I have 15 Ea * 7 Inch Reels of our family's movies on Super 8 film that I want to convert to DVD. I also have a nice c. 1965 Bell & Howell projector which works great.
I do not want to have the conversion done commercially because (a) I'm cheap and (b) I cannot risk losing the films. Using a circa 1980 Sony Videocam and a Sony VCR-4 mirror box (projector in one side and camera in the other side looking through a diffuser) designed for this very thing resulted in muted and blurry images. I found a larger generic mirror box and it was only slightly better.
Tonight I experimented by projecting the movies on a large glossy poster board and setting my D5100 and 18-55mm kit lens set at 55mm on a tripod as close to the projector lens as I could (to minimize parallax) and my first brief attempt was surprisingly successful.
It's grainy, but I prefer that to blur. The color is very very good.
Can anyone offer suggestions to improve my tests?? Will I harm my D5100 doing this by getting hot or whatever? I think the D5100's time limit is 20 Minutes, which should be just about right. I have a high quality, high capacity memory card.
Sorry this went on. I'm excited, but don't want to damage or shorten the life of my D5100. Thank you all.
I do not want to have the conversion done commercially because (a) I'm cheap and (b) I cannot risk losing the films. Using a circa 1980 Sony Videocam and a Sony VCR-4 mirror box (projector in one side and camera in the other side looking through a diffuser) designed for this very thing resulted in muted and blurry images. I found a larger generic mirror box and it was only slightly better.
Tonight I experimented by projecting the movies on a large glossy poster board and setting my D5100 and 18-55mm kit lens set at 55mm on a tripod as close to the projector lens as I could (to minimize parallax) and my first brief attempt was surprisingly successful.
It's grainy, but I prefer that to blur. The color is very very good.
Can anyone offer suggestions to improve my tests?? Will I harm my D5100 doing this by getting hot or whatever? I think the D5100's time limit is 20 Minutes, which should be just about right. I have a high quality, high capacity memory card.
Sorry this went on. I'm excited, but don't want to damage or shorten the life of my D5100. Thank you all.