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Topic: Review Wolverine Reels2Digital MovieMaker 8mm film digitizer
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Mike Spice
Master Film Handler
Posts: 421
From: none of your business
Registered: Jun 2017
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posted August 04, 2017 04:44 AM
with the new motor I have scanned around 1600ft and so far so good.
I have decided not to use the 'rewind' function on the machine, I am doing that using my projector, the rewind function was pathetic in the first place using the wolverine.
When you see the size of the take up motor, it's quite obvious that it is not sufficient to rewind a 200ft reel tightly enough or evenly enough, glaring error on the part of wolverine imo.
Rewound films were really loose on the reel, as the tension is not good enough on the wolverine rewind, so putting more strain on the take up is not something I want to do, let alone put up with loose rewinds.
I have also only been scanning two 200ft per day, rather than non stop back to back scanning, with some crazy idea if I don't push it too hard, it might just last. Of course, that should not be the case, it should be capable of running all day long.
I am tempted to open it up and see if the new motor has begun to leak black goo as the first one did, I may look over the weekend.
I have little faith in the machine right now and am expecting it to break down again, but that's just me and machines.
I have around 900ft to go on my current project so if it breaks down again I will let you know, but for now, it's working.
I was expecting a new clutch with the new motor, but they only sent a motor, and as I say, so far so good... but I'm yet to be convinced until I take a peek inside, which I may do this weekend.
I'll let you know the moment it fouls up, or I open it up for a look at the new motor.
I sent a photo of the old motor back to wolverine in california, they thanked me for that, they do seem helpful enough, but if and when this new motor fouls up and I contact them for a third motor, I hope they will still be as kind!
As I say, it is working as expected, but if a machine of mine breaks down when it is so new, it takes me a long time to regain faith in it again......
If you are interested in my scanning results, you can find me at youtube by searching for 'Mike Spice HMS Ark Royal' at you tube and there you will find my old movie junk, old Royal Navy 8mm from the 70's of mine and some clips of other folks films that I am charging £2 per 50ft reel for.
You can also find a link to my 'Super 8 Rescue' facebook group from the youtube page, where you can see in depth video tutorials and samples of my customers films and general tech stuff about my hobby. [ August 04, 2017, 06:04 AM: Message edited by: Mike Spice ]
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Pere Pasqual
Film Handler
Posts: 43
From: Gandia, València, Spain
Registered: May 2017
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posted August 05, 2017 01:34 PM
Hi people,
I'm quite new to the forum - in fact, this is my first post. I've been laying around for the past 3 months, since I registered, though.
Well, the thing is that I put my hands into one of these machines. I find the quality is more than OK for the price, but I'm a bit disappointed with the software functions. As many of you have already said, I would have expected things like:
- A computer-controller operation mode (this way each frame could be, for instance, saved directly to the hard disk and we could choose the output format; for instance, lossless png, etc).
- Ability to choose between 24 or 18 fps on the output file. I find nonsensical and very annoying we have to do it afterwards.
- Fine-tuning options on the machine itself like choosing different output resolutions, different formats and, the most important one, DIFFERENT bitrates/compression. I notice a lot of compression on the generated files.
- Better zooming options, allowing to capture even the registration holes if we wanted to, to crop them during postprecessing if we wanted to.
- Better brightness, contrast, gamma, tint and those all functions.
Now here it goes the main reason of my post: getting a better firmware. I already exchanged some emails with Wolverine support (they were very kind); they told me "it's impossible to set the frame rate on the machine to 24fps because 30fps is the less that the chip can deliver" (a statement that I would label, in the best case, as "incorrect" - a claim that, simply, cannot be upheld), and even asked them if they could make some source code available in order for us to improve it. I'm a computer engineer and believe that I could make some improvements I had access to it. Unfortunately, they replied is closed-source. Althought they sent me a newer firmware version:
20170511-ZS04 (file: FWDV180N.bin) (Please let me know if it's ok to share the firmware and I'll post it in case anyone is interested)
It's a bit strange, because my machine was bought the past month and it came with a far older version (20170215-ZS02). Anyway, I haven't still tested it because I'm afraid of losing some features and not being able to roll back to the previous version (I don't know how to make a backup of the current one).
The interesting thing was that now I had a firmware in my hands and, thus, something that we could potentially "reverse engineer" in order to "retouch" some function here and there.
Please, don't misunderstand me: reverse ingeneering a firmware is a very difficult task and I don't have the necessary knowledge to ever do so. My biggest ambition was to find some flag that could change, for instance, the default FPS to 24 by looking at the file with a hexadecimal editor. Or, to say it more properly, find someone who could do so.
And this is what it happened: by inspecting the file I found the string "NT96650". We know the machine has a NovaTek chip because that's what appeared the first time I connected it to my computer. So some googling for these strings produced interested results.
The funny thing is that the chip appears to be used on a wide range of those car cams people uses to record their travels (specially in Russia?) and that it has already a huge base fan and they are already hacking their firmwares for better functionallity.
The site https://www.goprawn.com has a section for NovaTek cams, and there, on the first 4 sticky posts, there are a bunch of tools for customizing NovaTek firmwares!
So this is what I did:
- I used bnGui, "Load firmware", it successfully recognized it, -> "unpack", and got an un packed .rbn file.
- Then I opened it with NtkMPE, and... Bang! A list of valid video modes, with different resolutions, fps and bitrates is available!
You can see the last one is our old friend 960x720, @ 30 fps and 9000 kbps bitrate.
And then I ended the investigation process because I have yet to figure out how does this work. I can edit the width, height, fps and bitrate settings, so I bet it would work if I change them to any valid combination. What is a valid combination? Any of the ones that appear in the list? Or any that is known to be hardcoded inside the chip?
Also the highest 1440x720 resolution from our European companion is available there.
I've seen captures of this list for those car cams and they have set up them to very esotheric combinations, with very high fps and bitrate settings. So I don't see the problem setting fps to 24.
I made modifications to that file and saved it successfully. Anyway, haven't been able to repack it into a proper .bin firmware files. But in case I had it, I'm not sure if I would attempt ruining my machine by flashing it with an unproper firmware...
I plan to get in touch with the programmers to see it the tools could be used with our machines, also.
More to come...
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Pere Pasqual
Film Handler
Posts: 43
From: Gandia, València, Spain
Registered: May 2017
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posted August 07, 2017 10:31 AM
Hi people!
Well, noting down our firmware versions is important, as well as our "hardware versions", because probably the same firmware won't work at the same time for the step-motor version and for the belt one, possibly rendering the machine unusable by flashing it with wrong firmware!
Anyway, I've come to a dead end: I understand what I have to do to fit the modifications inside a new firmware file, but it's the program what's failing now. It hangs when trying to "pack" the file, and there's nothing I can do to solve it. Theoretically the source code for this utility is available but I have to yet find it, and also I don't have the knwoledge to implement the proper modifications. I contacted the author regarding this issue both by a private message and by a forum topic reply here and here; now I'm waiting for a reply that who know when will it come, if ever...
Suggestions welcome, as always!
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