[Noisebridge-discuss] request for info re super-8 conversion hack

Sean Cusack sean.p.cusack at gmail.com
Thu Dec 29 21:55:57 UTC 2011


ooh crap! Sorry for not seeing this earlier. When I took film and video in
college, my final project was on 8mm, and I wanted to use non-linear
editors to add sound, splice, etc. the result (i.e. I faced the same
problem).

My solution was exactly what you proposed - dark room, project onto a white
wall, record with a nice DV cam on a tripod. Reason being, there are some
weird complications to trying to get analog -> digital when it comes to
film:

Video is not quite 30fps, it is 29.97fps because it "drops" a frame every
so often to store information related to something called a timecode. A
timecode is a counter that allows software, DVD players, etc., to reference
different points in a digital file by an index. So, somehow, you need to
get your non-timecoded analog stuff into a timecoded digital format before
you can play it on anything. There are a couple of ways to do this:

a) use fancy pants (expensive) editing software like Premiere or Final Cut.
You can import a "filmstrip" of individually scanned images and let it
stitch them together into a continuous movie file with a timecode attached.
This makes the scanning part easy, yet laborious, since you can just snap a
picture of every single frame.
b) build a "drop frame" algorithm into your scanner. If I remember the
math, 29.97fps means you drop 1 frame from every 100 frames of footage. So,
you'd want to have your scanner randomly skip a frame at that frequency.
Timecoding would be easy since you'd just number each frame in the sequence
you captured it.

Anyways, not sure if that helped or not, or if it was way too late, but
just to throw an extra $0.02 in there :)

Sean

On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 12:46 PM, jim <jim at well.com> wrote:

>
>
>    Thanks for the ScanCafe tip; I'll pass it on.
> I'm still hoping someone will provide some kind
> of guidance re making the gizmo from scratch.
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2011-12-20 at 15:20 -0500, Casey Callendrello wrote:
> > I fully support creating such a hack. However, there is a company based
> > in India called ScanCafe that will do scanning for very reasonable
> > prices - $.20 per foot.
> >
> > --Casey
> >
> > On 12/20/11 1:45 PM, jim wrote:
> > >      a friend of mine has a friend who's got some
> > > super-8 format film that he'd like to capture into
> > > some kind of digital format.
> > >      the content is family stuff, personal interest,
> > > no commercial value. he's not in a rush and doesn't
> > > want to pay the high fees for a commercial shop to
> > > do a conversion. the 20-year old film is in great
> > > shape, given the limitations of super-8 format.
> > >
> > >      i suppose one way of conversion might be to
> > > play the super-8 onto a screen and record the output
> > > with a digital video camera.
> > >      my pal thinks this is good fodder for a hack: rig
> > > up some kind of ccd device to a mechanical super-8
> > > film feeder and use sprocket edge detection to
> > > determine when to capture the current frame to the
> > > ccd device.
> > >      anybody got ideas or opinions?
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
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> >
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>
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