Customer had this VHS tape of her wedding transferred to DVD by Legacybox in May 2020. They omitted roughly 19 minutes from the beginning of the tape (including the wedding ceremony) and left about an hour and 20 minutes of blue screen at the end of the disc. The bitrate used to burn the disc is obviously low because only about half the capacity of the disc was used. Overall sloppy work by Legacybox and this is why you get a better transfer when you use a smaller locally owned company like DDVF. Cheap prices mean lower quality work and you get what you pay for.
Author: ddvf
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Bell & Howell Filmosound 8 – Super 8 sound film from 1969 that uses audio cassettes
Step back into late-60s filmmaking tech with a look at the Bell & Howell Filmosound 8 system, first introduced in December 1969. Long before Kodak’s 1973 launch of factory-striped Super 8 sound film, Filmosound 8 gave filmmakers a way to record true sync sound using completely silent Super 8 cartridges.
In this video, we show how the Filmosound setup works:
• A Super 8 camera (like the Bell & Howell Autoload models, and later modified Canon 814s) is tethered to a
• Dedicated cassette recorder, which captures both the audio and a stream of sync pulses—one pulse for each frame the camera exposes.On playback, a matching Filmosound 8 projector reads those pulses from the cassette and constantly adjusts its speed to stay locked to the sound. The film itself has no magnetic stripe—it’s standard Super 8—but the cassette’s pilot-tone track keeps picture and sound perfectly in step.
That means Filmosound 8 brought sync dialogue and narration to home, educational, and industrial Super 8 productions about four years before Kodak’s own Super 8 sound cartridges (Ektasound) put magnetic stripe directly on the film in 1973.
You’ll also see why Filmosound never became a true mass-market hit: the setup was a bit cumbersome. You had a camera tethered to a cassette deck, extra cables to wrangle, and then a matching projector to play it all back in sync. But that complexity came with a payoff—because the sound lived on a full-size audio cassette instead of a tiny magnetic stripe on the film (like Kodak’s Ektasound cartridges introduced in 1973), the audio fidelity could actually be better. Less hiss, more headroom, and the option to re-record or mix on tape meant Filmosound 8 sometimes delivered cleaner, richer sound than the “all-in-one” striped Super 8 systems that came later.
If you’re into vintage cameras, film transfer work, or just love obscure movie tech, this is a great example of how clever engineers worked around the limitations of early Super 8 to get professional-style sound on a consumer format.
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1998 Sony Handycam HandyGuide with introduction to Digital Mavica
Learn some tips & tricks for using your camcorder in 1998. And stay until the end to see the Digital Mavica that records photographs to floppy disks! We digitized this 1998 Video8 cassette to show the equipment and techniques that were available at the time for producing home videos and digital photos. One of our customers still had it in his camera bag with his Sony CCD-TR416 camcorder! Video preservation by DDVF.com for educational purposes.
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Slow winding Video8 videotape
We use sunlight (UV) to kill or inactivate mold on a Video8 camcorder tape. We will physically clean the dead mold off the tape surface before digitizing the videotape. Here is the slow winding machine we 3D printed to slowly wind the tape and “unstick” it. We can then deliver the video on DVD and/or as an MP4 file on a USB flash drive. www.ddvf.com
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How to get tape out of dead VHS-C camcorder
Saving a VHS-C tape from a “dead” camcorder. Battery is drained on this VHS-C Panasonic but we can use an external power supply to give the camcorder 6 volts to eject the tape. We can then deliver the video on DVD and/or as an MP4 file on a USB flash drive. www.ddvf.com
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98 VHS video cassettes
98 different VHS video tapes from Konica, 3M, AMPEX, Target, PDMagnetics, Focal, Zenith, Spartan, Avanti, Polaroid, Gemini, Digitech, Memorex, Radio Shack, Panasonic, JVC, RCA, Fuji, Scotch, TDK, BASF, Sony, Maxell, and Kodak.
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Rescuing VHS-C tape from a VHS adapter with corroded 2001 AA battery
Early camcorders used the Compact VHS (VHS-C) format. VHS-C has the same width (1/2”) magnetic tape inside as the standard VHS but the put less tape inside (usually 30 minutes instead of 2 hours). VHS-C camcorders came with an adapter so you could insert the tape into a normal VHS VCR to watch your videos. Most adapters use a AA battery to power the motor. They did make some that were manual – you turn the wheel and it moves everything into place. No other camcorder format (Video8, Hi8, Digital 8, MiniDV) had an adapter that would let you play the tape in a VHS VCR – you had to run wires from your camcorder to your TV. Would never work since the magnetic tape inside the cassettes was much narrower than VHS. If you have any of these tapes, bring them by the store and we’ll transfer to DVD and/or MP4 files on a USB flash drive.
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Killing mold on videotapes with the Ultra Violet Inactivation Chamber (UVIC)
Using sunlight (UV) to kill or inactivate mold on a Video8 camcorder tape. We will physically clean the dead mold off the tape surface before digitizing the videotape. We can then deliver the video on DVD and/or as an MP4 file on a USB flash drive.
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Ejecting Video8 tape from a dead Sony CCD-F201 using 6V
Okay, this is a Sony CCD F201. It’s a 1991 model Video8 camcorder. This is the rest of it here. We’ve taken off this cover cuz we’re trying to get this stuck tape out of here. It’s the customer’s camera. They brought it in. The camera’s completely dead. Hooking up power back to these terminals here doesn’t work. Camera doesn’t turn on at all. So, we’re gonna try and hotwire it a little bit using this motor here to activate the transport. So, we’ve got our lab power supply here set to about five six volts.
And we’ll try to put a little power into this thing and see if we can get that thing to pop out. So, stand by. Okay. So, I pulled back the tape that covers contacts on this motor and we’re going to put a little bit of voltage on here.
Maybe have to go the other way. Let’s try this.
It’s moving.
There we go. Look at that. Pop the tape right out.
We’ll rewind this. It’s got a
Maybe why the tape was stuck cuz this lid’s not really working either. We’ll get this tape fixed up and then we’ll transfer it to she’s getting DVDs and she’s getting a flash drive, MP4s files on the flash drive. So, if you have like an old camera like this and you got a tape in there you need to get out. If you’re not comfortable doing this kind of stuff you work yourself, bring it in. You can see here the little motor and they uh this is Sony manufacturing at the time in 1991. They used a little piece of kind of like cloth electrical tape to cover up those contacts. But that’s your motor that drives the whole transport mechanism and releases the hatch. So, got to get to that and then you can get your stuck tape out without having to uh totally destroy the camera.