S8 Steam Roller Clip On YouTube

[Ian Cooper]

I've been a lurker just reading the forum for the last couple of years, I finally signed up since starting to explore the delights of 16mm.

 

I've just posted a short sequence of Super-8 Plus-X on YouTube for those that might be interested.

 

Rolling Home

 

 

It was filmed a couple of years ago as a series of unrelated shots to test the film and a couple of cameras. This is what resulted when I sat down to see if anything could be edited together afterwards.

 

Everything up to and including the first shot of the steam roller on the road was shot on a "Canon Autozoom 518SV", the rest was shot with a "Beaulieu 1018 SX8". Film stock was Kodak 7265 processed by Andec and telecined by Todd-AO.

 

The version on youtube looks an awful lot better if you click the button in the bottom right-hand corner to display the video clip in it's native 320x240 resolution, rather than let the player try and make it bigger.

[Patrick Neary]

Nicely done!

[Phil Rhodes]

Looks all right to me. Can you post some uncompressed stills so we can see how it looks technically? Youtube does bugger things quite severely, although on the upside it will be effectively degraining it for you!

 

P

[Ian Cooper]

I'm afraid I have compressed them to save space etc., but they haven't been resized and the amount of .jpg compression I've added hasn't really altered the way things look all that much.

 

I have to say that when the images/footage is viewed on the TV they appear much crisper and sharper than when seen on the computer monitor. The grain adds a nice fine texture and is lovely and sharp, it certainly doesn't detract from the images. The pictures themselves when seen on a TV are sharp and there's no obvious difference between the Canon and the Beaulieu.

 

I did find focusing 'issues' with the Canon. I think it was me struggling with the focusing aid rather than a problem with the camera, but it can be seen on some of these frames. On the first still you can see the corrugated shed in the background is much sharper than the safety valves and whistle in the foreground. This can be seen time and again on the footage shot with that camera.

 

 

These first frames were shot with the Canon.

 

Frame 1 - 69kB

Frame 2 - 65kB

Frame 3 - 46kB

 

 

And these last two with the Beaulieu

 

Frame 4 - 71kB

Frame 5 - 75kB

 

 

Unfortunately I don't think the presence of constantly moving grain across the whole picture really does the YouTube compression any favours! The water hose at the end just appears as a mushy blob, on the original you can clearly see the weave of the canvas! Not to worry. I also don't know what happened to the last few seconds of the clip, it was certainly there on the file I uploaded to YouTube, but has got chopped off now! - must be another compression technique, lol!