Good Enough: Digitizing Film at Home

Movie film is a challenging form of media to preserve and share digitally. This is might be somewhat surprising. Unlike the ephemeral tape media standards of the 90s (looking at you Video8 and DAT), film enjoyed a long run as the de-facto format for capturing motion pictures. Film projectors are pretty easy to come by. Yet, the process of digitizing film requires either recording a projected image (telecine) or digitally scanning each frame. Both approaches require specialized equipment to yield a passable digital twin.