Wolverine MovieMaker Pro
A while ago now, my parents sold the house they’d lived in since the early 1980s and moved permanently to Queensland. They’d been dividing their time between northern Queensland and Victoria for some time, but they decided the time had come to make the move for real.
There was a lot of rationalisation of possessions in preparation for the move, and decades worth of stuff had to go.
It was very late in the downsizing process that I became the custodian of a collection of Super-8 home movies chronicling a period from the early 1970s through to some time in the 1980s. I brought them home with me, and they languished in a basket for longer than I care to admit.
What on Earth could I do with them? I didn’t even have a projector. I had to get them transferred to digital somehow, but after checking around the price to get it done was looking … excessive. Prices can be around $50 for conversion of a 3-minute super-8 reel, and I had hours of film to transfer.
After cracking my knuckles dramatically, I did some internet searching (Kagi, not Google because Google sucks now) and found out that there were a number of devices available for purchase that would allow you to transfer 8mm film to mp4 at home. The best-reviewed was the somewhat preposterously named Wolverine Moviemaker Pro.
The Wolverine MovieMaker Pro in full flight.
It’s not cheap (around $600 Australian dollars) but if you have a lot of film to convert, then it just might make sense for you like it did for me. Operation is simple — feed the film as you would on a projector, pop an SD card in there, and press a couple of buttons. The Wolverine passes each frame one by one over a backlit glass plate and ‘scans’ the frame before moving to the next. It’s slow — maybe a few frames a second — so it takes maybe 20 minutes to process a standard 3-minute reel. Resulting video files are then stored on an SD card for transfer to anywhere you like, or you can even connect the MovieMaker Pro with RCA cables to a television. That seems like a weird thing to do, but hey, you do you.
Look how cute I was in 1976.
The results are … pretty good? Super-8 is a low-resolution medium to begin with, and years of improper storage wreaks havoc on both the colours and the underlying film substrate. Well-loved home movies will already be showing signs of wear before you ever get to them; scratches and splices and cigarette burns are all coming along for the ride.
The files themselves are 1080p HD, which is probably more than Super-8 really deserves if we’re being honest. Of course they’re in 4:3 aspect ratio, which looks a bit odd these days on widescreen tv, but looks just fine on YouTube or the devices people are going to look at these movies on.
The thing is, nobody is going to complain about the quality, because; the job here isn’t perfection. It’s about rekindling memories that people had thought were never to be seen again.