8mm Forum: Question for John Whittle and Others About Film Transfers

This is topic Question for John Whittle and Others About Film Transfers in forum 16mm Forum at 8mm Forum.

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Posted by Dan Lail (Member # 18) on June 05, 2008, 10:05 PM:

When transfering sound film to DVD do you need a projector with a five blade shutter? I have heard that all you really need is a digital camcorder with a veriable fps(25 fsp) control, this would eliminate the need for a projector with a five blade shutter. What is the most economical way to interface a set-up for this endeavor? I guess what I am trying to find out is how to get a good copy of the film to a camcorder. I know how to get it from the camcorder to the software program.

Posted by Lucas Elzea (Member # 1152) on June 06, 2008, 09:43 AM:

Hello Dan, That is a very tricky question with a lot of variables. It will in any case be a process of trial and error. The best results will come from a 3 chip mini dv camera with variable shutter speeds and manual override for the f-stops and automatic gain. Turn auto gain off and play around with different shutter speeds until the flickering is gone. If it is too bright or too dark you can then adjust the f-stop of the lens accordingly. These cameras are fairly expensive though and most consumer cameras do not have all of these features. If your film projector has variable speeds then that also allows for further fine tuning ( you can always speed or slow down the material later in an editing program ). Let me know if this was of any help to you.
Lucas

Posted by Dan Lail (Member # 18) on June 06, 2008, 10:15 AM:

Thanks, Lucas. I had no idea about camcorder capabilities. So, in your experience this will make broadcast quality dvds?

Is it posible to use this telecine projector(below) with a high resolution digital(economy price) comcorder to produce broadcast quality dvds?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ELMO-16mm-TELECINE-5-BLADE-PROJECTOR_W0QQitemZ250255131872QQihZ015QQcategoryZ15254QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Posted by Lucas Elzea (Member # 1152) on June 06, 2008, 11:06 AM:

Hello again,
It depends what you mean by broadcast quality. I personally am no freind of DVDs because of the mpeg format and all its' drawbacks ( atifacts, banding etc. ). If you really want broadcast quality transfers then I would go to a professional Telecine house where they have equipment worth millions of dollars ( wet gate, etc ) and pay about 500 dollars an hour to make the transfers and color corrections. But to then get that quality onto a DVD would take some seriously tricky compression and in any case a loss of the original quality.
It looks like that projector with the 5 blade shutter ( very small slits! ) is a special adaption perhaps for transfers to a video camera without a lens ( aerial image cinematography ) which is how the cheap corner foto shops used to transfer their home movies. I personally was never satisfied with such transfers but on the other hand I have seen super 8 movies transfered with wet gate that looked FANTASTIC.
In the end you get what you pay for. What I do is to get a good image onto a screen and then film that screen with the best video camera I can get my hands on ( no doubt the "red camera" which shoots in a RAW format )but mini dv is good enough, and I would also make a point of shooting with progressive scan and not with fields, play around with the gain and shutter speeds and voila. In the end you will have great quality but you will also have a data rate of about 1 gigabyte/ minute. Try getting that onto a DVD!! So unless you are a master of compression and have some very fast computers and expensive software ( in which case I will be getting some tips from you ), I cannot imagine that you will be happy with the results. If you are doing this for archival reasons then the best archival format is film itself. If you are doing it for familly and freinds then any good old projector will do but the video camera is essential, and take my advice and forget DVDs and always stick with the best possible medium which in your case in the end would be digital uncompressed, or mini dv compression which is not too bad.
However I am a purist and I still prefer vinyl to cds and lets not get started on an mp3 discussion!
Cheers
Lucas

Posted by John Whittle (Member # 22) on June 06, 2008, 08:10 PM:

Dan,

The problem in the US is that our NTSC system uses a frame rate or 29.97 fps for color and film is 24 fps. If you buy a camcorder that has a 24P setting in theory you could synch it to a projector to eliminate the frame bar that will cycle through your picture without it.

A professional transfer from a flying spot or ccd telecine does a full frame capture and then a device known as a frame store plays out the information for the interlaced TV system we use.

In Europe they have a mains frequency of 25hz and a tv frame rate of 25 hz so it's easy to run projector and get a transfer with a minimum of tweaking.

The 24P camcorder makes the same conversion on playback that the frame store in a telecine does.

MPEG2 gets a lot of bad raps, most are undeserved. There were when I last checked a couple of years ago 29 or more profiles or variations of MPEG2 and the problems cited are often from a user or a software author choosing the wrong one.

Worse than MPEG2 is DV tape which is one of the earliest digital formats and is really a set of still jpeg pictures. As such you often see ghostly movement of foreground to background objects. A high bit rate MPEG2 recording is better and after you author the program in a computer you can apply double pass variable bit rate encoding which will reduce file size and maintain quality. As a rule, don't try to squeeze more than 120 minutes on a 4.7G DVD.

The pupose of the five blade shutter on projectors goes back to when camera pickups were slower tubes and the short "blasts" of picture allowed for an even picture although you never would get "clean" frames and often saw blurring between frames of film captured on a single video field. Most early VHS tapes were transfered this way as well and look poor compared to today's high end transfers.

So in short,

Look for a 24P camcorder (they're turning up more and more now) which you'll be able to use for transfer and general work.

Set up an aerial image for best quality, contrast and even illumination

An ideal projector would have some way to synch to 23.97 to match the camcorder.

Even though everything is going digital, we're still bound by that old legacy drop frame time code rate and 29.97/23.97 frame rates since everything today has to run at ntsc and atsc and thus all the equipment is already built to run at 29.97.

John

Posted by David Kilderry (Member # 549) on June 10, 2008, 08:29 AM:

Dan, Lucas and John have come up with more than I could offer to your problem.

The only thing I would offer is that if you have just a couple of films you wish to transfer, find a Rank Cintel Flying Spot scanner in a quality production house; for top results it is worth the $.

If you wish to copy films on an ongoing basis then you will need to fiddle a little and go the camcorder route.
Good luck

David

Posted by Maurice Leakey (Member # 916) on June 10, 2008, 09:31 AM:

John

I'm sure it was a small slip of your keyboard but I would just like to say that the European mains frequency is 50hz.

Posted by Dan Lail (Member # 18) on June 10, 2008, 11:33 AM:

Thanks, Lucas, John, and David!

What a wealth of informatiion. [Smile]

I would like to make ongoing copies for my own use. If I buy a 5 blade telecine, then what is a good economical digital camcorder to buy?

Posted by John Whittle (Member # 22) on June 10, 2008, 09:41 PM:

Dan,

Personally I don't think right now is a good time to buy a camcorder. There are some really great deals on some DV tape units and hard disk and solid state 480 devices. BUT if you're doing sound, you need a camera/recorder that has a mic input so that you can bring in the audio.

I watch for the HiDef Cannon camcorders to start dropping in price. The current units that record in ACHD (I don't know if I've got the letter right there) in 24P, have a mic/audio input and record to SDHC cards or internal cards.

You can use this for years to come in HiDef and most editing programs now accept the hidef input and you can save the project in hidef at 24P and then have NeroVision or other editing program transcode it to MPEG2 DVD format.

Currently BluRay recorders and rawstock are pricey and tempermental as is common in new hardware/formats.

And yes, I typed 25Hz for European mains when I knew and should have stated 50Hz. It's ironic that the early Filmo projectors from the 20s and 30s were DC and AC from 25Hz to 80Hz when many parts of the cities were still DC (I remember that as a kid in the 50s, there were office buildings in Seattle that still were DC).

John

Posted by Steven Sigel (Member # 21) on June 11, 2008, 11:41 PM:

Dan --
Don't buy a 5 - blade projector and a camera -- buy an ELMO TRV. The results are a lot better...

Posted by John Whittle (Member # 22) on June 14, 2008, 05:04 PM:

Elmo discontinued these machines several years ago. They made a 16mm version and separate machines for regular 8 and Super8. There was also a slide projector machine.

However Clive Tobin is making new transfer devices like the elmo but incorporating a lot of improvements. You can get get one with a 3CCD chip camera. The results are absolute rock steady, clean and sharp transfers. These prices for these machines put them out of reach for the casual user, but if you invest in one, you might develop a nice little side line business as people are finding that the only way they will ever see their old home movies is after they're transfered to DVD.

Check out Clive's machines at Tobin Cinema Systems (it should come up on a google search).

John

Posted by Bill Brandenstein (Member # 892) on June 14, 2008, 10:33 PM:

David is right, that a Rank spot scanner transfer is a great way to get DVD-quality results. BUT for the price of that Elmo auction, Dan would only get an hour or two of Rank-suite time at a transfer house!

I am out-classed here by the engineering minds at hand. However, two additional concerns with the Elmo come to mind. First, how is the projector's speed set? If it is locked to the 60Hz power, you'd be better off -- but there would still be an occasional frame or field slip. If it's a normal belt-driven unit, well, then there would be LOTS of mistiming. The second concern is the aperture cropping issue. When you project film OR watch a normal TV, you're losing about 5% of image around the edges. But when capturing video from a normal projector aperture, you double the cropping, and end up with 10% or more of the image lost.

Dan, are you familiar with Roger Evan's workprinters? That's another way around all of these problems, but is more expensive.

Posted by Dan Lail (Member # 18) on June 15, 2008, 08:13 PM:

Thanks, Bill!

Steve and John, is this Elmo TRV you are referring to?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ELMO-16MM-FILM-TO-VIDEO-CONVERTER-TRV-16-CCD-COLOR_W0QQitemZ320262129512QQihZ011QQcategoryZ15254QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Posted by Martin Jones (Member # 1163) on June 16, 2008, 03:22 AM:

Tobins web site....http://www.tobincinemasystems.com/

Martin jones

Posted by Steven Sigel (Member # 21) on June 16, 2008, 09:40 PM:

Dan - That is an Elmo TRV, but it's an older one.

The TRV 16 (that one) was the earliest model, the TRV-16G is the middle model, and the TRV-16H was the high-res model (S-Video output and more scan lines).

Posted by Kevin Faulkner (Member # 6) on June 17, 2008, 05:34 AM:

Hi Steve, Havent seen you on here for a long time [Frown]

Welcome back [Smile]

Kev.

Posted by John Whittle (Member # 22) on June 18, 2008, 06:37 PM:

Remember using either the TRV or Clive's machine will give you a video and audio output signal. I find that the best way to capture this is with a set-top style dvd recorder, not a computer. Then the DVD can be imported into Nerovision and edited, adding chapters, menus and backgrounds, etc.

The set top recorders do a better job of on-the-fly mpeg encoding than most of the computer add in cards. The computer cards are often dropping frames or stalling since there are always other things going on in a computer so real time capture is a bit tricky.

John

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