Experience in Converting 8mm Home Movies to DVD IBM Mid-Peninsula PC Club Peter Hirsch May 19,

Second of Series Digitizing Movies Digital Archiving of Videos and Photos – Alan Kolsky – April 2008 Experience in Converting 8mm Home Movies to DVD – Peter Hirsch – May

Convert 8mm Home Movies to DVD Steps 1.Digitize 8mm films 2.Edit Digitized films 3.Add Titles 4.Add Sound Narration/Music 5.Create DVD 6.View DVD 3

Digitize 8mm Films Service – Digital Pickle 1169 Howard St., Suite 203 San Francisco, Ca Cost – 1838 Feet (.25/ft) – Uncompressed AVI format to an external hard drive – $ Pickup/Delivery service – Palo Alto and Los Gatos Time to Digitize – About 1 week 4

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 5

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 6

Add Titles to Film Insert titles at beginning of each clip Add transitions 7

Add Sound Narration/Music Using Microphone add narration Used CDs add music 8

Create DVD Used “Easy MPEG/AVI/DIVX/WMV /RM to DVD” to convert WMV file to DVD Obtained program from 9

View DVD Home movie complete – View DVD Re-edit and iterate process 10