Vintage Super 8 Film.

This group is a showcase for home movies and amateur films shot during the heyday of Super 8, mainly the 1970s. I hope the Vimeo community can help to uncover these nostalgic gems so we can all see the old cars, fashions and hairstyles that capture the zeitgeist of the era.

The Super 8 film format was introduced in 1965 and began to supplant the harder to use, standard 8mm format. By 1970, Super 8 was the dominate medium for home movies and amateur filmmaking. Its simplified system allowed every-day people to start recording their lives in moving pictures. More film footage was shot during this time than ever before or since. In the early 1980s magnetic video tape technology allowed for the introduction of the "camcorder" which quickly overtook Super 8 and marked the beginning of the end for the use of film to record images.

Super 8 film is still used today. Just as back then, it is made with no sound track and contained in cartridges that are inserted into auto-exposure cameras. The cartridges are opened at the lab for development and placed on three inch reels. Playback takes about 3 minutes threaded through small, easy to use projectors. Some later Super 8 films included sound. Today the film can be digitized in high definition with little loss of quality, which often demonstrates that the old footage was superior to the consumer video cassettes that came immediately after.