A Fast and Efficient DIY Super 8 Film Digitizer

Before the proliferation of camcorders in the 1980s, most families recorded their memorable moments on Super 8 film cameras. As such, many people now have Super 8 film full of sentimental video, but no way to easily play it back. And that film can easily become damaged, so time is a factor. The safest route to take is backing that video up like any other important data, but first it has to be digitized. That’s where Elbert’s DIY Super 8 film digitizer comes in.

This follows the same basic operating principle as other DIY film and slide digitizers we’ve featured: a digital camera snaps a photo of each frame. In this case, the frame photos can then be automatically assembled into digital videos and backed up appropriately or viewed on modern smartphones, computers, TVs, and so on.

This project stands out because it is affordable, but also fast and efficient. The digital camera is a USB microscope connected to a PC and the Super 8 film feeds through a mechanism driven by a stepper motor. An ESP32-based development board controls the stepper motor and can advance the film by exactly one frame at a time. The ESP32 can also adjust the brightness of an LED that shines through the film to give the camera a good view.

This whole process occurs under the coordination of the PC, which runs a C++ program. It advances the film by one frame, illuminates the LED to the desired brightness, snaps a photo from the USB microscope, and then repeats that process until the user stops it at the end of a reel. That cycle can repeat quickly, so it won’t take long to digitize an entire film reel.

The USB microscope was a good choice because its magnification is adjustable and the film (less than a quarter of an inch across) can fill the entire video frame. And while the resolution isn’t very high by modern standards, these USB microscopes are inexpensive and the quality should be more than good enough for Super 8 film. Analog film doesn’t have a “resolution” in the same sense as digital video, but it has a finite number of photosensitive crystals (the grain). This camera should be able to capture the full quality, so the digital copies don’t require any sacrifices.