Motion Picture Film Digitization Visit

Bring your favorite home movie memories to have them digitized with Smithsonian staff members. Motion Picture Film Digitization will convert your favorite memories on 16mm, 8mm and Super 8 film formats into digital video files for easy playback and sharing.

• During each three-hour session we will spend approximately 150 minutes transferring your home movies to digital files. The other 30 minutes of the session will be needed for other supporting tasks.
• Please plan to arrive 15 minutes before your session starts for preparation of your material, and plan to be at the facility for about 30 minutes afterwards for us to complete all of the processing of your digitized materials. When we are finished we will give you a USB memory stick for you to take home with your digitized movies on it.
• To help maximize the number of items we can digitize during your 150 minutes of capture time, organizing your items ahead of time will help increase the number of items that we can digitize! Organize them by priority of what you would like digitized. Film digitization require lots of prep work and processing! This means that your 3 minute roll of film could easily take 30 minutes or more to prep and digitize. There is no way to speed it up! So, if possible, it is best to decide ahead of time what films you most want digitized. If need be, we can preview films for content at the start of your session, but this will limit the amount of time we will have for digitization.
• IMPORTANTLY, this digitization session will only be to digitize analog film formats — 16mm, 8mm, Super 8 in B&W or color. We will not be able to digitize photographic prints, post cards, calling cards, video formats (VHS, Betamax, Betacam, MiniDV, Hi8) audio tapes, etc., but there are other appointments that can do these items.