M4rkJW parent
Neat stuff! I have a ton of 8mm and some 16mm film to archive, perhaps this is a good first step towards an open-source film scanner.
8mm film scanners are so common they're available at Walmart.
There are lots of DIY film scanners described on Youtube. They don't have to run fast and they don't need a pull-down mechanism, so they're simple devices.
And they typically suck. It's a different story if you want to properly scan 8mm from edge to edge and get TIFFs (or similar) for each frame.
Oh, do they ever suck. I did some Super-8 transfers to a Digital8 camcorder in the early 2000's. I tried one of those Kodak-branded 8mm digitizers in my public library last year. The 20 y/o SD Digital8 transfers done with an optical transfer box look better.
Yeah. I was always pissed that none of the dedicated still-photo film scanners offered a movie-film adapter. I had a Nikon LS-2000 (which sucked, BTW) and it had a film-feed mechanism... but only for 35mm still film.
Then again, those scanners didn't have sufficient resolution for 8mm. I think the LS-2000 was something like 2700 DPI... which would only yield 800 or so pixels across. So it would have also needed an additional lens.