Wolverine-Hawkeye Telecine

[Kamel Ikhlef]

Moderator's note: This thread is a continuation of the very popular topic started by Robert Hudson on April Fools' Day back in 2017. 1,387 posts later we start anew.

---

Well, the forum has closed ... I continue here!
Panel Command V2 with new switch 4 positions and picoblade 5 pins. it's Christmas leds garlands !...
I hope my shematic is correct ?... I am electronic beginner... to test...

BTW :I did not model the entire Wolverine in 3d. But I can try to see if we can integrate a camera box (36x36x25mm).
Optical lens C is larger than M12...To see, it can be interesting ... If not, recreate the camera cardboard template to test...

Look This Telecine : https://youtu.be/f-syiwopokw

[Stan Jelavic]

Good going Kamel. Hawkeye is not dead yet

[Kamel Ikhlef]

Look This Telecine : https://youtu.be/f-syiwopokw
or this : https://youtu.be/yXxPCjzw4NY
4K super 8 Scans : https://youtu.be/JNMd_jsoOKI

[David Brown]

Kamel 4k looks good, yet the author complains that h264 codec has lost detail?

I would like to see that 4k scan side by side with 2k.

[David Brown]

Stan

iceland on SUPER 8. This is not mine. I was looking for a commercial scan that shows framing and sprocket holes. They reveal there is some jitter that is natural to the film.


- resolution - do we have to go higher. Not optical but maybe more pixels per frame. 2K is possible (will double check) with existing setup and C mount (different camera) https://www.oemcameras.com/dfk-72buc02.htm

The best answer comes after a comparison of 2K and 4K.
The Wolverine full screen files on my tv looked awful. Even overlooking the compression artifacts, there were fuzzy edges. With current marketing speak that has flipped image descriptions from height to width, a 4:3 aspect of 1440x1080 is "2K"(1080p) and "4K" is "2160p). The Hawkeye's current camera sensor is 4:3 and 2592x1944. If we can use all of it, that should capture all/most of the film's detail. Upscaling in post or by TV should look better when starting with bigger physical dimensions.


- white balance - I think further improvements are needed - Am I right? Can someone compare with side by side with other setup.
If it is way off I am willing to write our own capture based on algorithms published by:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZni...be&app=desktop
I really like the results.

Wolverine's light source might not have consistent color from 1 machine to another with the stock lamp.

WOW, I really like the monitor display with a live image, reports, and settings. (The DIY telecine)


- I will try DSLR setup with my spare Wolverine. Essentially dismantle the unit and mount components on a piece of wood. See what kind
of quality I get. Is it worth going that way in a long run?

That will be hard on the DSLR's shutter if it is used for all captures. It's how I hoped to evaluate the 4K/2K thing. I have the gate and motor mounted to wook now. The board and display will need and extension for the power connector. I will have to wait until I have the V8 finished, no way to capture motion yet.


Just be honest... We put in lots of work and some money into this but should not be biased by that.

[Stan Jelavic]

David,

Upscaling in post or by TV should look better when starting with bigger physical dimensions.

I will try to mount the Wolverine stepper assembly on a board. That way I can try different cameras. With the current camera and lens I will be able to get closer to get hiher resolution (DOF may be a problem). I also plan to open up the bottom so that a different LED type can be tested. I had pretty good results with the video light and a diffuser.

Wolverine's light source might not have consistent color from 1 machine to another with the stock lamp.

I do auto white balance with the unloaded gate. It does go gray but I am still not happy with the results. There was a post that says to use the film with lots of black and white for auto balance. This should compensate for the film stock. But I do not have that. I think I will compare with the DSLR.

That will be hard on the DSLR's shutter if it is used for all captures

Just a short clip for testing.

It's how I hoped to evaluate the 4K/2K thing.

Sounds like a good plan.

will have to wait until I have the V8 finished, no way to capture motion yet.

I have an older V5 that I do not need. Can send it to you. Will need your address. Domestic shipping is around $16.

[Peter DiAntoni]

I would love to see a dslr mod. In a previous telecine project, I projected a super 8 camera directly to a Canon 5D full frame sensor (no lens). It worked pretty good, you could focus the projector on the camera sensor similar to focusing an enlarger with a grain magnifier. I ran it all with the live view camera settings, which does not use the mechanical shutter.

[David Brown]

There must be a shortage or high demand here. This is a significant price increase. 4k is losing it's sticker shock.

[Stan Jelavic]

I also noticed that these cams are no longer on sale. Will check with them tomorrow to see what is going on.
Peter, I also used the DSLR for capture. Used MarkII and Olympus Pen. Still have the macro optics.
Working on the setup bit by bit.

Revised the frame sync cct. Now the cam trigger has full 3.3V on it. Tested it and it works good.

[Stan Jelavic]

Checked with oemcameras and here is their input:
It appears the pricing should actually be lower than what is listed on the site. I was have our web guy make the adjustment. Price is $129/each without the lens.

[David Brown]

Thanks Stan for checking with oemcamras! I won't worry yet.

[Stan Jelavic]

Remembered the post that Keith posted a while back.
Posted by Keith Wilkinson (Member # 7162) on October 28, 2019, 04:47 AM:

I am new to the forum, but have been reading this thread with much interest. I have been doing 8mm transfers for some years thanks to my late father leaving me twenty years of material starting in the 1960’s. I haven’t got a Wolverine but use a modified Eumig projector and machine vision camera.
However, I thought Stan especially, would be interested in what can be done with the SDK from Imaging source. See this website:-
http://www.nightshade-arts.co.uk/tel...rocessing.html


Read the while article and tried 2 pixel binning. Here is the result:
https://kapwi.ng/c/G2dhGE3j

The resolution is 1/2 of the original resolution but looks like the dark scenes are better.
At this point the comparison with Wolverine does not show drastic improvement except for the artifacts.

[Bruce Davis]

Nick Whitehead made his software program available to anyone end of October 2019, default colours/image seems better but the capture timing is not quite right for the Hawkeye, if I remember correctly it captures half the image while the film is moving, also the program is not as intuitive to use as IC capture.
Regards - Bruce

[David Brown]

Stan

My understanding of pixel binning is an in camera option to shrink the image. It's better than line skipping, but avereages surrounding pixels to shrink the image on the fly. If the sensor is larger than the target video dimensions. It looks better than cropping in or line skipping.

Is there another use for it here? Strange someone would be tring to reduce resolution !!! Well, maybe for streaming bandwidth.

[Stan Jelavic]

I tried Nick's sw but it could not find teh device on my win10. Did not spend too much time with it.
But Nick had several good pointers. One area is dynamic range and histogram.
The ADC is 12 bit bit the output image is 8 bit. That is why it is hard to get the dark and light areas to work.
WDR comes to the rescue. It compresses 12 bits into 8 by dropping bits in less relevant intensities - not perfect but still big help.
Gamma gives more bits to the dark areas but the issue is that shadow detail become visible but look flat with histogram at 0 on left side.
WDR improves that but the final video will still have low contrast in dark areas.
In Film9 I used auto white balance that fixes that by expanding the histogram. Obviously, other tools also have that capability.

Another issues is that in Ic Capture auto exposure does not tick well with WDR and overexposes some scenes.
This gives weird colors sometimes because one color may be clipping while others are ok.
So, run bright scenes with lots of blue sky, bright green grass etc and adjust exposure reference until the histogram is clean.

When comparing Hawkeye and Wolverine, Wolverine has an unfair advantage. It has sharpening set very high so the video looks crisp
and actually ok for some scenes
But in those cases Hawkeye looks dull. Obviously, in some cases Wolverine is too crisp and annoying.
In the following video I applied all of the lessons from above and cranked up sharpness to match Wolverine so that we it is a fair comparison.
See it for yourself:
https://kapwi.ng/c/G2dhGE3j

Where do we go from here:
I think we should try to get the optical magnification up so that the image covers the whole sensor.
In order to do that we will have to redesign the Wolverine front panel. Our friend Kamel comes to my mind.
Redesign the panel so that the sensor to film distance is 12mm x 4 = 48mm.
If the 12mm lens that we use gets overwhelmed, then I have a quote for C mount for our camera.
Go with the C mount lens - similar to what Nick did. That way we will be as sharp as Wolverine without digital artifacts.
Here are the settings I used:
Color
Saturation = 59
White Balance Auto = off
White R = 99
White G = 70
White B = 64
Color Enh = on
Exposure
Exposure Auto = on
Auto Reference = 74
Highlight Red = not set
Image
Sharpness = 14
Gamma = 80
Denoise = 0

Partial Scan - set as required
WDR
Tone Mapping = on
Global = 0
a = 3.68
b = -0.23
c = 0.30
lum_avg = 0.46

In Film9 set auto balance to on. Everything else off.
With these settings
Hawkeye is overall sharper
Colors is a mixed bag - a better postprocessing tool will help. Needs someone with post processing experience to test.
Hawkeye - less digital artifacts
Video quality - very close between the two tools