Josh Gladstone

Hey, does anybody have or know where to find a copy of the Bolex 18-5L projector service manual? My pulldown claw is out of place and I'm not completely sure how to fix it. A service manual would be lovely. Or has anyone else ever fixed a similar problem, or even taken the projector completely apart? Thanks!

Here's a grainy clip. I processed tri-x as a negative so it's even grainier and more contrasty than normal.

My setup was the same way when I was getting things sketched in. Stacks of books, pieces of cardboard and coins holding things up. And mine took three hours to scan 50 feet! Hopefully my 2.0 version will be faster! If you're interested, one thing that helped me is streaming the most recently captured frame to a localhost web server. That way I'm able to check up on the capture and watch for dust and hairs remotely without hovering.

I think it looks pretty great! I've actually done something similar (see thread here if you're curious), but my converted projector/film transport system just broke. I've got a bolex super 8 projector on the way, so I'll be working on my 2.0 version when that gets here. But I'd love to see some pictures of your projector/triggering setup.

They are not merely calling it 1080p for no reason, they are calling it 1080p because the files have a resolution of 1920 pixels by 1080 pixels. I don't know what else to tell you, and I'm really done arguing about it.

Wow, that is nuts! So, there were two separate pulldown claws?

I really don't want to get into it more, but Andries, I think you're confused about how compression works, and that you're conflating bit rate and resolution. YouTube is absolutely streaming 720p, 1080p, even up to 2K files. H.264 compression does not work by reducing the size of the picture area and then blowing it back up in the end. If you're interested in how it works, here's a link to the Wikipedia article. And that stuff you're watching broadcast on BBC or on a blu-ray is absolutely compressed as well, just at higher bit rates. Edit: Perry, I wrote this before your response got posted. But yes, I agree with you. Actually, if I had seen your post first, I probably wouldn't have written anything myself.

Yes, thank you Perry, I have certainly been talking about encoding at 50,000kbps and uploading that file to Youtube. Youtube then re-encodes that into various formats. So, in theory, the higher quality file you upload, the higher the quality of the re-encodes (although I have seen some anecdotal posts that there's a limit on this). I really doubt Youtube ever serves 50,000kbps files. Andries, I don't know what you're talking about that "720 or 1080 maybe listed but the quality is never anything properly filled 720 or 1080." Go to keepvid.com or anywhere else that lets you directly download the files Youtube streams, download a 1080p or 720p file and check the resolution for yourself. I just downloaded a 720p version of one of my videos and according to VLC, it's a 1280x720, 24fps h264 video playing back at between 2500 and 3500kbps. Youtube isn't lying about resolution.

Yes, higher than HD. So if you were to compare a 2k or 4k version of a video on Youtube, to the same thing uploaded to Vimeo, the Youtube version would look better, even on a 1080p monitor. Especially since Vimeo doesn't even allow your videos to playback at 1080p unless you pay for plus. And even if you do, you don't even get unlimited uploading! 5gb a week? That's not even enough for 15 minutes of video at 50,000 kbps. (Although to be fair, they do recommend 20,000 kbps for 1080p video, which really makes me wonder if it's higher quality than Youtube, as they suggest 50,000, but I digress). So I dunno man, to me it's not about the audiences, hardly anyone watches my junk anyway. To me it's about just putting stuff out there in the highest quality way possible. Youtube definitely has its issues, but I think it does that better.

Will, there are no ads on youtube if you chose not to monazite your video. And I admit that Vimeo has lots of features that are better than youtube. But for it to be really usable, you have to pay a monthly fee. And even then, youtube still supports higher resolutions and better picture quality, and plays back on more devices all for free. Peter, actually you can and you can't. First, I want to take back the "hd=1" trick, as that was apparently recently deprecated in the most recent youtube player api, unfortunately. The newest player automatically plays back based on the size of the container it's in. So if you embed it in a webpage and its container is small, it won't play in HD by default. If the container is large, it will. So, if you want to, you can use the url for a youtube popup window, which makes the container the size of the browser window. If your browser window is large enough, it'll automatically playback in 720p, or even 1080p. All you have to do is change the "watch" in the youtube url to "watch_popup", e.g. youtube.com/watch_popup?v=P2xnHyzlNqs&list=PL6E414828ACB06EE9 It seems that's the best you can do right now. Kinda blows, but it is what it is.

Youtube doesn't like grain. They might use lower bitrates than vimeo at standard definitions, which might account for the difference, but grain always looks bad when heavily compressed. That being said, I still prefer youtube over vimeo because youtube allows for 2k resolutions and higher bitrates at 2k. And when played back at 2k, the stuff looks pretty good. Plus it's free and has unlimited hd uploads. So youtube wins for me. I usually compress to 50,000kbps for 1080p (which youtube recommends), and 100,000kbps for 2k. Might be a bit of overkill. Semi-relatedly, If you're going to send links around, you can add "&hd=1" to the end of youtube urls to force 720p playback.

That's so funny. I'm surprised they gave you so much trouble in Italy, I thought they loved film. If I recall correctly, I had no problems in France a few years ago.

It's from Kodak's website, so it's not an urban myth. Whether or not you think Kodak is being dishonest, that's up for debate, but they claim it's KODAK VISION 320T exposed in an INVISION CTX-5500 baggage scanner. Which to be fair is a checked-baggage scanner and not a carry-on scanner, but according to wikipedia it is "the most widely used, FAA-certified Explosives Detection System in the world." Also, as far as allowing super 8 cartridges through without x-raying, I have done exactly that many times. It's not like they don't inspect them, they just swab them and use an Explosives Trace Detection machine to check for chemicals. I don't know what it's like elsewhere, but every major airport in the US is capable of that.

I don't know about other countries, but in the US I ALWAYS ask for a hand check. It doesn't take any time, and the TSA agents haven't ever minded. Occasionally, they'll ask what speed the film is, and I just say "oh, well it's movie film..." and they smile and say okay and take the film. Just be sure to be nice and thank them after they do the hand-check. At least that's how it goes in the US... This is 320 asa 16mm with x-ray damage from a baggage scanner. At the very least, it can't hurt to ask for a hand-check.

Sorry, I forgot to answer your other questions too! Cropping in FCPx can be done either in the inspector, or in the viewer window. Click on the video clip you want to crop in the timeline, and then look for this cropping icon in the bottom left of the viewer window: Click on the cropping tool. The dropdown triangle next to it allows you to select the type of cropping: Trim, Crop, or Ken Burns. To play with colors and exposure, click on the clip you want to adjust in the timeline and then find this area in the Video section of the Inspector window: Under "Color", where it says "Correction 1:", click the triangle icon all the way on the right. This will bring up the Color Correction Window, which allows you to adjust hue, saturation, and exposure levels for your shadows, mids, and highlights. And here's a real time-saving tip. If you've adjusted a video clip, either with color correction or effects or cropping, and you want to paste those attributes into a other clips, select the source clip you want to copy, copy it with Command+C, then select the clip or clips you want to paste the attributes into, and press Command+Shift+V. This window will come up, allowing you to select which attributes you want to paste into the selected clip(s). Hope that makes sense! Good luck!!

The problem is that, without crystal sync, the camera motor never runs at exactly 24fps, or any constant speed for that matter. Sometimes it runs a little slower, sometimes faster. So when you go to try to synchronize it with something that was running at a constant rate, i.e. an audio recording, it will never sync properly. You'll be able to get one point in sync, but the audio will always drift after a few seconds. You can make a sync marker (clapper board or some other sync point) at the head and tail of each take. This will allow you to adjust the playback speed of either the audio or video in order to synchronize to those two achor points, which may get you close depending on the length of the take and steadiness of the camera motor, but it's never going to get you a hard sync. Hope that helps!

For what it's worth, someone told me recently to overexpose a stop for each decade since it was manufactured.

Oh I'm interested in that 5234 test. That sounds great. Can't wait to see your results!

The old trick for when you're having trouble focusing by eye is to take the top off a maglight and focus on the pinpoint of light. (If you're going to do this next to an actor's eye to focus on their face, warn them first so they can close their eyes. It's super bright.)

Is it possible that the eyepiece was not covered during shooting (either by the operator's eye or closed to light some other way)?

Viktor, it looks great! A little on the desaturated side, but I really dig it. Was it an overcast day or sunny when you shot this stuff?

Does the film movement run when its switched on? If it does and it's just that the takeup reel doesn't spin, then it's probably just a bad belt and that's a simple do-it-yourself fix. If nothing runs, then it's a bigger problem.

So here's the scanned footage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDpfbzBvLI&hd=1 I cropped the top and bottom because it's distracting, but I left the horizontal uncropped. Here's the workflow: Captured 16-bit tiffs, assembled them as an image sequence in quicktime, saved in AJA 10-bit codec, import into FCPx. A few shots were overexposed, so I did some correction in FCPx. The helicopter stuff was very heavily overexposed, so I captured that section with a longer exposure. Cameras were a Nikon R10 and a Beaulieu 1008xl Also, if you'd like the see more movies and photos, like my page on Facebook! Facebook.com/PhotoChemicals Thanks!

I just processed a roll if Tri-x in D76, so I thought I'd upload a frame since it might give you a better idea than something in caffenol. I processed it as a negative, so it's still pretty grainy, but I think it's great. This is straight out of the scanner, no corrections or anything. And it's just a jpeg, but I can upload the uncompressed 16-bit tiff if anyone is curious.

First, make sure that when you watch on youtube, you're watching in HD or 2k. I get 1200x1600 pixel images out of the scanner, so I upload to Youtube in 2k. But yes, I absolutely agree that the first transfers I did were not very sharp, it was really more of a proof of concept. There are many improvements I've made since then. Most importantly, I'm using different glass now. I had started off just using a lens from a Bronica SLR that I have, but now I'm using a Schneider enlarger lens and a proper macro rig. So that has improved the sharpness greatly. I was also only ever able to get 8-bit images out of OpenCV before, even though I knew the camera was capable of 10-bits. Well, I recently re-wrote the image capture part, using pydc1394 instead of libdc1394. You wouldn't think it would make a difference, but I can now capture the full 10-bit images in 16-bit TIFFs. So that's also a big improvement. I've been hand-processing a lot lately (mostly in caffenol, but I'm just about to process a roll in D76), so I don't have too much lab-quality film to scan, but I plan to get some developed next week, and I'll post some new scans then. In the meantime, here's my most recent. Shot on a Beaulieu 1008xl and processed in Caffenol C: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0uG1BPBJrs