Why Not Just Transfer My Film at Home?
When some people look at the potential cost of converting their 16mm and 8mm film to DVD, they may consider the idea of just converting it themselves using a projector and a video camera. This may seem simple in theory, but it is actually very difficult to make work with any quality. There are a number of problems with this approach that affect the quality such as alignment, exposure control, and an effect called “aliasing” which will create bright spots running through the final video. Most consumer grade video cameras and camcorders don’t have control features needed to make this work well and the quality will be poor.
If you were to obtain a studio grade video camera with the proper controls, you could come up with a reasonable capture with a lot of fine tuning, but the speed control and the difference in frame rate of film (which is typically 18 frames per second) vs. camcorder frame rates of 30 frames per second will always be an issue. These problems also make it very difficult to keep a proper focus on your image and your final movie will look blurry since the camera will ultimately be capturing the image as the frame is transitioning.
