Wolverine 8mm & Super 8 Reels to Digital MovieMaker Pro Film Digitizer, Film Scanner, 8mm Film Scanner, Black (MM100PRO)

This is a review for the Wolverine Pro 8mm/Super 8mm film scanner. A lot has been written by others about the product. A couple of people did a very good job listing many of its pros and cons. But some of the cons and suggestions to remedy are a little unreasonable. It is important to remember this is a consumer quality product meant to let the average person digitize movie film, not a commercial quality product that is used in labs. So yes, the product could be improved, but that would also mean increasing the price, and at approximately $400 I think the price is right for the average person wanting to transfer old home movies, or hobbyist that digitizes movies for fun or artistic endeavors.For me, I had a bunch of old movies I wanted to digitize. I originally thought about having them done professionally by a lab. But considering the amount of films I had, and the cost to have them done commercially, it made more sense to buy this unit than to spend a thousand dollars or more to have it done by a lab.I did a lot of research and was worried by comments I read such as...it takes forever to do a film, you need to babysit the machine because it can get stuck, it splits film, etc. But I decided to take the plunge anyway. And I am glad I did!Like I said earlier, this is a consumer level quality machine, but it is packed with enough features to allow you to make nice transfers of you films. You can tweak a number of items such as sharpness, exposure, and frame adjustment. It took me a while to find an ideal set of settings for my films, but once I did, I rarely had to readjust. And when you are done, you can always make changes and enhance your copies in software. I use VSDC Free Video Editing Software, and it does a terrific job. It allows me to add music, and voice overs, etc. turning my old silent movies into talkies.The types of movies I am transferring are old 8mm home movies from the 1950s. Typical family films that were spliced together onto 5 and 7 inch reels. I am also transferring Super 8mm films I made in the 1970s as a hobbiest...stop action movies, mini silent films, and travelog movies I made, which had accompanying sound on reel-to-reel tape (which would always fall out of sync after about ten minutes). In fact, since the Wolverine does not come with anything other than a 4-3/4 inch take-up reel, I use an old 7 inch tape recorder reel as a take-up reel for my larger movies.My films have a lot of splices. Some were nice and neatly done, but others were horrible-thick and wide. In fact, some of the splices were done with scotch tape many years ago. Considering the age of the films, amount of splices and the quality of the splices, my films have been going through the unit with very little problems. As I write this, the unit is next to me transferring a film I shot in 1978. It is on a 7 inch reel, and has been running for about three hours (it is nearly done). If I were to guess, it has at least a hundred splice points if not more, and it hung only three time during the transfer...one time because the splice was too wide (overlapped both sides of the film), and the other splices were very thick (I have a feeling those were done with scotch tape). Other than that, I had no problems. I had some other films that did jump, and went out of alignment, but that was due to the film, not the unit. The film's sprocket holes were ripped and/or stretched from years of play and abuse in a variety of old projectors.This unit is not perfect, but it doesn't cost an arm and a leg. And it certainly isn't as bad as others may lead you to believe. If you are like me, and have a lot of movies you want to digitize and post online for family and/or friends to see on Youtube (hidden link only they will know about) this will do the job. In fact, if you don't want to use post production software, Youtube has tools you can use to add sound and enhance you transfer.

I've been using this for a couple weeks now digitizing some '60s and '70s 8 mm and Super8 mm film reels of various sizes, all of which having had proper storage since then, and had a learning curve that took some attempts before I realized that most of the issues were because the film hold-down pinches the film too tightly. As a workaround but certainly not a fix, I've been lightly clamping the edge of a film cleaning pad under the hold-down lid so that it doesn't press down quite so hard and for the most part that solved the issue. A better fix would be an adjustable hold-down or simply lighter springs. From reading online, the pressure can be adjusted in a roundabout way but no tools I have are able to fit in to do so and it did not come with any.The transport itself is marginal and being mostly plastic is flimsy but it works although fast forward (called Rewind on the device; it has no actual rewind as such) moves at a snail's crawl. Also, and I knew this before purchasing so it wasn't a surprise, it came with only a 5" take-up reel when it is capable of holding up to 9" or so and the 5" was too small for many of our reels of film.It is not possible to multi-task while rewinding by taking out the SD card to extract the data on a computer as removing it causes the Wolverine to simply shut itself off no matter what it is doing. While the buttons are fairly easy to use, the firmware behind them, if there is any at all, is mediocre.Getting the film into the holder is another issue which had a learning curve and much more difficult when following the directions that came with the machine which states to first slide the film under the back center hold-down tab, then work it under the left and right ones at the front by twisting the film slightly. It is far easier and quicker to place the left one under first, then the center, then the right.As for the quality of the transfer, it seems okay but with the too tight film hold-down there is some slight jitter which I have not been able to completely eliminate so I must run jitter removal filters as part of the post processing. Software filters can only guess so do not totally eliminate it so made me wonder why no automatic frame detection was used in the machine itself that would eliminate jitter being added in the first place.Setting the framing adjustment is fairly easy once I learned that it needed to be done so be sure to do it first before digitizing an entire reel. Also, keep watching on the next reels you do as the setting does not seem consistent from reel to reel which, of course, is likely variations in the film rather than in the Wolverine. What I did was to fame it smaller to allow for the variations, then cropped it afterward.Over all and in spite some of my criticisms, I would recommend this to anyone with old movies to digitize but don't expect perfect results without considerable fuss and good editing software afterward as the results are not plug and play!