Telecine in HD?

[Boehmi]

Recently, my father bought one of Roger´s amazing Workprinter XPs to transfer our family´s private Super 8 and Regular 8 footage.

We both wish to transfer the films in the best quality that is possible for us amateurs, so we had the fairly obvious idea of using a HD camcorder. Well, after reading every related discussion of the last 7 month I could find in this forum, I have strong doubts that it is possible.

What seems to have been established is, that one can use a HDMI connection with Cinecap (using a Blackmagic capture card) and CineCap accepts a maximum resolution of 1440x1440.
So in theory, it should be possible to capture 1440x1080. Of course, the amount of data that has to be recorded every second is a lot greater than that of regular PAL, and I had the impression that a good computer couldn´t take it in March 2007. Do you think, the data rate is the main problem, and is it still (6 month later ) a problem? If not, what´s the problem?

Or would it be wiser (and possibly cheaper), to save the money for the incredibly fast computer and buy instead an amazing but not too amazingly expensive SD camcorder that has maybe less pixels but still a better picture quality?

Help me, Filmshooting.com; you are my only hope.

Stefan

[themagickite]

i'm also very interested in this, i don't think you can use the WP to capture HD although on the website it says they're working on a solution to do this. i think the reason is simply that the software hasn't been made to handle HD (yet).

however you could use a cinemate for HD as the camera acts independently and doesn't even require a computer. so in theory you could capture with an HD cam with HDMI out into the blackmagic and have some pretty huge data files, though with the frame blending that the cinemate method brings to the party, i'm not sure if it would be worth the effort of using a raw capture.

some people don't think there's any point in capturing S8 in HD but i reckon unless you've got enough pixels to see the curve of each grain rendered smoothly, then your not yet at max quality. the image may not look any sharper but there should be a difference in there, 1 grain doesn't equal 1 pixel, why does film always look sooo much better projected, cause every grain is in their, doing its little mexican wave. but stuffing each grain into a pixel just kills their individuality and stops them from being free, random and analogue little beasts.
that's just my opinion and i have neither the experience in telecine or projection or the technical knowledge to back it up. so feel free to correct me.

[Will2]

What about a WorkPrinter style machine that could "print" to a DSLR still camera?

It might not be for the average person & could be a little complicated, but you could get any resoluton you needed, easily string together frames in After Effects and manually set the frame rate to what you want. It would be completely progressive (if you want).

Software would have to trigger the camera via USB or setup an intervalometer...

Exposure would have to be set manually and fixed since each frame would be different, but those images have great dynamic range and could be adjusted after the fact. (you could even capture RAW if you you had a TON of space).

I did a sunrise capture with my Nikon D200 and it's built in intervalometer then pulled the 3872 × 2592 image into a 1920x1440 project to make a full 1080P movie... looked amazing.

[MovieStuff]

i'm also very interested in this, i don't think you can use the WP to capture HD although on the website it says they're working on a solution to do this. i think the reason is simply that the software hasn't been made to handle HD (yet).

The software is not the issue. If capturing from uncompressed HD, then you need 4 of the new 300 speed SATA drives (16mb cache) in a Raid in a PCI Express card. According to some of my customers doing this, they can capture in uncompressed HD using CineCap with no problem using this configuration. We do not encourage it because we have not had time to experiment with such a set up and can't offer support for troubleshooting at this time without direct experience, obviously. Also, not many home computers would be able to edit uncompressed HD anyway, so making the file is one thing but working with the resulting footage is something else.

What about a WorkPrinter style machine that could "print" to a DSLR still camera?

Most SLRs (digital or film based) have a shutter life expectancy of about 150,000 frames and you will see fluctations in exposure long before that point simply because such cameras were not designed to create sequential exposures that match exactly from frame to frame. Even a series of frames that look identical to the eye might reveal pulsations if strung together in an animation sequence. So while building such a set up is easy, making it work consistantly and cost effectly is different. About the only way to avoid the wear issues is to use a flashing LED during a long exposure time so that shutter wear isn't an issue. Or, alternately, you could use 5 second exposures so that any mechanical differences in the shutter performance will account for a smaller percentage of the overall exposure volume. But recording to a flash card would be impractical and it takes about 10-15 seconds to write to a computer via typical cameras' USB cable. So with 20 seconds per frame, you would be looking at about 20 hours per 50 foot reel.

What is technically possible isn't always practical.

Roger

[themagickite]

yeah there is that option, you could use a canon DSLR with their macro lens, allows 1-5 times magnification, could easily fill up the sensor with the super8 frame with out needing a lens on the projector. i really wanna try this but don't really have the resources or cash.

the problem with using a DSLR to transfer super8 is the cams aren't made to shoot that many images with in their life, people using them for animation found the shutter wears out pretty fast. would still be really cool though. you'd have maximum res and those things have great dynamic range, only factor that would fall short might be registration.

edit: never thought of the fluctuation, interesting point.

[themagickite]

So with 20 seconds per frame, you would be looking at about 20 hours per 50 foot reel.

What is technically possible isn't always practical.

Roger

could/would you make such a machine though? if someone really wanted to work that way?

[MoonstruckProductions]

This is the setup we use and it has not failed us yet:

Workprinter XP
Sony HVR-Z1U
Blackmagic HD Extreme Capture Card
(Z1U attached to the HD Extreme using the component cables)
Cinecap using the Blackmagic card set to HD 1920x1080 4:2:2 using the Blackmagic 10bit HD codec.

CPU Specs: Tyan 5000XL MB, Two Xeon 5140's, 4GB FBDIMM, 10,000 RPM System drive, 2TB RAID-0 (8x250GB SATA 3.0gb/s 16MB cach) using a Rocketraid 2320 card in the PCI x4 slot, running Windows XP Pro 64-bit.

No dropped frames, no blurred frames, etc. Since the system has been running, approximately 3 months, we have succesfully transferred 20,000 feet of film.

The big thing is keeping all those hard drives cool as performance will suffer if the temp. gets too hot.

Total system cost including the camera and workprinter: $13,000.

As Roger mentioned, this setup may not be practical for most people. And if film transfers were the only things we did, I would not have invested the money. But since the computer system doubles as an HD workstation for our video production business, I can justify the cost.

-Scott

[mattias]

Also, not many home computers would be able to edit uncompressed HD anyway, so making the file is one thing but working with the resulting footage is something else.

last i checked any computer was able to compress uncompressed footage though. :-)

anyway if you have that kind of raid there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to edit it as well. uncompressed video requires lots of disk performance but is less heavy on the rest of the computer than for example hdv.

/matt

[themagickite]

cool

that setup sounds awesome

do you have any samples?

maybe just a frame so we can see the full HD image?

[Will2]

Thanks Roger, didn't think about shutter wear.

Recording to a flash card is impractical

Yes, but they are getting much larger and cheaper and they would only have to store smallest filesize the camera can produce.

On the HD cameras: I'm probably missing something basic but couldn't you simply slow down the capture to give the drives more time to keep up? Like 1 frame a second or 1 frame every 2 seconds if needed? I know that would take longer and not be practical for DVD mills but for personal transfers of high quality maybe not so bad...

You might not be able to play back in full uncompressed HD but you could re-compress to ProRes HD or DVCProHD or something for editing on a normal system.[/quote]

[MoonstruckProductions]

cool

that setup sounds awesome

do you have any samples?

maybe just a frame so we can see the full HD image?

You can view a still frame at this location:
http://www.moonpro.us/images/hdfilm.png

Or visit this page to download a 10-frame test clip:
http://www.moonpro.us/filmtest.htm

-Scott

[Boehmi]

@moonstruck
Good to know that it is possible after all! I don´t have the 13,000$ though. But why is it possible to capture fullHD using CineCap? I thought the upper limit was 1440x1440? And did Roger not doubt the long-time stability of SATA-drives?

So, lacking the money for Moonstrucks silicon jewel, wouldn´t it be smarter to invest 2000€ in a proper SD camera and 400€ in a new computer? Would my untrained eyes notice the difference between a semi-professional SD camcorder and a tourists HD camcorder?

Or maybe I just buy 50 cheap SLRs, take a picture of each frame and use Roger´s Slidestream to transfer the slides This would also solve the backup problem

[MoonstruckProductions]

@moonstruck
Good to know that it is possible after all! I don´t have the 13,000$ though. But why is it possible to capture fullHD using CineCap? I thought the upper limit was 1440x1440? And did Roger not doubt the long-time stability of SATA-drives?

Well, I'm not using Cinecap to capture, I'm using the Blackmagic HD Extreme card and the Blackmagic codec. All cinecap is doing is working as the middle man. Cinecap recognizes the mouse clicks from the workprinter but uses the Blackmagic card and codec to save the images. Therefore the only limits are that of the Blackmagic card.

Well, it's only been 3 months and 20,000 feet of film isn't that much. So, the longevity of the SATAII drives is yet to be seen. However, if one should fail, it's only another $70 to replace it. So I'm not too concerned.

-Scott

[Chinese Belle]

FYI - Avid has a great cross platform QT codec that is visually lossless.
It is not lossless in the classic sense (like Animation codec). But it is good enough that you would be hard pressed to see the difference between uncompress and the Avid codec even if you A/B switch it.

The data rate is variable. It ranges from 145 to 220 Megabits per second. About the same as uncompressed standard definition. It supports 8 and 10 bit (60 GB per hour).

http://www.avid.com/onlineSupport/suppo ... entID=7952

Apple has an equivalent codec called ProRes 422. However, you will need FCP 6 to use it and it is not cross platform. It is also not recommended to capture with it unless using an Intel Mac (MacPro) since it is optimized for the Intel chip.

The Avid codec works on either platform. Needs only a G5 or a P4 or better CPU.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

You can view a still frame at this location:
http://www.moonpro.us/images/hdfilm.png

Do you have any other frames? This image sure doesen´t convince me that there is any point to transfer 8mm films to HD.

There doesen´t seem to be much detail or sharpness, not more than there is in a good SD transfer... :?