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Warped Film


Eugene Lehnert

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I have some old film that I want to have transferred but it is warped and twisted slightly. It's possible it's from water damage. Is it possible to transfer this through a telecine or would a scanner be better? Would the scanner flatten the film as it goes through?

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I have some old film that I want to have transferred but it is warped and twisted slightly. It's possible it's from water damage. Is it possible to transfer this through a telecine or would a scanner be better? Would the scanner flatten the film as it goes through?

 

 

It depends on how bad it is, I have transferred some really old shrunken and twisted film on our Telecine sometimes I have to go and gently push on the film as it winds on the takeup to keep it from unraveling. I ran some 35mm B&W from the 20's about a week ago that a customer had bought as stock footage on ebay that was very bad but no budget for restoration due to the nature of the material.

 

Very badly shrunken films will not go easily through a standard Acme or Oxberry clamshell gate (i.e. most pin registered scanners) so to get them scanned you will have to use a modified pin registered gate which will have enough tolerance to let the film go through but also enough pressure to keep the film flatter in the image plane of the scanner, plus smaller pins to register the shrunken perforations.

 

If your film is fairly recent and has some water damage sometimes a rewash in a film processor can fix it up and make it wind well enough to stay acceptably flat in telecine to make a sharp image edge to edge. Or it may telecine fine if the water damage is less severe.

 

-Rob-

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