Want to transfer film to dvd?

Great Questions for 8mm film transfer to DVD. There are many options out there and most companies try to choose for you. We like to give options, but it could be confusing.

1. Gold DVD's are fine. We use Taiyo Yuden watershield DVD's to give you a photograph quality printed on your disc. They will last 100 years as well. http://tinyurl.com/ybolyt2

I recommend getting two DVD copies, one you can watch, and scratch, and another that is for safe keeping and to make copies.

Regular DVD's will corrode on the inside layer if they are not manufactured properly. I've had some DVD's flake off on the inside layers due to the 'cheapness' of the DVD. Gold does not corrode, hence it is supposed to last over 100 years....if taken care of.

2. You can either get a Mini DV tape or a hard drive transfer of your files. I recommend the hard drive version because it is much easier to copy to another hard drive, plus, other files can be kept on the hard drive such as edit files so that editing is easier to do a year down the road. MiniDV tapes can be susceptible to drop-outs, kids ripping up the tapes, magnetic loss or not having a miniDV camera in the future. It also only holds 1 hour of footage.

In any case, the DVD has compressed files that are not archival quality.

3. It is hard to say which card will be used in camcorders in the future, but tape is definitely going away. One big reason is the manufacture of a tape drive and all of those parts is very difficult and costly. From a cost and convenience standpoint, tape is not the future for consumer or professional cameras.

Thanks!

Matt from Blue Cloud Video

it is hard to predict 100 years. long before there was such a thing as digital photography, Kodak would scan regular photos onto cd's called PhotoCD. These were gold and thought to last 100 years. I put 100s of my better photos on PhotoCD for archival purpose because Kodacolor negatives fade in relative short order. Now it is 20 years later, not 100, and i can make 2 observations.

1. I discovered by accident that Vista and OSX no longer support reading of PhotoCD discs, no one told me. Fortunately i have one XP laptop computer, so i was able to read the discs and make a normal CDrom with JPEG format which is my "new" archive. The gold Kodak PhotoCDs are now coasters.

2. I went to scan some of the original color negatives with my Canon Coolscan and found they are too far gone to save. Thank god i had the PhotoCDs made when i did. Color film negatives have a less than 30 year lifetime which is why professionals embraced digital media in the first place.

So get the DVDs but don't expect them to last forever. I have my video archives on DV tape. That will get me through the next decade and then i can decide to convert to another digital media. DV may be the last tape format to be developed, but it is not going away anytime soon. It is 15 years into what will probably be a 30 year run, if VHS, Umatic, Betacam and Quad are any guide.

Gold archival are good disk you Can copy as much as you wont stay with DVDs can use them in comp and dvd players. no vhs tapes are a thing of the past S/D card are here to stay and are better then DVDs don't starch and some hold more info on them the DVDs. if you live in a big city find a big camera shop most of them can put the film on dvds for you.

Import them to your PC, plug your IPOD in, import data on PC to ITUNES, sync, now there on.