DIY Flm Scanning

[carllooper]

lamp might need some dimming to avoid risk of heat damage to the film

if you are videoing onto the film gate you shouldn't need a very bright light source, that would also give your transfer 'hot spots'.

Yes, that's very true for doing transfers, however I was speaking about use of the projector as a normal projector, ie. for screening films for an audience, but still using the stepper motor.

C

[mr_x]

Sorry, was confused, thought we were discussing scanning?

[joshgladstone]

if your stepper motor is up to it, the motor could drive the projector as a normal projector, ie. running it at 24 fps. And with feedback from the shutter sensor, and appropriate control logic, you can regulate the motor to hold the projection rate at precisely 24 fps (or any other rate), for however long one likes.

I don't think this stepper motor can deliver quite those speeds, it seems to max out at about 1fps, but there are higher rpm stepper motors out there. Actually, a brushless dc motor would probably be better (as I understand it, they're essentially the same as a stepper but meant to be driven at speed). Actually, I rather like this idea as an art installation or something. You could tie the playback speed to a dial or some sort of manual control, or even to a light sensor or anything! I bought a Bolex regular 8mm projector accidentally to be a super 8 scanner and started taking it apart before I realized it was the wrong format. So I have that just lying around now. I might have to give this project a try at some point.....

[mr_x]

There we have it - film lives! ;)

[carllooper]

There we have it - film lives! ;)

Yeah for sure.

Digital delivery is one way of delivering a film, but nothing quite beats the traditional method, using a film projector, a darkened room, and a group of real life people.

My 12 year old daughter, of course, would be just biting her lip, waiting in silent fustration to get back to the ipod game she is otherwise playing with the boy next door.

C

[mr_x]

There are many aspects of 'film' that digital media (or even analogue video) miss. For me it's several things, the atmosphere of film, the surface quality of a print (which deteriorates over time) and the sheer magic which is photographic emulsion. You can't do that digitally. Can't do it because video is a graphic medium whereas film is Fine Art; another analogy could be acrylic versus oil colour, both have their plus points but neither can stand in for each other. Oil paint was invented over half a millennium ago & has never been equalled or surpassed for quality, merits or demerits of individual painters notwithstanding ;)

I suppose the view that state-of-the-art media isn't as profound as 'what we grew up with' was a view which accompanied the introduction as such new and novel things as the transistor radio as opposed to the radiogram with its superior speakers and consequent sound quality, which is a debate which will probably never end. I do miss cinemas where we used to "worship" [Morrison] at the silver screen, but ultimately the magic is inside.

http://youtu.be/cQdIOXN3byM

[carllooper]

An interesting thing is that even when film is transferred to digital it is actually quite effective there, if you know what you are doing. Film can compete with digital on digital's own turf, ie. within the domain of digital delivery systems

This had me stumped for a while (a few years back). But it's to do with the way film works, the way it engages an image statistically rather than through a predefined grid of sensor pixels. It's able to create an image which works better in the digital domain than a native digital image. At least in terms of tone and colour. One can get some extraordinary images happening by shooting film first, and then transferring it to digital, as distinct from just shooting digital.

A lot of attention in the past has been focused on resolution, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that tone and colour are equally important sought after qualities and perhaps even more so. Many speak of the 'cold' look of digital vs the 'warm' look of film. This is not anything to do with colour. B&W film exhibits the same warmth. Its do with the way film engages an image statistically, vs the way a digital one does so through a cartesian or god-doesn't-play-with-dice framework.

But as Neils Bohr once said "who are we to decide how God thinks" (not that I'm religious but when dealing with history one has to deal with such concepts).

Film has a way of correcting an image for digital consumption. But only if you shoot film first. You can't do it afterwards. Some theories think you can - ie. shoot digital - transfer digital to film - and then transfer it back again. Ha ha. It doesn't work. The limits of digital are baked in during exposure. The limits of film are also baked in during exposure, but it's a different set of limits, and ones which allow a particular kind of warmth to jump across the digital barrier.

C

[mr_x]

At the end of the day a film image is more interesting than a digital video image because there is more going on, the film image isn't static, even when viewing something like Warhol's 'Empire State' where very little happens, the surface of the filmic image seems alive and moving, it is a 'movie', a motion picture. In contrast, a digital video camera on a tripod could almost be a photographic still of what it is recording. This was less true of VHS video but that was also a pretty boring proposition for an experimental film maker. This is my major criticism of frame-by-frame scanning, you could end up with something which was film but now looks more like DV after all the image stabilisation & apparent imperfections and glitches have been taken out.

[carllooper]

I have no problem with the general idea of digital post.

For example, degraining sounds terrible and in general it would be but there are exceptions and the most important one is this: for many delivery channels, a work undergoes compression, and if the compression is high (as it often is over the internet) it becomes necessary to do a bit of degraining. Why? Because otherwise the compressor will do it for you, and it will do a much worse job of it, because it's designed to compress a digital source, rather than a film one. it doesn't understand grain in the same way a degrainer does. The less grain in a signal the less compression is required and the less of a mess the compressor will make. You have to do a bit of experimentation to find the sweet spot between not enough and too much, going back and forth between the degrainer and the compressor, against the target bandwidth.

And digital registration - I have no problem with this either. Better still would be better mechanical registration in the first place. Of course, it's not necessary to reduce jitter. One could just as easily modify a system to amplify jitter and get some interesting results as well.

And adjusting the exposure, colour, gamma, etc. When printing film to film one doesn't normally ignore these things, so there's no reason to do so when printing to digital. What you do is of interest.

All of this is consistent with experimental filmmaking. To experiment is to treat systems with some healthy skepticism - that they are not necessarily set up the way you would have set them up had you designed the system. You alter the system. Digital registration is a result of experimentation. Once upon a time it didn't exist. Experimenters then changed that situation. The same goes for every part of a system. It's up you to determine the outcome - there's nothing in a system that is any more authentic than any other way it might be made, or made to behave. Indeed you might go on to create your own system from scratch.


Has anyone actually sat through the full nine hours of Warhol's Empire State? Perhaps an insane few have done so. I've always regarded it as a conceptual work. After a while you get the idea. No need to watch more. It's like as a kid when you first learn to count and you get to a hundred, after which it dawns on you that there's no end. You deal with infinity for the first time. To count to infinity? Rather than do so, you just get the idea of infinity, and there's no need to keep counting. Perhaps if you are going to do a stint with Empire State, for the full nine hours, you could take a book with you to read, having a break from that every now and then, to look at the film. Or perhaps you could indeed zone out for nine hours in front of it. Hmmm.

C

[Pj]

I have finally bought the Samsung NX100 [a compact mirrorless camera] and have captured some Super 8 and Super 16 footage. I am impressed with the results, I’m getting much better images, more vibrant colours and textures than I ever got with the machine vision cameras and I have tried a few of them; Mightex, The Image Source and the Point and Grey cameras. I have connected the camera's wired remote to a micro-switch which is activated when the frame is brought into the gate and momentary stands still. I have reversed mounted a 50mm enlarger lens [Schneider S Componon] and have used extension tubes to magnify the image and have used a focusing rail to get sharp focus. So far I have saved each frame as a high quality Jpeg on an SD card, the camera automatically numbers the Jpegs in sequence these are later animated in the NLE it takes just over an hour to scan 100ft of 16mm and an hour to scan Super 8. I'll put picture up soon and upload a video.

Pav

[carllooper]

I have reversed mounted a 50mm enlarger lens [Schneider S Componon] and have used extension tubes to magnify the image and have used a focusing rail to get sharp focus.

That's the same lens I use, in the same way. Look forward to seeing your results.

C

[mr_x]

Always thought Empire State was a sort of pun on the concept of the 'movie' - a medium which defines itself by capturing movement, and so you mount a movie camera on a tripod and film something that is static. So conceptual art, yes. I haven't sat through it.

[Pj]

I always forget how to upload images here, I have uploaded some film grabs I've done on my website;

http://www.lightbreeze.co.uk/Film%20Technology.htm

If the link above doesn't work please go to the Technology page.

Thanks

Pav

[carllooper]

I always forget how to upload images here, I have uploaded some film grabs I've done on my website;

http://www.lightbreeze.co.uk/Film%20Technology.htm

If the link above doesn't work please go to the Technology page.

Thanks

Pav

The link works. Its a great write up. Excellent work.

Carl

[joshgladstone]

So scan some stuff already! The suspense is killing me