Filming a projected video

[Martin MacDonald]

Hi,

 

Slightly odd thing i'm trying to do here, although really i suppose it's no different to shooting a front-projection background, except that there would be no foreground. So i suppose the root of my problem is 0 experience with rear or front projection.

 

My camera died during a shoot on the weekend, and for various reasons we couldn't postpone the shoot and wait for a repair. It was also unfortunate that the only backup camera we had was a fairly cheap Canon camcorder.

 

So call me nuts (yes i could just do all this in final cut), but i'd really like to get this digital footage onto super 8 film so that i can splice it with the stuff we shot before the breakdown. I know it could be hard to match the look, but happily the scene that was shot before the camera breakdown is part of the story that requires a different look to the rest anyway.

 

So i'm thinking of projecting the digital footage and shooting it off the wall with my s8 cam. Of course now i'm concerned about flicker and a number of other things - it could be tricky or impossible to sync my old camera to the projector. Or perhaps it doesn't matter too much?

 

Does anyone have any experience/thoughts/spontaneous ideas about:

 

- best size of the projected image? From experimenting with DIY telecine a smaller projected image seems best for clarity. In reverse, my thinking is that if the projected video image isn't too large i might overcome a little of the resolution problem from the cheap cam.

- shoot in a darkened room/lit room?

- if darkened, will i have problems exposing the film correctly? i will be using Ektachrome 64.

- and of course, the flicker issue

 

My apologies for the rambling nature of this question. I feel a bit mad even wanting to go to these lengths, but it's partly out of curiosity, too.

 

Many thanks for any advice on this.

 

Cheers

Martin

[Ted Hinkle]

This is kind of an interesting post and I thought it was odd no one responded to. Although I could see that this concept would be frowned upon since it seems kind of backwards. That being said has anybody tried this or tried shooting an LCD or LED screen with a super 8mm camera. What were the results what would be the best lighting and circumstances to shooting this way. Or perhaps a frame by frame conversion from digital video footage to super 8mm film for the purpose of adding flicker and grain in a way that would be better than any nle effect. I think for me this kind of takes the fun out of super 8mm and it just seems wrong to do it. But I haven't heard of anyone trying it and I can't help but wonder what it would look like?

[Ted Hinkle]

I've been google-ing this for a while off and on today to see if I could find anything that anyone has done transferring digital to super 8mm and all that I've found so far, is this company in Canada that uses a kinescope digital film recorder. Their website is http://www.blackandwhitefilmfactory.com/ they also transfer digital video to 16mm. The samples of the transfer to 16mm seem more appealing (based solely on the sample footage). I wish they had more samples of the transfer to super 8mm as the ones they have aren't that great and they're at very poor resolution. Still curious to see if anyone has done anything else like this.

[jason duncan]

Ya know, I thought I was nuts. Because I was also wondering if it was possible to transfer my crystal clear (yet sterile) digital miniDV footage to Super 8. I shoot my buddies band in bars/clubs a lot (see my post "filming live band in bars") lol because usally it's too dark for Super 8, yet my 3-chip miniDV footage looks great in the same club. I would much rather shoot Super 8 for that organic look. So I would like to somehow transfer my properly exposed digital tape to film, then back to miniDV tape to edit NLE style.