Help with telecine lens.

[RCBasher]

Sorry, I wasn't looking to offend you, just giving my honest opinion...and I do have some experience, not only of film transfer but also of video compression. The HDMI output is not RAW data from the CCD, it is processed. The scratches are not particulary sharp. It is still a good transfer but I was just responding, I hoped in a constructive way, to your ascertion that the grain was visible hence sharpness is is as good as it will get. To me, it doesn't look like sharp grain, it looks like tiny water droplets!

Please take a look at the two images in the results section on my website (click to see at full resolution) and you may see what I mean. http://www.cine2digits.co.uk

[topaz]

still images never look great, maybe post a HQ clip on vimeo or something.

[luuude]

Its true, there is actually some water droplets on that film, I am scanning them for a friend and some of the reels probably has been wet or maybe its from bad processing back in the 70s

Whatever you might think of my optics and camera the purpose of this post was to show the use of a front surfaced mirror to help OP with his setup.

I dont want to hijack this thread with a pissing contest. So please dont respond unless it is about the mirror

Best regards

L

[RCBasher]

It is not your OP so I will reply to whatever I like. My repsonse is relevant because it could well be the mirror and long path to the sensor (harder to eliminate vibration effects) which is causing the soft images.

Anyway, I have nothing else to add so I will not trouble you any more.

[granfer]

Good point, Frank! It would be a lesson to us all to remember the the BASIC concept of Photography... the less involved the better!
Hence the original concept OBJECT - PINHOLE - IMAGE (FILM) produces the sharpest pictures.
That became OBJECT - LENS - IMAGE (FILM) in order to reduce exposure time.
and the print methods NEGATIVE - CONTACT - POSITIVE (PARER) for contact printing
or NEGATIVE - LENS - POSITIVE (PAPER) for changing the size
and NEGATIVE - LENS - POSITIVE (FILM) for Optical Printing.
The lesson from ALL of those is.. Keep it simple; the fewer elements involved the better the chances of the Best Result.
If you can cut out the mirror, condenser (field) lens, back or front projection screen, "cheapo" Projector Lens and use
FILM - High Quality LENS - SENSOR only you reduce the chances of spoiling the image through dust and optical distortions.

[luuude]

Here you go Topaz. It´s a snippet of a transfer I am doing now. Its a h264 quicktime but it should play in VLC and similar players, perhaps even windows media player. I also link to a html5/flash player if you cant open it that plays it.

http://www.sementbetong.no/super8/super8.html
http://www.sementbetong.no/super8/ludvig.mov better rightclick and save as, its rather big.

There is some advantages and disadvantages in using a DSLR for capture. Firstly since it has a mechanical shutter its not really a good idea to trigger it to take photos, you would wear out the shutter pretty fast.

The best solution I could come up with is to hook it up to my computer via HDMI and capture stills from that on the computer. This is synced with microswitch inside the projector and a hacked mouse.

You could also just record a movie in the camera and use some clever AVIsynthscripting to find duplicates. If you tune the speed so that you always get at least two exposures that is between the claw movement you can find them and store one of them and throw all other frames out. Since the frames you get during the claw movement always is different from each other and from the static nice frames there will never be a duplicate of thoose. The problem here I guess is mostly how long you can record and that it will compressed, you can get the bitrate higher with a hacked firmware that would probably help. I havent tried this method but I know some people use it. And I have seen some very good results

Another problem is that the sensor is pretty big so you need a lot of magnification. The easiest and best is perhaps a planar microscope lens on a bellows (or a zoom if you have one that will work) this gives absolutely ridiculously sharp results. The cheapest is a reversed lens on bellows.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnhallmen/5379235010/
http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... php?t=9664

On the good side there is the fact that you can use the camera like a normal camera when it is not doing telecine, wich for me is most of the time. Another plus is that the new DSLR cameras have very good dynamic range and if you choose a log gamma you can pack a lot of info in those 8 bits from the original 14 bits. Also its very correct in its colorendering.

Best regards
L

[topaz]

outstanding, really.

amazing work, you should be very proud. 8)