I have never tried this, and don't actually know if it would work, but a thought about creating a films look popped into my head last night.

Use a super 8 or 16mm camera and shoot just a still subject. i.e. a wall, or a sheet of paper. I would say, just shoot one roll of film, no need in wasting too much money!

Then transfer that to tape or dvd, or whatever, and import it into you NLE. Then drop the opacity of the film footage and 'super-impose' the film clip over the footage you shot with Mini DV.

Picure how I think this theory works: If you just shot a white piece of paper, you would still get the grain and little cigarette burns, etc of film, but then when you lower the opacity in the editing room, you would eliminate the visibility of the paper, yet keep the grain, etc.

Would this work?

My video instructor did the exact same thing for a commercial he shot. It most definatly works, however, film grain does little to get a "film look" out of video IMO.

Now it would be cool if you could use that same concept to mimic the spectrume of color, and lattitude, etc that film could deliver, not sure how you would pull that off, or if its possible... ill think about it.

Or as the obverse to what you proposed, shoot your video, project it on the wall/screen, then shoot the 8 or 16mm film of the the projected video.

I'd shoot hot pink paper and key it out...

Josh, I don't think it would be worth the trouble, and give you no better effect, with less controll then most of the commercially available "Film Grain" effects. Some of them will allow you to alter the size and sharpness of the random grain pattern that you put over your video. (And I've shot a LOT of super 8 film)

What's novel about that? It's a video to film transfer.

yeah.
I rendered out a bunch of film scratch from AE and have never used it.... the plug-ins are definitely good enough.