DIY real-time 8mm/S8mm telecine system sample footage

[Onnie Granados]

Greetings, all --

Are you interested in rolling your own real-time 8mm/S8mm transfer system, that produces pretty darn decent results, for a few hundred bucks, using parts you can find by digging around on ebay? I'll post a link to the results first, so you can see what I think are "pretty darn decent results," and then you can decide if you wanna keep reading or not.

Here's some sample footage: https://youtu.be/FhrKO1cEo7U

I wrote up a long post with pictures of my setup, and then got some kind of server-error message and lost it all, drat, so I'm just gonna post the above link for now and if there's any interest in How I Did It, let me know, I'll try writing more later.

Onnie

[Roland Diaz]

Looks awesome, how did you do it?

[Onnie Granados]

Looks awesome, how did you do it?

Thanks, Roland!

Okay, here's the short version, for anybody with a modicum of technical ability (and/or willingness to break your own stuff) --

Parts list:

1) Sankyo Dualux 1000 projector, chosen because it's got a variable speed control, will accept a 1" diameter projector lens, is dual 8mm, has only one part that is likely to break (the drive belt) and is easy to fix (you can get a new drive belt for around ten bucks), and you can find these on ebay for $20-$200, depending on condition. You won't use the existing projector bulb, you'll use an LED lamp, more on this in a bit.


2) Sunray 2" 107 (Wollensak) 16mm projector lens -- this replaces the stock lens in the Sankyo projector, and is an easy swap, you just wrap a couple of layers of electrical/duct tape around the lens so it'll fit nicely into the the projector. What this lens does is, allows you to aim your camcorder directly at the lens and "zoom" in to capture the "gate" of the projector, thereby eliminating any need for any other lens in this system. This gives the best image quality, but does require correcting the image orientation in your editor (Kdenlive) later. Other 16mm projector lenses should probably give equal results, but I've got several Wollensak lenses so I used what I had. Also the Wollensak lenses are easy to take apart for cleaning, if needed, and you used to be able to pick one up on ebay for ~$10-$40 USD.

3) Panasonic HDC-HS9 camcorder -- I chose this because it has 3 CCDs for really excellent image quality and resolution, plus it's old so you can (usually) find them cheap on ebay for around $100 USD. If you've already got any sort of HD camcorder, or still camera with movie mode and a modest zoom lens, that'll probably work, at least for testing purposes.

I did have to modify the projector and I can give a detailed guide on the steps needed, but short version for the tech savvy: I removed the aperture gate for the 8mm/S8mm switch (held on by two small screws) just to "open up" the frame so I could crop as much or as little of the edges of the display frame that I wanted (I like watching the sprocket holes myself), and I swapped out the original projector bulb for an LED. Now, everybody has their own favorite design for a "cool" lamp source for a telecine device, and you can spend hours and $$$ on the Ultimate Color Balanced Light Source Ever, but here's my version: I had an LED auto tail-light bulb left over from when I swapped out the bulbs in my car, and I had an old tail-light socket in my junk box, so I thought, "Let's try putting this old LED tail-light bulb in a socket, connect it to a 12v DC power supply, and see how it works." No dimmer, nothing else, just a simple LED tail-light bulb. It worked great!

I did use a small piece of scrap acrylic plastic as a lamp "diffuser," which you can see in the photos attached -- this goes between the lamp and the film gate to make a nice uniform white "background" for the film, and worked great with the tail-light LED light source. It's just a piece of transparent white acrylic plexiglass, you can find small sheets (6"x6") on ebay or Amazon for $10 or so, then cut it to size (hacksaw works fine) to fit your projector. You can tape it in place, or do what I did and screw it onto the projector so it doesn't fall off right in the middle of some transfer.

4) Then line everything up as you see in the pictures -- install your LED in the projector, swap out the projector lens, aim your camcorder directly into the projector lens, spend a bit of time lining everything up (you could build a cool Telecine mount system or just do what I did, put the projector on some table, put the camcorder on a tripod, aim the camera directly into the projection lens, adjust the zoom and focus on a test film), and once everything is lined up, turn the projector on, turn on the camcorder, adjust the projector speed so there's no flicker, press record on the camcorder, and voila, you're recording your movie in real-time on the camcorder.

Once you've recorded your footage, pop the SD card into your computer, fire up Kdenlive, use the Flippo plugin to turn your footage right-side up and front-to-back (i.e. Flippo allows you to "invert" the X axis and Y axis, just invert the X axis and that'll fix the footage), and the Sankyo's tend to run about 18-20fps in "non-flicker" mode, so I adjust the playback speed in Kdenlive to about 85% of normal (close enough to 16fps for 8mm, I'd run about 90-95% for Super 8), and then edit the footage as you would any other video.

I can get into really specific detail for those of you who are sincerely interested in building your own system, but hopefully this helps get a few people wanting to roll their own real-time transfer systems!

Oh, and the orange duct tape on my camcorder: I picked up my Panasonic HDC-HS9 camcorder from a guy for dirt cheap because the little monitor hinge is broken, the little display works but the hinge keeps swinging shut and turning off the camcorder, unless I tape it open.

[Paul Adsett]

Congratulations Onnie on a really great quality transfer. Much better than videoing off a screen and Far, far better than those Wolverine type film scanners. The color looks gorgeous, no flicker, no digital artifacts, rock steady and very sharp. Who could want for more?

[Winbert Hutahaean]

How (or what type of software can be used) to reduce jitterness/shakiness that usually found in 8mm amateur shot?

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

This is EXACTLY the same optics principle I've been used for ages. And it simply WORKS - I can solidly confirm on that.
Unless you really need frame-accurate transfer this setup is the most practical & efficient method hands down.

[Stan Jelavic]

Very nice and simple setup. Good work Onnie. How long can you run it before getting some flicker? I tried this in the past with the Chinon and Cannon projectors but would always get some flicker for longer scans. That is why I use the sw to eliminate the flicker for this type of transfer. But you have to run the projector at 8 FPS or slower.

[Onnie Granados]

Thanks for all the kind words, everyone!

As of today I've run about 2,000 feet of film (mostly in 50-foot reels) through my system, and the results have been quite satisfactory, at least for my needs. Now I can finally get around to transferring all the old home movies I've been saying I want to transfer!

For those of you wondering if I needed to do much post-processing of the footage to correct for color hue and saturation, dynamic range, or banding/jitter due to projector motor speed sensitivity -- really the only thing I've done to the raw footage is, flip it over (top to bottom, and front to back) in my favorite editor (Kdenlive) and tweak the playback speed to slow things down to what I'm guessing is about 16fps. That's it!

The reason for such minimal post-processing is because of the video camcorder having a 3CCD imaging system -- there's a whole CMOS vs. CCD "rabbit hole" we could go down to discuss the pros and cons of each, but three huge advantages (to me) of the 3CCD Panasonic camcorder are:

1) High resolution and color accuracy because of three separate chips for red/green/blue.
2) CCD images have a more "film-like" quality to them, than CMOS images, for some people (like me!)
3) Global shutter (CCD) vs. Rolling Shutter (CMOS) -- makes a huge difference in syncing the projector and camera for pretty much no flicker. This could be a topic for a very long conversation, but short version: If you want to do real-time film transfers, go with a CCD camera, much easier to sync.

Also a major plus with using a 3CCD camera/camcorder: CCD cameras/camcorders are considered a very mature technology (read: old and obsolete) so you can pick up a really good 3CCD device for a lot less than a comparable quality CMOS camera.

Anyway, hope this helps somebody else have some fun with home movie transfers!

[Thomas Dafnides]

Thank you for sharing your expertise with us .... I am always impressed when someone can achieve something at the fraction of the cost that other systems require.

[Stan Jelavic]

Thanks for the info Onnie. I have almost identical system like yours that I played with years ago. The camera was Optura300 and I recall having issues with the sync running the camera I believe at 60 fps but cannot remember and the projector at 20fps. So I will try it again with the Panasonic HDC-HS9. Wanted to see how the colors compare to the industrial camera that I use with the frame-by-frame.

[Kevin Faulkner]

Very impressive results and some of the best I've seen. Could also be applied to a sound machine but flicker could be a problem running at sound speed. I believe there is a guy in the US that does a similar conversion on Elmo 16CL's to transfer 16mm films.

[Bill Cotter]

How (or what type of software can be used) to reduce jitterness/shakiness that usually found in 8mm amateur shot?

Look for the free software Virtualdub and the deshaker plug-in. It takes a bit of a learning curve but the results can really be amazing.

[Stan Jelavic]

The post from Onnie prompted me to try the Sankyo projector and the Panasonic HDC-HS9 camcorder.
Parts:
Sankyo1000
Panasonic HDC-HS9 camcorder
Light
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B098W63FJ5...roduct_details
50mm FL lens
https://www.seeedstudio.com/8MP-50mm...ra-p-4624.html
New belt (made my own)
2 day of work to get the setup running.
Here is the result:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i-V...usp=share_link
Actually quite decent for a simple setup like this. Nice colors and almost 0 flicker.
The projector speed adjustment has a nice range and very easy to get close to 0 flicker.
Here is the comparison Hawkeye
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yPM...usp=share_link
Obviously Hawkeye is quite a bit more money and more work to setup and much longer scan time...

[Stan Jelavic]

A few pics.

[Nantawat Kittiwarakul]

Just finished a pretty large lot from one of my customer. The total length is around 4,000 ft give or take. Due to the size of this work the customer agreed to have all films scanned in real-time manner much like in this topic, and would pick certain reels to rescan in frame-by-frame process later.



The projector used is Elmo SP-E. The camcorder is a good old Canon Legria HF-G30. Notice the other frame-by-frame scanning setup running in the background, but that's another story.

After fiddling around I'd found that if I set the projector's speed to 25fps, but with slow-motion function enabled. The actual speed would be reduced to one third of 25 fps - or 8.33 fps. The speed would fluctuate for the first 10-20 second or so, but would quickly settle down and stay fixed to the end of the reel. On the camera side I set the frame rate to 25 fps with 1/25 s shutter speed - therefore "always on" shutter. This will give absolutely no flicker transfer even with this CMOS sensor camera, but at 8.33 fps.

The rest is just the matter dumping all captured clips into the editing program and set the playback speed to 200%. So the playback speed of all clips are 50 fps, but the actual speed of the film is now 16.67 fps - a good compromise for both Standard8 and Super8 films.
(Actually this is how silent films were transferred in PAL country - by running them at 16.67 fps.)

The result is totally flicker-free, HD resolution scan from pretty fast workflow. The customer had already seen the sample and very pleased with the result, and greenlit me to proceed. I would wrap up this work and deliver to the customer within less than 2 weeks - everyone would be then happy.

So yes, not only this simple method is pretty fast but also very capable too.