Converting cine reels to hard drive / DVD

[coffeeicing]

Does anyone have any advice about how to go about this?

I've just acquired a big box of old cine reels (about 20 of them) from my childhood dating back to about 1970.

Ideally I'd like to have it all transferred onto a hard drive then I can fiddle about with it in iMovie & make a DVD. I've had a rummage on the internet and it seems that this will cost up to £80 a reel !

Anyone done anything similar or found another way forward?

DH projected them onto a plain wall and recorded them with our new video camera. There was no sound track on the cine so we added background music to some of it. The results are better than we expected.

You can get it transfered professionally, but it's not cheap.

Thanks NAGY. Does it look like a recording of a recording, or does it look like footage from your video camera? (I would add music separately as well so no sound to worry about, just picture quality.)

The better quality cine was OK....Maybe 'slower' than in RL. The cine that was not so well focused didn't transfer as well. You have to get the cine well focused.

Not as good as a modern video camera. But I'm glad we did it.

Thanks NAGY. I'm struggling as I'd really like the quality to be great but don't want to pay a fortune. Also I don't have a projector and don't know what's on there, so could end up forking out a huge wodge for hours of dross...! Maybe getting a cheap projector on ebay ought to be my first step.

There must be lots of unused projectors out there somewhere. We borrowed one to do ours. At one time you could buy equipment to transfer cine to VHS (if you've still got that!), but even that wasn't cheap. Also you may well lose quality each time it's transfered.

bumping just in case anyone else has any experience to add

bumping one last time, just in case

Hi.

Four years ago, I used this company www.memories4keeps.co.uk to transfer 3 reels of cine film to dvd. It cost £72 in total. It was one of the cheapest companies at the time.

I was very pleased with the quality of the transfer. I did not have access to a cine projector and so could not check what was on them first - there was a large quantity of dross! But there were also some priceless memories and it was well worth the cost.

With so many films, I agree that in your case it would be worth checking to see what is on the films first. Unfortunately I have no experience of cine myself and would not know how you could go about cutting out the unwanted film before using a transfer service.

memories4keeps transferred my video onto a DVD intended to be played straight onto a standard DVD player - this was the only service they offered at the time. I was able to import this DVD footage into a video editing application (Pinnacle Studio) and edit it as if it had come from my modern day camcorder. Worked a treat.

They also operate an ebay shop where you can see feedback. I notice that they mention transfer to AVI and bulk discounts. May be worth getting in touch with them.

Good luck with your project.