19 Apr
2013
19 Apr
'13
8:14 a.m.
At 08:16 AM 4/19/2013, Charles E. Fox wrote:
While I don't doubt that a $100 K scanner can do
good work with well shot home movies, about 90 percent
of the footage I have seen in the thirty five years I have been transferring this stuff
has been out of focus, poorly lit, scratched,
badly framed, (upside down even,) and so far no one has complained of the quality I get
with my projector
to Buhl lens system to video camera. Sooner or later we are going to run out of 8mm films
to transfer. and it
would take a long time to recover $100K at ten cents a foot for film.
By "video" you mean NTSC? On tape? What resolution is that? What
is the resolution of a good-quality exposure on 8 mm or 16 mm?
What's the resolution of film from a poor 8 mm camera?
The place I mentioned scans at HD 1920 x 1080 pixels - quite a bit better
than NTSC resolution. The $100K scanner guy wants to go to 2K, arguably
2048 x 1556, unknown pixel depth. With deeper bits-per-pixel, you get
more leeway to massage poor exposures.
Maybe you're more careful than the guy I used in the early 90s,
maybe your projector has better lenses, (did I know you back in
the Amiga days or when I was writing for video magazines?)
but take a look at the difference between 1990s projector-to-VHS
and today's digital HD scan. Watch at full-screen.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f08K0Co3l5s>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f08K0Co3l5s
One of my films was flipped horizontally and plays backwards. It was
an easy fix in digital. Look at the sprocket jitter in the example
above. How do you fix that with a projector?
I think there's plenty of interesting films that would be worth preserving.
I am tempted to help my local historical society with such a project.
I'm sure there are home movies that would be worth keeping as a
historical record, and that would be of interest to others.
- John