Cine Film to Digital (3-Inch Reel)

A 3-inch reel is the smallest standard size for cine film and typically holds around 50 feet of footage. At the standard Super 8 projection speed of 18 frames per second, that gives you roughly three to four minutes of film. These small reels were often what came back from the chemist after processing: a single holiday, a birthday party, a baby's first steps, captured in one short, continuous take.

The film on these reels is usually Super 8 or Standard 8 (Regular 8). The reel size refers to the spool, not the film gauge. If you are unsure which type you have, look at the perforations along the edge of the film: Super 8 has small, closely spaced holes on one side, while Standard 8 has larger holes on both sides. If your film is noticeably wider (16mm) or has a single row of holes running down the centre between the frames (9.5mm), those are gauges we do not currently digitise, so please leave them out of your Media Box.

Small reels tend to get handled more than large ones: pulled out of boxes, threaded onto projectors, rewound by hand. This handling causes scratches, fingerprints, and edge damage over time. The film stock itself is also degrading chemically: colour dyes fade (particularly cyan and yellow, leaving a pink or magenta cast), and acetate-based film can develop vinegar syndrome, where the base material shrinks and becomes brittle.

We scan each frame individually as a high-resolution still image, then assemble the sequence into a smooth digital video file. This frame-by-frame approach eliminates the flicker and hotspot problems of real-time projection-based transfers, and produces significantly sharper results. Colour correction is applied to compensate for fading, and the final file is stabilised digitally to remove any gate weave.