From 8 mm film to YouTube

My maternal grandfather, Otto Nielsen, was a keen photographer, and he also recorded the family on 8 mm film from 1973 till around 1978, when he had to stop due to illness.

As an example, here is a brief recording from my first birthday (which is quite appropriate, given that my youngest daughter will be one tomorrow):

However, going from the original film strip to YouTube has not been all that straightforward.

After his death, his 8 mm films were lying around in a drawer in my grandmother’s flat, mixed up with some films he must have bought at some point.

After quite a few years, my grandmother finally got round to viewing them all with a view to throwing away the ones he hadn’t made himself, and she took the remaining ones up to a shop where they converted them to VHS, added some easy-listening music and discarded the original films.

This week I then bought a kit to connect our VHS recorder to my Windows 7 computer, which creates an MPEG file.

I then loaded this file into iMovie on my Mac (which was a bit tricky, because iMovie won’t admit that it likes MPEG, so I had to create a MP_ROOT folder at the root level of my USB key and create a folder called “101PNV01” inside this folder and put my MPEG files inside this [thanks!]).

From then on, it was easy – iMovie is great for editing films and putting them onto YouTube.

My only remaining problem is what to do about a church service starring my mum which was broadcast back in 1982: I have it on VHS, too, but the video capture software on my PC claims it’s copy-protected and stops after five seconds. 🙁