Homemade Telecine

[Stan Jelavic]

Used the horizontal mount because the camera is pretty heavy and hard to slide up and down vertically. The heatsink is actually 0.1 Ohm high power resistors which I could use to cut the voltage down to the LED because it is close to the max. Will see if this LED holds up without the voltage drop. Partially tested different film formats and it seems to work OK but will have to do more testing.
The current spring on the idler arm seems to be too weak and the takeup messes up the frame alignment. Will try stronger spring.

[David Brown]

Just so you don't feel like your doing all the testing, I have the 35mm splicer almost done. I've had trouble with the pin spacing. Spent a lot of time trying to adjust the printer, tried scaling (that does not work!!!). The 3D prints do match the 3D dimensions. Tonight I found that the pin pitch I'm using is wrong, just a little.

Print film uses motion picture film, but is always long pitch. Every where I see 0.1870" pitch spacing. It's also conviently shown as 4.75mm. That is rounded up, it should be 4.7498mm. It's too small to measure the last offset, easy to see the last pin is a little long. Might work.

Bought some 35 negs from Ebay for $3 & free shipping. Should be here in a day or two. Mine are complaining.

[Stan Jelavic]

Nice work David. The machine would have to be redesigned for 35mm. I am running the S8 tests. Will try the regular 8 next. Have some really crappy R8 footage but that is ok for testing. Will switch to 16mm after that.
I ended up using your heavier spring for the idler and that work perfectly. The frame alignment is better and there is no interference from the takeup.
Just a note, the Magic Lantern silent mode capture is very slow. They show all kinds of stats after the image capture that takes several seconds. Not sure if all of that can be disabled. Will check on their forum.

[David Brown]

I don't know how to physically add 35 to the HawkeyeII using the existing gate and pinch. I have been looking at some 35mm film holders, some motorised. I thought about adding a second step motor and just swaping the plugs. If the current FW can add more spacings, the existing reel posts might work with adapters. Just a thought.

Still there is the possibility that framing from different cameras will never be exact.

I'll post links to these projects. One had a motor/manual advance that was very fast. 1 button advanced the frame and the operator could hand adjust before capturing with the second button.

[Stan Jelavic]

Have not spent much time on 35mm. Just got the film formats working today after quite a bit of debugging. Run the CCS debug with the launchpad and replaced the gpio inputs with variables that i can change in the debugger and setting the breakpoints. Worked quite nice and helped me a lot. The flash memory also gets displayed in the memory window showing the values written into flash.
Currently the FW supports 4 modes. So yes, the 35mm spacing is also supported.
If there are boards out there with the stepper then the board could be adapted to that.
Will prepare the board for you with the control panel and the switches.
Forgot to add the S8/R8 switch so the boar has some rework for that, pretty simple mod.

Wanted to mention that the tuning is a bit tricky because of film shrinking and stretching. So you have to run it for a while and observe the trend and slowly tweak it with the UP and DOWN buttons. Some old R8 film that I had gave me a hard time. The S8 few films that I tried are much better and can run for a long time in sync. So, definitely this machine is not for people that just want to set it up and let it run unattended. It is quite a bit of work The results look great though and are worth the trouble in my opinion.

Forgot to mention, planning to run your 16mm reel tomorrow Davis.