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Author
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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 08, 2017 08:28 AM
At the risk of tempting fate, I have just finished the last reel of my current project for a customer.
The new motor has scanned 2675ft over the last week.
All seems to be fine...
I really do believe that not using the wolverine to do any rewinds has made a difference.
That little motor is not up to rewinding, the temptation to apply finger pressure during the rewind to get a tighter wind, and often giving the winding spool a helping hand, no doubt, put undue strain on what is basically a toy motor.
It is fine for the scanning process but from my experience I would encourage anyone with a wolverine, to find an alternative rewind method, as I and others, have done.
I just have 2 400ft reels of my own to do, so let's hope I am not tempting fate and facing a third motor!
[ August 08, 2017, 10:33 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 09, 2017 03:19 PM
There are great news about modifying our firmware...
Tobi@s, the genius behind those hacking tools, kindly replied to my messages and yesterday he released a version of his software that will do the job with ours. It's amazing! I was so tired that I wasn't able to play with it; let's see if today I'm able to do so before I fall asleep...
In the meantime, for the brave people out there, you can try by yourself. And don't forget to say "thanks" to Tobi@s! this is the link to the forum post.
Finally, I made another discovery I have yet to play with. I read here and there different file names for putting the machine in "engineering mode", tried some and this one seemed to work.
If you place an empty file named "engmode", without extension, in your SD card and turn on the machine, when you start the Wolverine, once the logo disappears, the screen is put into a red background and some messages appear:
"jpg size is too big or too"
"update logo2 failed"
"cfg file error: Open"
Then it turns off again.
Obviously it's trying to do something. I would be have if I could make a backup of my existing firmware before doing anything...
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Pere Pasqual
Film Handler
Posts: 43
From: Gandia, València, Spain
Registered: May 2017
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posted August 12, 2017 02:38 PM
Sorry people, now I've really come to a dead end ![[Frown]](frown.gif) . I've tried every possibly recipe I could attemp to "cook" our custom firmware and failed. The machine would simply not attempt to flash the image (althought something is recognized as the machine won't start when I put the file on the SD card).
Also my machine is now flashed with the updated firmware version they sent me, and there's no bitrate difference on the generated files (in fact, with the same captured footage, this time it's a few bits lower). I don't notice any differences, in part because I didn't play enough with the old firmware to see any. I could play with crop and zoom settings a lot so I even captured half of the registration holes (it's regular 8 footage), unveiling a significant % of the image that was hidden until now and that to me suits better for 16:9 cropping. But that was probably available also on the previous firmware version.
Also the "border" on the registration holes area looks like a very thick black line. It looks to me like if the resolution was in fact fake - could it be that it was an interpolated resolution, thus the output resolution was in fact much lower than the announced CCD/CMOS chip one? Hmm...
Sorry to be this deceiving...
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Pere Pasqual
Film Handler
Posts: 43
From: Gandia, València, Spain
Registered: May 2017
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posted August 13, 2017 07:30 AM
Well, some minutes ago I got some "partial" success thanks to new instructions I got from the firmware tools author! ![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
Don't get too excited: it doesn't work. The machine got flashed! That's the good news. But then the machine can't operate, appart from the scanner light being turned on.
The good thing is that it can be flashed back to it's original firmware, so no harm done.
I was able to make a simple test using these tools where I simply unpacked the image and repacked it again without modification - the machine detected it as a valid firmware and flashed it, but again, it was non-functional. So this leads to the conclussion that the problem is not with my modifications, but the tools that are generating the firmware image. I'm going to pass this info (along with a more technical one) to the creator of the tools. We are in his hands again ![[Wink]](wink.gif) . But hopefully it is a minor modification he is able to do for us ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
In the meantime, I've uploaded my first and only capture with the wolverine to this moment:
https://youtu.be/e_O5HESFlqQ
It's a one-minute minute from a home recording I bought at a flea market for 1 €; God knows how it ended there! This is Spain in the mid-60's or first 70's, judging by the car model (Seat 600). The car plate belongs to Alicante, so it was probably shoot in a town near there.
I applied a lot of zoom out so I even captured the registration holes. This is regular 8 mm footage, so a lot of visual information is discarded if you crop it to 4:3. I used MP4Box to change framerate to 18 fps (althought I can't be sure if that's the proper one) and applied a simple color filter because the original capture looked far more washed and with a bluish tint. On the top left corner you can notice that I also applied a "logo remove" filter to test if I could diminish the registration hole lack of information.
This was done in seconds with the filters that AVIDemux ships by default, so please don't be too hard! ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
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