I'm not sure that's ever been much of a "secret". Anyone who has used a computer to record audio or music has used the Line In/Microphone or a Stereo Input jack. The hope that the makers of these "LP-to-MP3" turntable makers rely on is that there are enough people who never thought of using their own record player & pc to make these files.
Yeah, I was being highly sarcastic about the secrecy. They've built an entire niche industry around people not realizing that their computer already does the digital side of the work
The only useful thing I see in these new machines is the "78-to-33" software. Trying to use software to do something it isn't designed to handle isn't going to give you great results.
It depends, I think. All you're doing is changing the speed, after all. So any software that knows how to change the speed of an audio file can do the same thing. As long as you're speeding it up, nobody'll notice the difference, though I admit there's some fidelity lost when you slow it down.
Just to confirm I'm not randomly imagining things, if I pull up the portable install (portableapps.com) of Audacity (an Open Source audio editor of some repute), I can import a random MP3...though it takes a while. Tap, tap, tap, tap...wow, this reminds me of working on my cutting-edge 286 machine in college, except it took this long for an equivalent-sized wave file.
Ahem. OK. Select All. And under the Effect menu, there's Change Speed, which--ooh!--even has rpm settings, just for the purpose. And yeah, it sounds just like when I was aa kid fooling around with the speed setting when listening to records. So there's that option, and it doesn't cost more than the modular plug out of the turntable and the couple of minutes for it to read the file.
Now, the key is that this is for individuals, not industry. Something like Roy's talking about overlooks the fact that industry only wants one transfer, then they replicate. And they'd rather the losers--I mean "consumers"--like ourselves not do it themselves in bulk. But if you still have them in the neighborhood, the places that used to just develop film usually have equipment to transfer most movies.
The only use I can see on an individual level for transferring film to another useful format is for "home movies", which is something the movie industry cares nothing about. I don't have any home movies in that format, so I never cared to look into what kind of equipment is needed to do such a thing, but I can't imagine it's cheap.
I looked into it once, not for home movies, but for things I own on VHS that I know will never make it to DVD, between problems with the rights and damaged originals--I actually spent an afternoon talking to folks at Tribune and Warner, including their restoration team, which was fun, though ultimately useless. Actually, it's not much different than the record situation, except where everybody today has a soundcard built in, not many people have a TV card.
If you do, though, or pick up something like the cheap WinTV unit (one of my professors, sadly passed on long before his time, founded Hauppauge Computer Works, so I always feel the need to plug the product), then you run RCA cables (or even cheap coaxial) from your favorite VCR and record the video feed.
I don't have my notes in front of me, just now, from when I was thinking of doing it, but you can pretty much burn an MPEG-2 video directly to a VCD or (with a little more cleanup and work) get a decent-quality DVD with menus, subtitles, different audio tracks, and so forth. Or just copy them to a DVD and live with it.
So VHS is definitely as doable as audio. For something more like 8mm or 16mm film, the story's going to be more complicated, and sort of like scanning microfiche.
If we're talking a Hollywood movie, I don't see a need to worry about it. They're taking care of it (do you really think they'ld ever pass-up the chance to make money?) and whatever has been lost at this point in that big vault they have hidden away ... well, it's not lost because they didn't care, they simply didn't realize that it was ever a problem until somebody physically looked at the canisters.
I don't know. Keep in mind that some studios worry about their images, so anything that could be viewed as racially insensitive (cough--Disney!) gets specifically left unreleased.
And don't forget the days when studios planned to only release old movies if they were colorized. Is the movie preserved if it isn't the original experience?
As far as anything that has ever been shown on television (but never commercially released), then in all likelihood, someone somewhere has it on VHS, at which point it won't cost more than $50 to get the hardware & software needed (along with a computer) to make a DVD copy ... IF they think to do such a thing. In this day and age, about the only thing that's really "lost" are the first few episodes of MST3K because nobody taped it and the original studio tapes were reused for something else. I mean, if I can find a website that has all 8 episodes of "Otherworld" for the entire planet to watch whenever they want, then pretty much everything else I can think of is safe & taken care of somewhere.
Possibly, but the problem is that you never actually know what the situation is, there. Somebody might have a copy, but how do you find that one person who's forgotten it's on an unlabeled cassette in a water-logged box in a storage unit? I think about some of the things I know I have recorded somewhere, over the years, and I get chills down my spine if I so much as think about looking for any of it...
By that reasoning, every comic book ever published would also be available for scanning...somewhere. And that may well be true, in principle, but getting access is a different story entirely, and you won't know if you're right unless you can account for everything, which...ick.
