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DIY Telecine with scanner


Daniel Meier

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Do you guys have any experience on using a still photography negative scanner for Super8 negatives?

Maybe it's possible to scan let's say three stripes of 18 frames at one time. Then you'd crop them and have 54 frames with just one scan pass.

 

Are scanners able to do this? Or do the negatives always need to be put in those mask trays to cover the non-scan area?

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It's been done:
http://www.jiminger.com/s8/

http://www.truetex.com/telecine.htm

 

I once scanned about 30 frames of Vision3 500T a while back. Took a full day. What a pain!

 

You don't need the mask trays.

 

You'll need a way to break it down into individual frames. Oh, and you're at the mercy of your scanner's resolution. The whole frame is only 0.036 in^2 (0.228" x 0.158"). At 600 dpi, you only get a 137x95 [pixels] image. You'd actually be better off setting a single strip at the top of the scanner to scan at very high resolution so you don't spend a lot of time/disk space scanning empty space

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I did a brief test of a roll of Tri-X I developed in Caffenol. (Was trying to see how low I could get costs of a roll of Super 8 down to. Around $25/roll in materials including the roll so not bad! No cost assigned to time for home development and scanning of course.)

 

I used a Epson V500 scanner in negative film mode. I put a plate of glass from a photo frame down over the film which was placed longways down the negative scanning area (it was already scratched from home development so I wasn't too worried about handling scratches). Then I scanned it at 2400dpi, brought that into After Effects, made a 4x3 comp, and made the strips into one long train of image strips, then made them move up into frame in a 18fps comp with an expression to continue the movement indefinitely. I also had a separate null on the whole thing that I kept moving over time to keep the image in frame. I'm a motion designer by day so I know my way around AE pretty well so this process wouldn't be for everyone but I couldn't get some of the software out there to work correctly. Worked better than I thought but it's definitely a time consuming process and about half the quality of a 1080p scan. Might try a full roll in the future.

 

I only did a few seconds. You can see it here.

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Thanks Nick and Zac! Nick, your workflow using After Effects and expressions is pretty smart! And the sample footage doesn't even look that bad.

How many frames where you able to scan at once?

 

In my tests, I got around 38 frames. I could've gotten more if I had a larger piece of glass as I was just using glass from a 5"x7" photo frame. So there was still some room in the film scanning area of the V500 as I was scanning it the long way down the full length of the flatbed.

 

And ya I was pleasantly surprised. I ended up getting it scanned by CineLab anyways because I had like 6 other rolls to be scanned so I figured why not. The CineLab scan was obviously better but since I developed via Caffenol, I think the effective resolution of the film was greatly reduced as it was really grainy compared to previous tri-x I have shot. Here's the scan. I had to lower the quality a little bit for imgur but it's pretty close.

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