Josh Gladstone

Cool!

Supercool!

Which lab was it?

Hey, sorry it took so long. So here's a Nizo S30 with aerial focusing: You can see the mirror is in the upper left corner: Here it is a bit closer: And here it is real close: When it came to me, the mirror was just bouncing around inside the camera. Once I glued it in there, the viewfinder was good as new. Hope that helps! Sorry it took so long!

No problem! Have fun shooting!

If you're willing to spend some money, the manual can be found here: http://www.oldtimercameras.com/instruction-manuals/stock/Model.asp?Model=10975&ModelPage=true Otherwise, here's a free link to a manual for a different model of Sankyo. Maybe it'll be similar enough to answer your questions. Hope that helps a little! http://www.4shared.com/office/PMUhTRmJ/sankyo_super_cm_600_super_8_ca.html

Haha, okay cool.

I'm pretty sure Pro8 also repairs 1014s. Spectra maybe too. There's a great camera tech in Hollywood named Tony, but he may only do 16mm cams. His email is awphoto67@yahoo.com

That's so great. I was going to ask about a regular 8 version also. And I love your overscanned footage as well. It's so cool to see it like that. So just for ridiculousness's sake, have you ever put an anamorphic lens on that UP8 3.1 camera? That'd just be nuts.

Nicholas, I never saw your original announcement post or I would have flipped out then. But holy crap, man! That's amazing! So ridiculously beautiful. I want one.

Hmmm, I dunno. You're right it's confusing. I'll try to open up a couple of my cameras and see if I can find a similar setup.

Thank you Carl, I'd love to see your setup and results, too. Do you have anything online?

Keith, I thought you meant that you'd keep the form factor of the camera too, but now I realize that you just want to use the movement. So yeah, that could certainly work. More power to you! I'd love to see it! I've also had the idea of a horizontally mounted scanner, but I think if I were to build something from scratch like that, I'd probably try to do something without a pulldown claw so that I'd be able to do 16mm too. Maybe for a 2.0 version...

I can't really tell from that picture, but maybe someone else can? Or could you post a wider shot, and maybe a shot of the mirror also?

I don't see any pictures attached to your post, but I wanted to let you know that you will probably be able to fix it. I've fixed a couple of cameras that had the same issue with a just little super glue. There's usually a small flat surface turned 45 degrees below the front end of the viewfinder assembly with a bit of old hardened glue smudged on it. Once you get those photos up, I'm sure I or someone else will be able to point it out for you. Oh, and don't lose that little mirror!

Keith, the light diffuser idea is interesting. I've actually played with the stuff before when I took apart a broken cell phone. I've been looking for the right stuff for ages, I'm not sure why I didn't think of that. Currently I'm using a few small pieces of diffusion from a Lee Filters sample pack all layered together, and that works pretty okay, but I've actually got another broken cell sitting around, so maybe I'll put that to some good use. Great idea, thanks for bringing it up! Jeremy, I think a DC motor also gives better speed. The stepper motor is definitely the bottleneck in that respect. Capturing one frame and advancing to the next on my machine takes about 3 seconds. At least 2 of those are just from the motor turning. Keith, I'm not sure a converted camera is the best way to go. Although, you could pick a camera that has single frame advance, so that could be useful and super easily driven. But where would you put the feed and takeup reels? And how would you turn them? One of the convenient things about using a projector is that everything is already geared up, so the takeup reel turns under power while advancing and the feed turns if put in reverse. If I put it in rewind, the pressure plate lifts out of the way and I can clean the gate. Etc. It's really convenient. I also doubt that you could get enough magnification from a digital camera's built-in macro mode. Even with a small sensor area, for super 8 you're going to need at least 1:1 magnification, which means you'll need either a dedicated macro lens or a bellows (or rails) setup. I've got my stuff on rails with an 80mm enlarger lens reverse-mounted a good 5 or 6 inches away from the sensor (picture below). If you use a camera's built-in macro, you'll probably end up having to crop significantly. That would be my guess. I did talk to someone who used a USB microscope and that actually worked really nicely. He was limited to it's 640x480 resolution, but they've got to have HD microscopes now, right? I would also recommend thinking about capturing tethered to a computer, and having the computer run everything. That way you wouldn't have to rely on "timing" everything out, but you could have the computer run the motor once it's sure a frame has been captured. You could also get live previews, which trust me, helps when focusing and adjusting the exposure. I could go on. There are lots of advantages. So here's a picture of my camera/lens setup: For those interested, this setup gives me the flexibility to change magnifications, so I can crop into the image, or scan all the way to the perfs. The 80mm lens gives me enough working distance to deal with the form factor of my projector, which only lets you get so close to the film plane because of how the lens used to be mounted in there. I started with a 50mm lens, but it didn't have enough magnification for the working distance I needed.

Hey, I'm just glad there's any interest at all, so I'm happy to answer any questions. I should mention that I'm not an engineer of any sort. Before this project, I'd never used an Arduino and never written a line of Python. I watched the few videos on Youtube I could find for design inspiration, but I'd never even heard of Cine2digits before a couple weeks ago. I REALLY wish I had. Point is, I'm making all this up as I go along. Trial and error. So it turns out it actually is very difficult to synchronize the number of steps to the movement of the projector. It's pretty easy to get really close (i.e. no problems for a few hundred or thousand frames), but if you watch almost any of my videos, you'll see that the picture tends to roll every now and then. That's exactly because I'm out of sync by a few microsteps per 1 full revolution. Too few steps and the image rolls down, too many and it rolls up. I recently lubed all the moving parts of the projector, and that seemed to affect the number of steps for a full revolution, too. So it's tricky. You can adjust the number of steps per revolution on the fly in the program, but it's still one of the the only reasons that I stick around to monitor a capture (the others being dust in the gate and to turn it off when it finishes). I've thought about some sort of magnetic or physical trigger to overcome this, so I might look into that. As far as using three LEDs and a monochrome camera, I don't see why it wouldn't work. I just did multiple exposures in the bracketing test and it looked plenty steady to me. I actually wanted to do the same thing originally, but I went with a color machine vision camera for simplicity and because it came up on ebay for real cheap.

I assume you're talking about mag striped film for recording sound? As far as I know there are none. Sometimes a few rolls show up on ebay, but that's all going to be old stock. If I recall correctly, the adhesive they used to glue the magnetic tape to the film was hazardous in some way. I bet they could have found a replacement, but by then video had already begun to take over and I'm guessing there wasn't enough demand. But please, someone tell me I'm wrong and that there's someone out there making sound super 8 film. I'd love to buy some.

Hey guys, thanks so much for the comments! David, I think that's a really good idea. Cyan should work, I think. I'll keep that in mind as I continue to experiment with negative color stocks. Peter, I'm definitely getting more than HD as far as image size goes (vertical resolution anyway), so it's certainly possible. I'd recommend checking out the Muller HM film scanner for inspiration. That does some of the best scans I've seen. And since there's some interest in this thing after all, I thought I'd share some little updates. I've upgraded the optics to a Schneider Componon 80mm enlarger lens, which is worlds better than the repurposed medium format lens I was using before. I've also filed out my gate a bit, although I'm not quite finished with that yet. I also started using a 9-LED array as a light source, which led (pun!) to an interesting experiment. Since the scanner moves so slowly, I can expose each frame as many times as I want before advancing. So I decided to find out what happens if I do some bracketing. I captured each frame 3 times, once with 3 LEDs illuminating it, once with 6 LEDs, and once with all 9 lit up. This gives me 3 different exposures of the same image, one underexposed, one overexposed, and one in the middle. I then composited these images in PhotomatixPro. Here are some sample images: This is the finished bracketed image, after being composited in Photomatix: And here are the three exposures I got out of the scanner: And now everything in motion. I made a "normal" version to compare the bracketed version to. The normal version uses just one of the exposures, so no compositing necessary (I went with the most underexposed and then corrected the levels in FCP) The normal version: The bracketed version (with side by side comparison at 30 seconds): All in all, the bracketing takes a lot longer to capture and process, and I don't really think it adds that much. You get some more detail and things do appear sharper, but it also seems to flatten out the image tonally. But an interesting experiment nonetheless, and a cool option to have.

You can actually skip the pre-wash and stop bath, if you want. I usually just do developer, fix, wash, dry. Here's some recent footage I did that way:

Thanks! Sure did get it from Sparkfun. It's this motor, plus EasyDriver and Arduino Uno. I started off using the projector's original motor slowed down as far as it would go and still turn everything, and I was using a modified mouse button to register frames. It definitely scanned fast, but it was inaccurate and jittery, and sometimes it would capture the pulldown. So I figured it was better to go the stepper motor route. I didn't realize how slow it would be at the time, but at least it works! The added bonus is that it should work with almost any camera. It'll definitely work with any camera that works in OpenCV, so far I've tested my machine vision camera, and an HDV camera, and both of those open up no problem. The built in iSight even opens, so theoretically that's even a possibility. I'm not sure about DSLRs, but even if they didn't work in OpenCV, the code could probably be modified to capture a frame some other way. Could get some ludicrous resolutions that way too... I was really surprised the color negative stuff came out as well as it did. Here's an un-corrected frame, just a straight inversion: I really didn't expect it to work at all, and then this stuff started coming up on my computer. Crazy. Anyway, I'm going to try and shoot some 50D next week and see how that does. I expect good things! And yes! 16mm! Absolutely! I just got a Beaulieu r16, so that's definitely on my list of to-do's.

Hey everyone, So I've been working on a DIY film scanner and I've got it working somewhat well, so I thought I would share it here just to see if anyone else is interested. It uses an old Dejur Super 8 projector, which is run with a stepper motor and an Arduino. The camera is a Sony XCD U100CR color machine vision camera capable of 1200x1600 pixels. The camera is connected via Firewire using libdc1394 and OpenCV. The software is written in Python, and I'm running it in OSX (10.8.3, if you're curious). I'm still not set on the optics, but currently I'm using a medium format camera lens reversed on a sort of macro rig. But I'm working on that. The Arduino also fires an LED backlight. I call it StepCapture. It runs autonomously, just set it and forget it. Well, in theory. I'm still working out some bugs. And it does take a really long time. About 3 seconds per frame. So about an hour per minute of footage. And setup can take 20 or 30 minutes. But like I said, I'm still working on it! So here's a demo video showing how it works. Note, I'm now using a 9-LED setup. It outputs 1200x1600 sequential tiff files (or jpegs). From that I usually import into Quicktime, save a reference movie, and work with that in Final Cut for sound and any color correction. So here are some samples. Keep in mind, some of this stuff was footage I'd been handling a lot testing the system out, so it's pretty dirty. I'm also still in the process of properly timing the stepper motor and projector, so the image does sometimes roll. Here's some early test footage with Tri-X: This is some more Tri-X: Here's some Ektachrome 100D (and 1 shot of Tri-X): Here's my first test of Vision3 negative. Note that it's 500T and I was shooting outdoors as the sun was starting to go down. I did some quick color correction to take out some of the blue: Here's some Tri-X hand-processed in Caffenol: In all the cost of the project was something like this: Camera: $200 on ebay Projector: $50 Stepper motor: $30 EasyDriver (for the motor): $15 Arduino: $25 Lets say between $325 and $400. So that's pretty much it. If there's any interest I'm happy to share everything, answer any questions, talk about the features, future developments etc. Thanks for reading!

I've been shooting nothing but tri-x at sxsw this week. Definitely have a few underexposed night exteriors. Should be fine I think, but I'll let you know after I get everything processed. Shooting a test roll with various lighting conditions is really the best advice.

I buy my film from Kodak, so I'm only dealing with Pro8 for processing, and they charge $15/roll for color and b/w, negative and reversal. Spectra charges the same for everything except $17 for b/w reversal.

They're the same for color, but Spectra is $2 more for b/w reversal than pro8. And I usually use fotokem for 16.