can convert it like this, so that’s most likely what we’ll do.

Anyone have positive/negative experiences about either method?


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3 responses to “Super-8 cine film conversion methods”

  1. Bruce avatar
    Bruce

    I’d recommend 2 for practicality.

    From recollection, Super 8 is 18fps so to do it frame by frame would mean another conversion ti 25f (for DVD or whatever).

    Filming the projected image sort of does that for you. Either way though something has to give.

    Last time I did a cine conversion I ‘filmed’ it with an older tube camera which had a little ‘persistence’ to it so it smoothed over the differing framerate somewhat.

  2. tim avatar

    Yes. Think we’ll go ahead with that tomorrow.

  3. Bill Davidsen avatar
    Bill Davidsen

    You have the possibility of better resolution and fidelity with method #1, depending on the scan resolution, of course. If you can get the “raw” frame scans you can create anything from NTSC (or PAL) DVD down to .avi and .flv using ffmpeg, scaling as wanted.

    I guess the question is how much you care about preserving every bit of information, and on that you probably decide on a reel by reel basis.

    Have a good holiday.