8mm film to IMovie

A fascinating project!

My older brother had 4 hours of (silent) 8mm cine film dating back to 1958-1980 (when he finally bought a video camera!). He wanted me to convert them to carefully edited DVDs, with music, sound effects, titles and so on. Like a madman I accepted the challenge! To make life easier he lives in Belgium and uses a PC!

The process, to cut this short, was as follows:

At considerable expense he had all the film transferred to four DVDs in some PC-only friendly mpeg codec, and sent them to me.

I used Streamclip and the Apple mpeg thingy (saving time by not loking it up) to convert these to Quicktime DV files. To make life even easier, the Belgian moron who did the conversion to DVDs had not done so in chronologal order!

That made for a very large QT file, which I imported into iMovie, and set about carving it into date order, re-exporting the various years to QT as individual files, and then importing into iMovie projects to edit.

Only a couple of months later I had it organised into three projects, each of an hour or so, beautifully edited with titles, transitions, music, sound effects and other bells and whistles, and burnt them to 3 DVDs. I was generally agreed that I deserved an Oscar for technical merit!

That was just to let you know that it can be done!

Your only real hurdle is the copy protection. Can you get a fresh set that is NOT copy protected?

But before you even start I heartily recommend that you update your OS and all software to the latest versions, particularly Quicktime, and make that Pro.

A call to the DVD provider indicated
that the DVD was copy protected ... even tho’ it is
my film on the DVD.

Well, that makes your job much more complicated. Your best bet is to find another transfer service that gives you a DVD without copy protection.

Another alternative that worked great for me in transferring 8mm film was to get the film transferred to DV format instead of DVD. In the DV format (delivered back to me on miniDV tapes) you can download via your videocam to iMovie and edit away to your hearts content and then burn to DVD. The only glitch in this is the cost at about 40 cents/foot. (7000 feet!)If you do a google search you will find a variety of vendors out there who will gladly do the job. There is an article in MacWorld (don't have the specifics) that gives a step by step process for doing this.

I've thought about using this service. Not only will they clean and restore the film, but they will transfer it to mini DV tape or DVD...and at considerably less than 40 cents/foot. Not an endorsement by me, but their service and price look appealing.

http://www.slidescanning.com/film-2-dvd.htm

GReat that you found a service like this one. I wish I had known at the time I had the need...

b