I have about 50 hours worth of mostly Super 8 movie film from the 1960s and 1970s, and while I've had great success in scanning over 100,000 pictures from 35mm prints, slides and even negatives, I have yet to find a reasonable solution to scanning Super 8mm film.
I have tried the following:
If a decent piece of equipment existed, a bunch of enthusiasts could go in on it, take turns using it, and then sell it back off, and split any loss on the sale among the participants, and we'd each only be out a hundred bucks or something, especially if they're close enough to each other to avoid shipping it.
As for my current best approach:
- I have an 8mm / Super 8 projector with a variable-speed knob.
- I shine that onto a wall about 6 feet away with a piece of white cardstock taped to the wall.
- I have a 20-year-old Canon Elura miniDV camcorder. I point it at the image, zoom in until it just fills the frame. I do focus lock and focus on the wall (using a piece of paper with images on it for that part). I do exposure lock and adjust during a practice reel of film.
- I plug the camcorder via Firewire into an older MacBook Pro that has a Firewire input.
- I run iMovie HD, which can capture the live footage from the camcorder in real time, and record the footage as it comes in.
- I adjust the variable speed knob on the projector until the light-and-dark throbbing goes away. I adjust this occasionally as I capture if it starts up again.
- I click "capture" on iMovie, say the name of the reel out loud for later identification, run the projector, turn off the light, and record away.
- After capturing all the footage into their own clips, I can use iMovie HD to trim the junk out of the clips. Then I rename each clip according to the date and what's in it.
- I wrote a little program in Java to read the iMovie project's XML file and see what frame each title includes. Then I copy those frames of the ".dv" file to a new file with that name. (Fortunately, miniDV files use a constant number of bytes per frame, and have no other special header data in the files, so I can just copy a certain number of bytes from the file into the new file and it ends up creating a valid .dv file).
All of this works ok, but the quality of capturing off the wall is at most half as good as if I had a good frame-by-frame scan. But when I compared it to the Wolverine capture, it was TWICE as good. I could see all kinds of detail in my capture that was lost by the Wolverine footage due to its low resolution, high compression, and washing out the content.
I'd really like to capture this film at a good enough resolution and quality that I could consider it as good as the original, so I don't need to keep the original any more. Currently, I feel like I'm capturing a version I can watch, but which does not serve to replace the original.
I sure wish someone would create a system with good quality for an acceptable price.
I have tried the following:
- Projector with a mirror and frosted glass screen. => Too bright in the center and dark on the edges.
- Projector onto a movie screen. => Contrast too low.
- Projector onto an 11x17" piece of cardstock on the wall => Ok. (More on this below)
- Wolverine frame-by-frame scanner => Half the resolution of the cardstock-on-the-wall approach. :/
- Kodak Reels: I had high hopes, since it has twice the resolution of the Wolverine, which seemed to have half the resolution of my off-the-wall solution. However, reviews of that indicate that they use heavy compression that make it about as bad as the Wolverine (sometimes worse).
- Various services: Price is prohibitive (many thousands of dollars)
- Do-it-yourself scanners on YouTube: Nice results, but you have to build your own scanner from scratch with various special parts.
If a decent piece of equipment existed, a bunch of enthusiasts could go in on it, take turns using it, and then sell it back off, and split any loss on the sale among the participants, and we'd each only be out a hundred bucks or something, especially if they're close enough to each other to avoid shipping it.
As for my current best approach:
- I have an 8mm / Super 8 projector with a variable-speed knob.
- I shine that onto a wall about 6 feet away with a piece of white cardstock taped to the wall.
- I have a 20-year-old Canon Elura miniDV camcorder. I point it at the image, zoom in until it just fills the frame. I do focus lock and focus on the wall (using a piece of paper with images on it for that part). I do exposure lock and adjust during a practice reel of film.
- I plug the camcorder via Firewire into an older MacBook Pro that has a Firewire input.
- I run iMovie HD, which can capture the live footage from the camcorder in real time, and record the footage as it comes in.
- I adjust the variable speed knob on the projector until the light-and-dark throbbing goes away. I adjust this occasionally as I capture if it starts up again.
- I click "capture" on iMovie, say the name of the reel out loud for later identification, run the projector, turn off the light, and record away.
- After capturing all the footage into their own clips, I can use iMovie HD to trim the junk out of the clips. Then I rename each clip according to the date and what's in it.
- I wrote a little program in Java to read the iMovie project's XML file and see what frame each title includes. Then I copy those frames of the ".dv" file to a new file with that name. (Fortunately, miniDV files use a constant number of bytes per frame, and have no other special header data in the files, so I can just copy a certain number of bytes from the file into the new file and it ends up creating a valid .dv file).
All of this works ok, but the quality of capturing off the wall is at most half as good as if I had a good frame-by-frame scan. But when I compared it to the Wolverine capture, it was TWICE as good. I could see all kinds of detail in my capture that was lost by the Wolverine footage due to its low resolution, high compression, and washing out the content.
I'd really like to capture this film at a good enough resolution and quality that I could consider it as good as the original, so I don't need to keep the original any more. Currently, I feel like I'm capturing a version I can watch, but which does not serve to replace the original.
I sure wish someone would create a system with good quality for an acceptable price.
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