I have much to say about film-to-video transfer using frame-by-frame techniques, but I've been putting off making a page about it on my site, due to the enormity of the task and my limited time. I run the film facilities at Cooper Union Art School, where we teach 16mm and sometimes Super8. I spent a few years slowly building our current system, which does sharp 1080p transfers of 16mm reversal, prints, or negatives. My solution is based on parts we had available, some purchases from eBay and elsewhere, and my own history using the MAX visual programming environment to make my artwork.
First, a quick note: Mirrorless cameras DO have shutters even though they lack mirrors, so a mirrorless cam will die on a JK just like an SLR. (Though some of the very newest ones have an all-electronic shutter mode, often with reduced dynamic range.) I can't explain every detail of our system here, but this is the general idea: A (mirrorless) Panasonic GH2 camera body with macro bellows + enlarger lens is focused on the filed-out gate of an Eiki slotload projector. The projector has been modified: Shutter removed, sound-reader removed from film path, motor replaced with gear-head DC one, lamp replaced with RGB LED, power-supply replaced... An Arduino microcontroller inside the projector communicates with a nearby computer via USB. The Arduino controls the motor speed and direction, senses when the mechanism has advanced each film frame, and dims the LEDs (via a high-speed PWM controller). When a frame is stationary in the gate, the LEDs are on, but when film is in transit they turn off. So when the motor is running the LEDs blink once per frame. (This detail is crucial.) The computer is running a custom app (created with MAX) that communicates with the Arduino and manages a live video feed from the camera. The camera, like many recent mirrorless cams, outputs a 1080p signal via HDMI which we feed through a Matrox capture box and display on the computer screen for focus and framing. The software is also checking the brightness of the sprocket hole (revealed by the filed-out gate). When you begin recording, the projector motor turns on and the software captures the first illuminated video frame to disk then waits for the next one.... It's a slow process (about 4fps) but way faster than the JK (<1fps) and doesn't kill any DSLR shutters. After the capture is done, all the uncompressed frames are rendered out to your choice of codec (we use Prores 422) with optional image processing like curves, color-inversion, image-flipping, pillar-boxing, etc. The filed-out gate can cover Super16 or the soundtrack of prints, which we can translate to sound via AEO-Light [1]. The drawbacks are: It's home-made, so not easy to replicate with common materials. It's slow. It requires a specific camera shutter speed to eliminate PWM flicker. The GH2 is not the ideal camera (limited dynamic range makes reversal transfers too contrasty, needed firmware hacking to fix HDMI problems, needs to be recording to SD card to enable high-quality HDMI outs, even though we don't use the SD card recordings!) More recent cameras like the GH3 would be fine. The software is somewhat fragile because MAX is inefficient. (We use a fast SSD for captures but if you try to multitask during capture you'll get dropped frames.) Some pictures are here: http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/wp-content/uploads/1-HD-Telecine-wide.jpg http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/wp-content/uploads/2-HD-Telecine-Wide-lamp.jpg http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/wp-content/uploads/3-HD-Telecine-lamp-close-up.jpg http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/wp-content/uploads/4-HD-Telecine-internals.jpg http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/wp-content/uploads/5-HD-Telecine-pressure-plate.jpg http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/wp-content/uploads/6-Cooper-HD-Telecine-screenshot.jpg http://www.zachpoff.com/site2/wp-content/uploads/7-Cooper-HD-Telecine-sample-frame.jpg_(that's a frame from reversal. Color neg looks awesome too.)_ -Zach Poff Links: ------ [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/aeolight/
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