My wife and I will be married 52 years this coming June. On our wedding day the photographer got a batch of bad film and so we never had any real photos, only what we managed to get from family and friends who took snapshots at the wedding and the reception. Now one of my wife's uncles had a Super-8 movie camera, but despite asking afterwards, we never learned where the film went.
Anyway, six years ago, when we were selling my mother-in-law's house we found a box with seven reels of film but no projector. This box of film has been sitting in our garage ever since. We've considered having them converted to digital, but we weren't sure what was on the film (nothing was marked) and these are all 400 ft reels and it would have cost nearly $1,000 to get them all digitized, so we never pursued it.
A month or so ago, my wife suggested that we bite the bullet and get them converted, but I found a machine being sold on Amazon which allowed you to do it yourself. It cost less than $400 and the reviews were very positive, so I ordered one last week.
Now it takes nearly five hours to process a 400 foot reel (about 21 minutes of film) as the film is indexed through the device one frame at a time. The final product is a 1080p video file. Anyway, I just started to process the last reel and guess what, we found a movie clip of our wedding, something that we had assumed had been lost years ago. We never heard what happened to the film and no one ever volunteered any info about it, neither my wife's mother nor her father, who should have known what was on those films that he had put in that box all those years ago, ever said anything.
Now it's not a lot of footage, maybe three or four minutes worth, but it's more then we thought that we would ever have, so again, it was like finding a treasure. I guess the money I spent turned out to be a really good investment after all.
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