Maybe someone on this list knows the answer to my questions. I have recently come into possession of 16 mm home movies my dad made mostly in the 1950's. Some color, most B&W. Even on a 16mm projector, the quality is probably worse than what you can do with any smartphone today.
At some point someone had them professionally transferred to a VHS tape, as a result the original 50 ft reels have been spliced and respooled onto 7 inch reels holding 400 feet each. I found a VHS player in the attic and viewed the tape, the quality is nothing to write home about, not sure how much is the quality of the original and how much is the limitations of VHS. In any case, I feel VHS tape is too fragile and does not lend itself to sharing copies with relatives, plus who has a VHS player anymore? So I am looking at having a new frame-by-frame transfer done to either DVD or BluRay. Cost looks to be around $80 per 400 ft reel (20 cents per foot). Is this likely to result in better quality than the analog-to-analog transfer that was done to VHS? Is there any advantage to Blu-Ray over DVD? I'm not sure the difference between 1080p and 720p will matter given the source material. And which is best, a regular DVD or BluRay format, or an editable .mov format that will need to be modified to play in most DVD or BluRay players? I'm not thinking I am going to be editing this and inserting chapter titles or captions or commentary, but never say never. Right now I'm leaning toward something I can just pop in a player and watch.
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