There is a steady trickle of requests for information on transferring film to video. Plenty of small photo shops offer the service - usually farming the work out to a movie enthusiast who does it for pin-money. Such cine to tape services vary enormously in quality. Colin Jones is a great believer in doing the job himself and in getting the highest quality. That means lots of trial and error. He is happy to share his experience and save you some of the heartache..

Like most of us, copying cine to video has been something I have done often enough in the past. The key to it, like for most things in life is to spend some time beforehand optimising conditions. My results have always been of a fairly high standard, certainly better than many of the local shops which advertised cine to video. This time I set out to optimise Super 8 copied to miniDV and was delighted with the results. I set out below my findings.

Transmitted versus reflected light. My prejudices proved sound, reflected light was better than transmitted. Using a translucent screen for transmitted light copying gives the following problems: A hot spot in the centre Because it is a small screen all the grain of the ground glass or opal glass is magnified on the finished film. It needs a front surface silvered mirror to avoid double image. The plane of focus for the camera can be uncertain - are you focussing on the screen surface or the image? Set-up for reflected light copying. I then tried using a normal cine screen which happened to be lenticular and set this up in a dark room as far away from the projector as possible to avoid parallax problems with the camera. Using the garage this was at about 10 feet. The camcorder was set up with its lens as close alongside the projector lens as possible and pointing at the screen, and so parallax was no problem. Focus To make sure that I got it right I attached some newsprint to the front of the screen and focussed on this. This, as I have found previously is a mistake. I cannot explain why, but the image seems to float just in front of, or behind the screen. By allowing the camera to focus automatically on a moving image, then fixing it in that position, I got sharp images.

Choice of projector

Originally I was using my trusty Eumig 936, but then out of curiosity I lugged out the Elmo 1200 and tried that. To my surprise there was an enormous difference in the quality of the image. The previous recording now looked distinctly fuzzy compared with the lovely crisp images from the Elmo.

Shutter speed

The optimum was a 50th. Faster than this and the flicker became noticeable, slower and there was too much merging of successive frames.

Strobing Again, I cannot explain it, but there was no strobing even with the projector running at 24fps. What I got instead was a pulsing of the light intensity which as I said above, was more marked at higher shutter speeds. This was much more noticeable on the computer screen and the LCD, than it was on the TV which seems to smooth this out. However as anyone using a computer for editing will know, we can now stretch or contract any piece of film on the timeline. So I find it convenient to time the length of the complete film when it is projected at the proper speed, then copy it at a different speed so as to minimise the strobing. The speed I use is simply whatever I find best for obliterating the pulsing on the camera screen. When the captured film goes on the timeline I simply adjust it to the proper length and that's it - proper length and no pulsing.

White balance

This took ages to sort out. None of the fixed settings (indoor or daylight) gave proper colours. I was hoping to be able to generate a particular coloured light on which I could fix the camcorder's white balance, but to no avail. I tried a variety of filters and of projector light on slightly coloured cards - no good.

Then I reasoned that what the camera needed was projector light passing through clear film base on to the screen, but this didn't work either.

Finally, in desperation I simply waited until the projected image was a neutral one, such as a village street, and pressed the fix button on the white balance - magic! The colours were now very good and seemed to be suitable for a succession of other films.

Exposure

I left this to the automatic function of the camera and to my surprise it seemed to work quite well. Indeed some of the underexposed film actually benefited from this. However if the original cine is pretty good, then it's probably better to fix the exposure manually.Later when editing on the computer, I removed each splice point which improved the film no end.

Room lighting

I have never believed in the practice of souping up projectors to increase the light output. What the eye is concerned with is signal to noise ratio, ie. the contrast between the blacks and the whites. The only reason such modified projectors (xenon lamps, wider shutters etc.) increase the signal to noise is that there is too much ambient (unwanted) light falling on the screen in the first place. If the ratio from the projector is say 10 to 1, and with unwanted light with a factor of say 3, then the signal to noise ratio becomes 13 to 4 which is awful.

So the obvious answer is to black the room out properly, especially public halls where we show our movies. In the case of my garage I found that I could tolerate a table lamp by the projector with a 25w lamp which enabled me to see what I was doing.

Out of curiosity I tried a slightly grey screen to reduce the contrast and it was dreadful. The lenticular screen of course throws back a higher percentage of light to the camera and I did expect the contrast to be too high, but the digital camcorder (TRV 900) handled it well.

Sound To record the original sound track from the stripe, I wanted to feed this into the external microphone input of the camcorder, but this was too fierce, so I made up a volume control from an old 25K potentiometer and used this to set the levels before I started. (It's the plastic pot with the red cap in Figs 1 and 2) In retrospect I believe that very little of my original sound was worth saving. It's much better to replace it with new clear crisp sound once it's at the final editing stage, but there will always be some sound or voice which has to be preserved. The TRV 900 allows the manual record level to be seen in the viewfinder and adjusted. Once this is done it can be left alone. Having chosen the conditions, I spent the next four days copying all my old super8 films on to mini DV. This means that I can now transfer them to computer, edit out all splices, replace all dodgy music sequences with Hi-fi sound, and apply dissolves where appropriate. Most of course are just for home use, but some are now good enough to show at the club.

Standard 8 films

The projector lens for Std. 8 was very poor and these are the films of my early family life which I cherish the most, so I decided to have them copied professionally.

So where did I go?

I took them all to dear old Tom Hardwick who has an excellent set-up using a modified Std. 8 projector with a Super 8 lens and he made an superb job of it. As his PC is near to the projector he can capture directly ready for topping and tailing. Mind you he only offers this service during the winter months.

- Colin Jones

An earlier version of this article first appeared in SERIAC News.

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

Free JavaScripts provided
by The JavaScript Source