Film/slides-to-video Transfer System - The Director - Model V-0612

Want to transfer your old 8mm and Super8 movies to HD using your DSLR? Not sure this device would not hurt more than it helps. Of course, this is a long-discontinued gadget that was originally intended to transfer old home movies to VHS. Considering the fact that VHS is the worst motion imaging system ever known to man, the Ambico Film Transfer System is about right.All this thing amounts to is a milky white plastic panel that serves as a projection screen, an adjustable base to hold the thing up in front of your movie projector, a mirror inside set to 90-degrees so that left-to-right is corrected and signs and t-shirts don't read backwards, and a cheap diopter lens on the output port so that a VHS camera without a macro lens can be close focused on the tiny projected image.Anymore, you really don't need this. Simply get a piece of frosted glass or some kind of tracing paper from the art store, and project your image on that. Aim a DSLR camera with macro lens directly into the projector with the frosted glass or paper between. Yes, this results in an image reversed left-to-right, but that is easy to fix in software. VHS is dead and gone, so no need for the right angle mirror.Is this a good plan? Yes and no. I've been hoping to transfer my parents home moves for 30 years. There are multiple approaches to achieve this.The ideal solution is individual frame scanning. Unless you live in Los Angeles and know your way around the motion picture industry, this technology is almost never available locally. And it is expensive. I calculated my cost recently, and it was going to be over ten thousand to digitize a large box of films.Another alternative, one that is available in many bigger cities, is a telecine transfer. These involve a modified movie projector. This is much less expensive, and is probably the best for the average person. My one warning on this is to beware of "DVD Conversion" because optical discs are dead as 8mm film, only most people don't know it yet. Also, a telecine system optimized for DVD is by definition SD standard definition, not HD.When you go with expensive frame scanning, you can capture quality at resolutions above today's HD, including 2K and UHD/4K. I'm not optimistic that most old home movies were made to a high standard, but I'd still like to have high quality digital files.For me, that means ProRes format. This entire process is too complicated to explain in an Amazon review, but there are resources online. You will know you are reading the right things from people who know what they are doing when they start talking about delivering their work on a hard disk drive, not a DVD, and not in highly compressed video formats like the ones used on YouTube.

This was a good buy. I have thousand of feet of 8mm movies that I am putting on DVD's. I does a good job. Buy one, if you can find one.