Wolverine-Hawkeye Telecine

[Stan Jelavic]

Something to look forward to Kamel. Even with the BUC02 and the 16mm lens you can get pretty good resolution.
1900x1400 cropped S8
1600x1200 cropped R8

[Kamel Ikhlef]

Thanks Stan,
Yes it is already a good resolution. What size do you have before cropping?
What is the best post-production workflow to improve our captures?
I was waiting because it is a lot of work to digitize all the films and I wanted to optimize not to start over.
(I have lots and lots of films to scan).

[Stan Jelavic]

Hi Kamel. The uncropped resolution is 1248x1536 for both formats.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nvz...ew?usp=sharing

Different people use different posts. I prefer Video Fred Option4. Save the avi video with Lagarith or similar lossless codec.
For difficult scenes you could use HDR but that one is more work in post.

[David Brown]

Kamel

I'd recommend that you start now, don't wait. Use a practice film clip of 30 seconds or 1 minute and take it all the way thru the post process. That includes the finished file viewed on all possible playback devices you have.

Then you will be ready when your hardware is finished.

[Stan Jelavic]

Here is another HDR clip with the UX178 camera and 2146x1536 resolution.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_7v...ew?usp=sharing

[Kamel Ikhlef]

Thanks Stan and David,
Yes you are right. with the BUC02 I can't seem to get as good as you.
But I will soon resume my tests to improve my results and finally start my scans for several months of capture and postproduction.

The UX178 is better UX226 ?

[Stan Jelavic]

Hi Kamel. UX178 resolution is in between the BUC02 and the UX226 but the colors seem to be somewhat nicer. Also a bit lower cost than the UX226.

[Marco De Vitis]

If the slow motion clip you recorded was with film in the transport, try it without film. If the claw is more regular then maybe the film is too tight in the gate.

Hi David and all,
I still did not take time to open my Wolverine again but took another slow motion clip while operating the unit without any film loaded; the movement seems a bit smoother but it's still not perfectly regular along the full 4-frames period:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/AMC4P1jSiFzQYqjc8

In the meantime I found good processing settings for AviSynth in my opinion, but green tint (bushes, trees...) is still lacking in the result, I wrote about that in another thread.

[David Brown]

Marco

It looks like the claw was "jumping" half way in the decent when the film was in the gate and now the whole drop is smoother. You don't need to open the case to simply place a piece of paper in the gate and capture. This problem is difficult to diagnose from here!

The paper is for "wider" film but it also relieves some pressure. Stan has been thru all this but I seldom find older posts.



Looks like Avisynth has corrected your jitter. It can probably correct the loss of green too. Just adjusting the RGB values without being able to monitor the change is tedious.

I just looked at one of the AVIsynth scripts, color is adjusted by incrementing RGB, not entering values. I have no experience here. I don't use Avisynth.

Stan has a good eye for color balance and he also uses the scripts. Or are you doing color balance in your video editor?

Adding magenta subtracts green.

[Stan Jelavic]

Marco, David, here is the folded paper fix instructions:
https://www.wolverinedata.com/assets..._Film_test.pdf
The color can be adjusted in the script.

blue= -1 red= -4.5 #manual color adjustment, when returning result3 or result4. Values can be positive or negative

It is a U,V color space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV

blue = U, red = V

[Marco De Vitis]

Hi Stan and David.
Oh yes, the paper trick: I tried it some time ago for my initial transport issues, with no results at the time. And I was also afraid of trying it again because I fear the plastic slider might break, it's somehow worn on the right , I think it's like this since I received the unit (but didn't notice at first), maybe they sent an used one:


But a few movies are still giving me that issue i.e. occasional grinding sound of gear teeth skidding resulting in permanent frame displacement for the rest of the movie; so I now tried one of those movies with the paper trick and it worked better, thanks! BUT... it did not solve the "periodic jumping jitter" issue, the resulting video is still jumping.

Indeed, IMHO it would not make much sense that a film pressure issue - which is constant - causes a periodic issue... unless it only aggravates another existing minor periodic issue.
It's true that the claw movement in the second slow motion video is smoother, but in my opinion it is not perfectly smooth, it is still slowing down halfway sometimes.

Regarding color correction, I did not use J. Mayer's or VideoFred scripts so I don't know which settings you looked at. I just used the ColorYUV filter of AviSynth with custom settings I found trying to fix the yellow tint of the Wolverine source.
By the way, it is possible to see in real time the effect of changes to AviSynth scripts. I'm using AvsPmod which also automatically creates sliders for used parameters:


I already did color correction to achieve the result I showed in the other thread and it's not bad, but I'm having difficulties in keeping more green in the image. I'm accustomed to photo editing and I find myself at ease in the RGB world, where you just set the value of each color component between 0 and max, but I get crazy with YUV here: I find it irritating that if I remove some blue I will necessarily get more yellow, and the same between red and green . I just can't find the right balance.
I played around with it again today and got some results but I introduced a blueish tint, if I try to remove it I get yellow again instead, etc. I think some adjustments are needed on the offset and gamma of UV channels, too. It's a hard work and I hoped somebody already went through it .

Color correction is more or less universal anyway, if anyone has good settings for color correction of Wolverine output in another video editing application maybe I can adapt them to AviSynth.

[Stan Jelavic]

Hi Marco, the color correction that I mentioned was done in the Video Fred script.
Here is the script
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17nh...ew?usp=sharing

The values I used for U and V:
blue= 10 red= -5

Here is what the video looks like without color correction:


And here is with the correction:


Regarding your jitter issue:
I still think it is some deformation in the gearing mechanism. Try tightening or loosening the stop screw a 1/4 of a turn.
Make sure to test it first manually.

[Marco De Vitis]

Hi Stan,
thank you.
I looked at the VideoFred script again, essentially for color correction it just does:

ColorYUV(off_u=10, off_v=-5)

But I think the result has a blue tint and still some of the yellow tint from Wolverine.
Also I suppose parameters can vary depending on source material and purpose: for example I have a "test bench" movie which is difficult because it has many different kind of scenes and also dark areas sometimes which I would like to make brighter. I'm also trying to remove the yellow tint from people's skin, and to keep green on trees etc.

I combined your frame with 3 frames from my test movie, to try different settings on different scenes:

Top left is the original Wolverine output.
Bottom right is your color correction from VideoFred script.

I was proud of my first result "Marco 1" top right:

ColorYUV(gamma_y=150, gamma_u=45, gamma_v=5, cont_y=25, cont_u=-70)

I find it warm and neutral, with good skin tone. But on a second look it has a bit too much red, and trees and foliage have become almost purple, maybe for the same reason.

Today I tweaked again and reached "Marco 2" bottom left:

ColorYUV(off_y=-5, off_u=-5, off_v=-3, gamma_y=150, gamma_u=45, gamma_v=9, cont_y=15, cont_u=-80)

I think it still has a bit too much yellow on skin, but it keeps enough green on foliage.
If I try to get more green, the whole frame will get a blue or green tint.
If I try to remove some more yellow, I will lose green on foliage as in "Marco 1".
So at the moment I think there's nothing more to be done...

[Stan Jelavic]

Good going Marco. You guessed it right, the script that I sent you is just a starting point and I have not spent much time on. Some time ago I created my own Avisynth plugin to shift the color range but then realized that daVinci can do the same thing. So instead of shifting the whole color space you shift only a certain color range. You can have several of these shifts by using several nodes in series.
Here is a short tutorial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB6NX9sIctk&t=3s
Not sure if this will resolve your issue but could help a bit.

[Jonas Maude]

Dumb question but when buy the DFM 37UX178-ML do I need a lens at all or is just the bare board fine?
https://www.oemcameras.com/dfm37ux178ml.htm