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Digitizing Movies

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Brooklands

Brooklands

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For a long time I wanted to upgrade the quality of the copies of old family movies dating back to the 1930's. My parents had some professionally copied to VHS, and I had tried to copy others using a conversion device that used a camcorder and our movie projector. But none of the tapes copied well to digital, so I finally sent some movies to Legacybox. I first had found a 50% off deal, and now I am prepping a few more reels with a 60% off special.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the results. Some of the movies look better than they had when we watched them using a projector on a screen. And when the movies came back, they came on DVD's for TV viewing as well as separate disks with MP4 files for editing on the computer. I have posted a few edited movies on YouTube. The ones from the 1930's into the 1960's were shot on 16mm film, while the late 60's and 1970's where on super8. I have many more to edit, and most of the really old stuff will go on YouTube eventually since most of the people shown have passed away and can't complain to me now. Several films of interest there now are two from the 1930's showing the playground activities and scenes of Lehigh County, PA. In the newer category, the Allentown Fair and my college Films course movie "Rally" using footage from the first Schaefer 500 at Pocono with edited in for a "plot" may be of interest to some for more than just seeing the quality of the digitizing.

The one of Summer Harmony was not originally done on movie film, and is not part of the project...
 
Dave - you have more patience than I do, transferring all those photos, slides, and videos.

Wow, that 1955 "starts school" movie sure brings back memories. I was born in 1948, so the '50s were home turf to me. Remember when people actually dressed up to go somewhere? What a change in society! And home-made Halloween costumes. The times are a'changing.

Tom
 
I have digitized all of my VHS movies (store bought movies plus home movies). I also bought a special turn table and converted all my vinyl albums to .MP3 to play on my portable music player. For the VHS movies, I used this: Elgato Video Capture

My experience with the Elgato was pretty good. The movies now play through my Apple TV with about the same quality as they did playing the tape on a VCR.
 
When the kids got married in the family church in Eccleshall Stafordshire, UK, the videos done professionally would not play on a US machine due to the different cycles in the electricity. My son paid a lot of money to a firm to convert them to play on our systems, they never came out right. The only place they can be viewed correctly is in the UK on one of their machines. A real bummer! PJ
 
PAUL161 said:
When the kids got married in the family church in Eccleshall Stafordshire, UK, the videos done professionally would not play on a US machine due to the different cycles in the electricity. My son paid a lot of money to a firm to convert them to play on our systems, they never came out right. The only place they can be viewed correctly is in the UK on one of their machines. A real bummer! PJ
Click to expand...


I suspect now you could

1. buy a VCR that plays either or,

2. Find someone in the UK (or even locally - there are a lot of them in Toronto) who could digitalize the original UK version onto DVD or a memory stick, thereby bypassing the cycles completely.
 
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