What a project I started. I received a DVD burner for my birthday. It will burn my VHS tapes to DVDs. The VHS tapes are already loosing some of their color and the sound on many are muffled in places. I sent my boys a few DVDs I made and will send them more as I make them. It was pretty easy to do.

I decided to put my 8mm movies on DVDs, too. That is more complicated and very time consuming. I had to borrow a projector. I had a transfer box that I bought a couple of decades ago to put my photos onto VHS. I used that by pointing the projector into the transfer box and filming it onto my camcorder. Then I plugged the camcorder into the DVD burner and burned them onto a DVD. There was so much flicker due to frames differences between the old projector and the camcorder that I ended up not using it.

I then tried playing the movies onto a piece of paper on the wall as close as I could and still get it in focus (it makes the colors and picture more vivid.) Then I just turned on my camcorder and recorded it off the paper. It did a better job than the transfer box. [** My VHS to DVD, or visa versa, says you can input from a camcorder but it has to be digital. The analog ones won’t work on my model, something to watch for if you have an analog camcorder. But I suppose you could input your analog camcorder into a VCR and record it and then it would work on one like mine that records VCR to DVD.]

I spent 2 solid days doing this (12 hours a day) and the results are not all that great. Many of the old 8mm has faded color, have turned off color to an orangy color or has some kind of damage that looks like dust or mold spots or actual holes in them. But I just have too many movies to pay for it to be done. The primo services will clean the movie, adjust the color, fix the damage and put them on DVDs but at quite a cost. At least mine are saved on DVDs now (shelf life is only 5 to 10 years) and I can do a digital copy every couple of years before data loss occurs, and I can share them with my family. I may have my favorite one or two movies sent away to a professional and actually get them restored. If doing it yourself you will curse threading the movies into the projector and then having to rewind it over and over…..I can’t believe I lived or that my kids lived, in an age where you had to thread a silent movie into a projector!

I had another problem. I was trying to record in different modes to see if I could improve the results when the light bulb of the projector burned out. That’s just great. I called the camera shop in Erie and the replacement bulb was over $50 bucks. Unbelievable. I can’t return the projector with a burned out bulb. So I checked the internet and found one for $23 plus shipping. I have a projector that had a burned out bulb (that’s why I borrowed one) so I ordered a bulb for mine, too. The use life of a projector bulb is only 15 hours. That’s robbery!!!

So while I wait for the bulbs, I took out my slide projector and tried to record my old 35mm slides from the wall like I did for the 8mm movies. Not good at all. So I used the transfer box and they look pretty good except for all the dirt, lint and scratches on the slides that you don’t see with the naked eye and the off color due to humidity and the heat and cold of being in the attic. I used the capture feature of the camcorder for still pictures. I transferred some to the computer from the camcorder and they are low quality at best on the computer. But burned from the camcorder to the DVD and playing them on the TV, they look pretty good for the shape they were in. I tried my flatbed scanner but the results weren’t that good and I have over 400 slides. It would take forever with that. I’m looking into the slide scanners. They cost a couple of hundred for a decent one. You don’t get too much of a break for a used one on eBay. Perhaps I’ll buy one new and resell it on eBay after scanning all of mine and getting most of my money back by reselling it.

I waited too long to do something about my old slides and movies. They never should have been stored in the attic. Some are just too far gone. I’m lucky I did tranfer my old photographs onto VHS 20+ years ago and that particular VHS tape held up good and is already transferred to DVD.

Has anyone done this yourself and had good results? If you tried one of the store services to do it did it turn out good?