Experience inConverting 8mm Home Movies to DVD

IBM Mid-Peninsula PC ClubPeter Hirsch

May 19, 20081

Second of SeriesDigitizing Movies

• Digital Archiving of Videos and Photos– Alan Kolsky– April 2008

• Experience in Converting 8mm Home Movies to DVD– Peter Hirsch– May 2008

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Convert 8mm Home Movies to DVD Steps

1. Digitize 8mm films2. Edit Digitized films3. Add Titles4. Add Sound

Narration/Music5. Create DVD6. View DVD

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Digitize 8mm Films• Service– Digital Pickle

• 1169 Howard St., Suite 203• San Francisco, Ca.• 415-861-4565

• www.digitalpickle.com

• Cost– 1838 Feet (.25/ft) – Uncompressed AVI format to an external hard drive– $524.47

• Pickup/Delivery service– Palo Alto and Los Gatos

• Time to Digitize– About 1 week

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Digitize 8mm Films

• Important– If you want to edit the digitized videos• You must not convert them to DVD immediately• Use AVI format to store the digitized output• Use an external disk drive with enough storage

– In my case the Reels took 700k-5Megs each– 15 Reels were about 25 megabytes

» 5 Large Reels» 10 Small Reels

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Edit Digitize Films

• Used Microsoft Movie Maker– Simple to use– Function is adequate but minimal– Comes with Microsoft Vista Operating System

• Split movies into smaller clips• Delete clips

– Poor quality– Too long– Wrong focus for theme

• Paste clips together to make movie• Time to edit can take days or months

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Add Titles to Film

• Insert titles at beginning of each clip• Add transitions

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Add Sound Narration/Music

• Using Microphone add narration• Used CDs add music

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Create DVD

• Used “Easy MPEG/AVI/DIVX/WMV /RM to DVD” to convert WMV file to DVD

• Obtained program from www.download.com

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View DVD

• Home movie complete– View DVD

• Re-edit and iterate process

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