Wolverine-Hawkeye Telecine

[David Brown]

Stan - Good deeds are appreciated!

I was unable to get a lens combination yet to capture the gate with a dslr. Just can't get below the stepper motor. The microscope camera will and it has both 4k and 2k capture.

Like I said before I don't expect it to be a solution. No aperture on the lens and no exposure controls in software. It may have been cheap because it seems to be older and has lost support. The software has exposure controls, but they are grayed out. There is a wireless remote that I will open and see if the Hawkeye's trigger can be tied to the button.

Good luck on the battle of the led color. This looks very technical. Physically replacing the Wolverine's light source look like big challenge too. The led is so small. Are there more color precise leds?

My original plan for the dslr was to create another "gate" to left of existing gate, leaving the original to pull the film. There would be room for another light source there. The one I've been using is also an led. The Lume Cube is supposed to be daylight balanced, but it's not. It also has too much blue, I custom white balance the camera and it seem ok.

I was wondering if the exposure has an effect on the led's color, I placed a white card perpendicular to the Wolverine's light panel. Now there is lumenance gradient. I don't know if this is useful, interesting that green and red drop out in the highlights.

This was taken with a dslr on full auto, auto white balance. The camera failed. I am able to manually white balance.

[Markus Baur]

Stan,

I've taken a closer look at the S8 / R8 switch:



I don't think it does anything to the claw pitch mechanically. I can see two actions:

(1) For S/8 it pushes a plastic tab into the U shaped opening of SW1 triggering the switch contactless (IR / Hall Effect?) the same way the the claw trigger switch SW2 is operated. This switch may also tell the controller to run the stepper for the claw slightly differently. But I think you already investigated that.

(2) it moves the gate with the film path by 1mm relative to the light table and claw. It does this by having two standoffs from the gate riding inside the outer part of the switch while the four mounting screws of the gate leave it a little room to move perpendicular to the film path.

Bottom line: You could completely butcher the switch for Hawkeye operation as long as you keep the outer section for the gate to move in or provide some other means of moving the gate in / out.

[Stan Jelavic]

Kamel, the switches have to be reworked. They are two pole, so one pole should be used just to provide the contact closure to the connector and the other pole can be used for the indicator.
Something like this:



David, agree reworking the Wolverine LED can be a chore. That will have to wait. In the meantime I ordered the correction filters for white LED lights. It is a gel film that cuts down the LED temperature.
It may help.
Not sure if your test is completely conclusive yet but interesting idea anyways. Looks like all three colors drop down at the same rate which indicates that the exposure will not affect the white balance? I ordered an older black and white film which could be a good test for white balance.
Thanks Marcus for your hard work. Yes, the gate moves indeed. The pitch difference is OK because the hole sizes are such that one pitch can be used for both. In one case it will engage closer to the center and in the other closed to the edge of the hole. This could make the mod easier.

[Kamel Ikhlef]

Thanks a lot Stan,
Your solution is smarter. This shows that I am better in 3D design than eletronic design !
On your advice I will completely redesign the PCB.
For the "speed" switch,I do not know how to wire the indicators for the 4 positions (I think my solution is wrong). the connections of the switch positions are: 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5 for 0.5FPS, 1FPS, 2FPS, RW (I plan for the future v8). thanks again for everything.

[Stan Jelavic]

No worries Kamel. Here is what I think we can do for the speed switch. I will do a small writeup on that this coming weekend because it may be hard to understand it from schematic.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/2BVKSnhuTzoNAV2f7

[Stan Jelavic]

Here is the Hawkeye User Manual. Has installation instructions, IC Capture Settings, Nick's telecine usage.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1e0...IKzgN0oERQwcW9

Check the last chapter. It has the IC Capture settings that gave me pretty good results.

[Kamel Ikhlef]

Wow! OK, OK ... I was wrong! Thank you for your help Stan. I will try to understand the shematic (link with msp430 on the HAWKEYE mother PCB (v7-v8)).
In this case we may not need a 5-wire connector as only 3 are used ?
What value should be provided for the diodes and the resistors?

[Stan Jelavic]

For LEDs you can use 10mA drive current. So that is 3.3V/10mA = 330 Ohm.
R7 can be 10K
Use any general purpose transistor like 2N4401 or similar. Possibly get one from the library.
General purpose diodes.
https://www.amazon.com/Electronics-S...6158087&sr=8-2
https://www.amazon.com/General-Purpo...6158161&sr=8-1

[John Kennedy]

I finally bought the Wolverine moviemaker pro a few days ago. I have done some very basic testing and have uploaded a short segment of film shot by my Grandfather on Standard 8mm in 1965 on the Isle Of Wight, (which is off the south coast of England, for the benefit of our worldwide friends currently unaffected by Brexit!)

This is early days for me and the film is presented with no post production whatsoever. I am extremely encouraged by the results. I have attached a link but YouTube's limitations definitely reduce the quality somewhat. Still pleasing to these eyes though.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pmu1NmGv-dQ

[Bruce Davis]

Stan thanks very much for your latest documented Hawkeye and settings release, will test the settings. Are you suggesting doing the actual capture with Nick's program, which will result in an AVI file rather than individual images? This would save some time and disk space but not allow stop and restart without having to create a new AVI file. I do find in some cases that saving separate images can be more flexible.

John Kennedy, not sure about anyone else, but I find your capturing results to be very very good, you can be very proud of the result and that is before any post processing.

Regards - Bruce

[Stan Jelavic]

Good point Bruce. For now we can use Nick's program for testing and comparisons. If it proves to be really useful I can try adding the picture capture capability to it.
Good work John. The video does give a new life to the old film. It is bright and colorful and low jitter.

[John Kennedy]

Bruce, Stan. Many thanks for those kind words. I have read this board daily for years and followed the invaluable advice from you very keenly.

I took an early retirement in September and planned several years ago to spend this cold rainy winter in Blackburn Lancashire sorting through my Grandad's films and lovingly breathing new life into them for the many family members willing me on.

I always think of the excitement that our elders and betters must have felt when they saved up their hard earned money all those decades ago to be pioneers in the new medium of recording the lives of their loved ones. They would be thrilled I think to see our efforts in 2019 and we owe it to them to do our best. I like to think that my grandchildren in decades to come will appreciate what we are doing.

Most of all, I am stunned that Standard 8 footage from half a century ago which has been dumped in various cupboards, attics and wardrobes has survived so magnificently. I couldn't be happier with my purchase of the Wolverine moviemaker pro. I had so many reservations from the experiences of others on here and nearly opted for buying a machine running into the thousands of pounds. Admittedly these are early days as I have only had the machine for four days but I am so encouraged by my early tests.

[Stan Jelavic]

Enjoy your scans John.

[Stan Jelavic]

Still working on white balance. Posted some results today but they still do not make sense.
Essentially the unloaded gate histograms show that the colors from LED are not balanced and also
vary with exposure. If you try to balance them with unloaded gate the results are not very good.
Get better colors if done manually with the actual film...back to the drawing board, The procedure in the manual is still my best so far.

[Bruce Davis]

Stan it seems the camera board remembers its last settings (until they are changed) when switching between IC_Capture and IC_Telecine, for example the WDR settings.
Do we know which settings are kept in the camera board memory and which are not. I assume that settings in IC_Telecine like the colour balance (Hilite Midtone Shadow) are not remembered.
When you mention using IC_Telecine for Post Processing, does that men setting up as required in IC_Capture then switching to IC_Telecine for the fine tuning of "Colour Balance" settings (that would be time consuming especially at scene changes).
Thanks