8mm digital transfer lighting issue

[Chris Kromer]

***EDIT***
Apologies for posting in this forum. How can I delete this post or move it to the Film to Digital Conversion forum?
Thanks.

Happy Father's Day.

I've been transferring some 8mm home videos from the 50s and 60s to MP4. I'm using a budget Digitnow scanner, and I'm generally happy with the results. This is my first project, so I'm a total newbie to 8mm and Super8.

For a few films that were shot in difficult lighting environments (a dark, old church, a trip to the zoo on a sunny day, or camping in the shade), the lighting is washing out the whole picture. I've spent some time tooling around DaVinci Resolve's color correction options, but so far I haven't been able to make the affected films watchable. Even adjusting the contrast and saturation have little effect.

I've attached a brief clip here of a wedding. This is a raw scan with no editing. I'm familiar with the church where it was shot, and I remember it was always very dark inside. Is there anything that can be done to make such films watchable, or is this just a consequence of the technology of the time and an amateur cameraperson with poor lighting?

As I said, I'm a newbie, so I apologize for any mistakes or silly questions.

Thanks!

[Kim Trampus]

Just my 2 cents, but I think the scanner is picking up ambient room lighting compounded by the autoexposure of built-in camera its trying to compensate for the dark portions of the film by overexposing the dark image. Try capturing the film in a dark room with all the lights turned off.

[Chris Kromer]

Thanks, Kim. I never would’ve thought of that. If I’m unable to move the converter into a darker room, could I cover the area with the light and scanner with something to obscure the light? Or would that also mess up the scan?

[Ty Reynolds]

I agree that the scanner's autoexposure is over-compensating for the film's under-exposure, but I don't think ambient light is the issue. Those scanners are designed to be used in normal room light. Masking the edges of the film guide may reduce the scanner's spill light, though, along the edges of the film.

I've played with the clip in Sony Vegas to get the attached result. The gamma setting is greatly increased to bring out as much detail in the shadows as possible - hardly any in this case. The contrast setting is then boosted somewhat to bring back the washed-out blacks. The contrast center is is shifted to the highlights so they don't get blown out any more than they are. It's not much of an improvement, but not as flat as the raw scan.

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

This is probably Kodachrome film stock. Although this will provide very vibrant color and life-like contrast when projected, it is also the most challenging film stock to be scanned due to its high contrast characteristic. Using those Wolverine (and all of its clones) scanner, I'm afraid that this would be just as good as you can get from it due to the limited dynamic range of the scanner itself.

Maybe you can try the second run with +1 exposure settings, and see if that will do any good?