PC Magazine tips on Digitizing Your Home Movies
Digitize Your Home Movies By Jan Ozer August 3, 2004 
Nowadays, working with video on a computer, in the form of digital video, is relatively simple. That may not be much of a comfort, however, if you're staring at several hours of Super 8 film and contemplating digitizing your home movies. Nevertheless, we decided to give this a try, converting the analog footage ourselves, using a prosumer and a consumer DV camera. We also had two service bureaus convert the footage. We discuss the results online (www.pcmag.com/ footageconversion). Let's walk through the process of digitizing video shot on 8-mm and Super 8 film to DV format. During the transfer, you'll use a film projector to display the footage and a DV camera to videotape it. Since most DV cameras can also output DV while shooting, you can transfer the output simultaneously to your computer, eliminating capture as a separate step. You'll need plenty of disk space, as each 50-foot film roll contains 3 to 4 minutes of video and requires about 750MB of storage space (about 13GB per hour of film). If you want to archive the unedited film directly on DV tape, as we did, you'll also need plenty of DV tapes; count on storing about 13 to 15 film rolls per 60-minute tape. Read the article at pcmag.com
Nowadays, working with video on a computer, in the form of digital video, is relatively simple. That may not be much of a comfort, however, if you're staring at several hours of Super 8 film and contemplating digitizing your home movies. Nevertheless, we decided to give this a try, converting the analog footage ourselves, using a prosumer and a consumer DV camera. We also had two service bureaus convert the footage. We discuss the results online (www.pcmag.com/ footageconversion). Let's walk through the process of digitizing video shot on 8-mm and Super 8 film to DV format. During the transfer, you'll use a film projector to display the footage and a DV camera to videotape it. Since most DV cameras can also output DV while shooting, you can transfer the output simultaneously to your computer, eliminating capture as a separate step. You'll need plenty of disk space, as each 50-foot film roll contains 3 to 4 minutes of video and requires about 750MB of storage space (about 13GB per hour of film). If you want to archive the unedited film directly on DV tape, as we did, you'll also need plenty of DV tapes; count on storing about 13 to 15 film rolls per 60-minute tape. Read the article at pcmag.com
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