Caleb's Blog

Super 8 conversion to DVD I am currently trying to convert my families Super 8 home movies to DVD and have had limited success. To begin with I thought I would just pay to have a professional do the work for me. I started by getting DVD Transfer in Adelaide city to do one, 3 minute tape first. I got it back and was very disappoint as he told me the film had degraded very badly and the footage was very purple. I decided to get my Super 8 projector working so I could see the quality of the rest before paying the $3,500 to convert the other 20 I had. After getting the projector fixed I played the tape and was surprised at how clear it was. Here is a side by side comparison of what DVD transfer gave me and a simple “Cam” job by me, against the wall. As you can see they are very different. For starters mine has more in the frame and is no where near as dark and purple. By the way, the picture that is projected on my home wall is much, much better that what I can show here. DVD Transfer is a...

Over the past few weeks I have been converting Super 8 videos to my computer as well as scanning old pictures. During the process I have had a few hiccups and have had to explain encoding and quality degradation to a few people without success. I decided to do a little experiment and blog my results. If I take a jpg picture and save it, without editing anything, 100 times will I lose any quality. Here is my starting picture. (640 * 480 @ 43.9kb) (please note this blog may change the size on upload) Here is the same picture after saving 10 times Here is the same picture after 20 saves. It's quite obvious we are losing quality somewhere (no need to do the 100). The reason for this is that jpg is a lossy compression format. Even when saving a JPG at the highest quality it is still compressed and has a slight quality loss. On the other hand TIFF and BMP are lossless formats saving each and every pixel of information. This is great but the file size can be cumbersome for the web.