First, you can buy a film-to-video converter, which looks like a compact version of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel projector. The good news: “Film is a pretty sturdy medium,” says Ashley Blewer, an archivist, developer, and moving-image specialist, “so old home movies on 8 mm, 16 mm, or Super 8 reels are likely to be in decent shape.”ĭo it yourself. There are two DIY methods. Once you’ve identified the kind of film you have, you can turn it into a digital format-but it’s going to take some time and money. If the film strip is roughly two pencils wide-and on a reel that looks like the kind you might see in a documentary about the Golden Age of Hollywood-it’s probably 16 mm. Each 3-inch reel contains about 50 feet of film, good for only a few minutes of action.
“Regular 8 film is about as wide as a pencil on a small reel about 3 inches in diameter,” says Howard Besser, professor of cinema studies at New York University and founding director of the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program. If you have old reels of film in the attic packed in iconic yellow Kodak boxes, they’re probably Regular 8 or Super 8 film. Although Kodak released 16 mm Kodachrome film in 1935, then 8 mm (aka Regular 8) film a year later, home movies didn’t really take off until the 1960s, when Kodak released Super 8.
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