Copy Your Old Slides The Easy Way!

Step 7 Start Copying Slides!

I got satisfactory results using this method after having worked out the little kinks in the procedure. I probably copied about 100 slides in a short period of time. And the best part is I saved the money and the time and effort of shipping and waiting for a service.

Comments

[kariswg1]

Thanks .....this is a great idea. I will save this, for one those bad winter days, when you don't want to go outside. I don't have many slides, but enough to set this up. Now, on to finding a way to transfer old 8mm movies to DVD.

[greatscotmagic]

I think this idea would work for copying movies. You would need to replace the slide projector with a movie projector that would show your movies, a video camera instead of the still camera and the black matte opening would need to be the size/ratio of your projected film.

After getting the movie into the camera, if your camera can't get the video directly onto DVD, you would save them to your computer and then onto DVD with DVD burning software- at which point, you could edit all those shots of people with their heads cut off out of frame!<grin>

I bought a commercial video transfer unit on ebay pretty cheaply, I think I paid about $10.00 for it. It's not fancy, but works on the same principle as this. There are openings for the slide and movie projector to shoot their image into and a screen for the image, which is then copied by a digital camera (still or movie) shooting the screen.

Copying a movie seems to be easier and less time consuming than copying slides. Once you got the projector and camera set up and running, you could go do something else while the film is being copied. Slides need to be photographed 1 at a time, which would tie you down while you are doing it. It would be great if the process could be automated. I came up with the idea of shooting the slides with a video camera and then using a software program ro convert the movie into stills.

DVDvideosoft has a free program that will take each frame of a film or video and convert them into JPGs. You can set the program to convert the whole movie, or it can be set to convert frames at intervals you set, like every 10th frame. Once I get my unit set up and running, I will see if it works.

There are Instructables on how to transfer old movies to DVD and articles on the subject on wikihow and e-how.

FYI, DVDvideosoft has a lor of free audio and video programs, you can check them out:
http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/

They have great technical support as well. I speak from personal experience and I use thier programs a lot for converting video formats, quick video cutting, and audio work..

[Creativeman]

Thank you for your comment. Cman