Media Melee

Technical Details

I inherited many reels of regular 8mm film, but my first home movie was taken circa 1980 on a Super 8mm film cartridge. Each cartridge recorded 150 seconds of silent motion video that the local photo shop postal-mailed to Rochester, NY for processing. A week later I'd get a 3" reel spooled with 50' of processed film and only then got to see what I had captured. Generally I kept everything, even if it was out of focus or under/over/double-exposed.

Viewing was an elaborate task, which required threading a processed reel into a projector that used a bright, hot, expensive bulb to show the movie on a glass-bead-covered projection screen. You'd minimize/maximize the view by walking the screen, relative to the projector, forwards/backwards. To reduce this tedium I'd splice eight 50' reels together onto one 400' reel, giving about 20 viewing minutes and allowing me to bore friends and family for an extended period.

Film to Video8 Tape

I stopped using film when Video8 became mainstream due to longer recording time, better viewing quality, computer compatibility, reduced media size and weight, and overall convenience. Before long I had two video libraries, one of cumbersome film reels, the other of small cassette tapes.

All film degrades over time as the color fades and the physical media is worn by repeated showings. My Super 8mm film was still relatively young, but I also had regular 8mm film dating from 1950, all of which I wanted to preserve. With this impetus, in the early 1990s I decided to copy all film reels to Video8 tape.

Being young and on a budget I decided to do the transfer myself by simply projecting the film and recording the movie directly off the screen - except I didn't use the glass-bead screen, which tended to introduce graininess due to the size of the beads. Instead, I used an 8.5" x 11" piece of very white, smooth paper. I was very careful to record in a dark basement and to squarely align the film projector and Video8 camcorder as much as possible with the paper. It was during this process that I added a movie title and dubbed an audio track of classical music. Trial and error resulted in this procedure: