Getting Started

**encryptdesigns** · January 25th, 2005, 06:49 PM

I am a former TV/Film student who has recently become very interested in the whole super 8 techcnology. I know that it has been around forever but I am intrigued by it. I have contacted someone about a camera with some more information.

I'm not looking to make professional films, but merely for my own enjoyment and to see if this is something I want to get into.

I remember working with super 8 in school but it has been eons since that has happened. I know that I'm going to need film (b&w or color) a splicer and a decent camera.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Maybe I'll get yelled at for this question but I didn't see any posts regarding getting started with super 8. I have watched a few films and that peaked my interest even more so.

I would like to be able to edit the film on my computer and I have read about that. What's all entailed with that?

Thanks again for your time [img]biggrin.gif[/img]

Mark

**Nigel** · January 25th, 2005, 07:01 PM

It just depends on how much you want to spend...

A camera can be a few bucks or a thousand.

Splicer is cheap

Viewer fairly cheap

Projector fairly cheap

When you start talking about transfer to edit on your computer things can start to get spendy.

Good Luck

**Chezdigtlstudio** · January 26th, 2005, 01:06 AM

HI!!

Unlike some people, I am very excited for you if you're considering Super8! So you want to make movies? Movies that LOOK like movies and not some crappy digital cam-corder WANNABE movie? Ah HA! You're in luck- Super 8mm is cheap and produces SWEET results!

As a matter of fact, I was somewhat in your shoes 2 years ago. I wanted to make movies so bad, not for a living, but because I love telling stories and I love movies. Everyone kept telling me "just get one of those digital cameras" but I knew that I would never be taken seriously unless I learned FILM. So what do you need? It's easy!

There's alot of great Super 8mm Cameras on E-bay, I bought all of mine there. But when you do buy one, from wherever, make sure that it:

1. Has a manual aperature/F-stop setting
2. Shoots in 24 FPS (frames per second which is the 'speed of sound')
3. Has a nice unscratched lense, the bigger the lense the better.
4. Works- Super 8mm cameras take 4 to 6 AA batteries and so there's no excuse for the seller not knowing if it works.

5. There's an "electric eye" inside most super 8mm cameras that acts as an internal light meter. They work great. Make sure that the internal light meter on the camera you buy works.

NOTE- Most sellers on Ebay will have all of this info on thier page but if not, you can ask them questions by e-mail easily.

So you say you want a "splicer"? What the heck for? I bought a splicer when I first started shooting super8 and the only thing I've used that thing for is a neat decroation.

I reccommend shooting your film then having the developed rolls transferred onto MiniDV cassette so you can take your MiniDV camera and upload that footage into your PC or MAC using firewire. The results are great!

I do everything myself except developing and transfer. Don't even bother transferring the film to video yourself, it's very difficult (speaking from experience) and professional DV transfer is fairly cheap- they even do color correcting. I go to a place called Filmcraft Lab here in Michigan. They're a very professional lab mostly specializing in the automotive commercial and motion picture industry. You can send your stuff there too if you want, they're known throughout the country.

So what are you going to do about lights? Indoor super8 filming is real tricky, requiring lots of light. You may be tempted to use a higher speed Ektachrome super8 film, but I think it's too grainy (unless you're talking about B&W). Better to just stick with good ol' Kodachrome 40 when shooting color. So I use photoflood lights for lighting background. For lighting my characters I use a photoflood encased in a giant softbox, and I use fresnel lights. What do you think you'll use?
I bought all this stuff at different photo shows and it's all used equipment but it was still expensive for some reason.

What are you going to do about sound? Many will tell you to "buy a DAT recorder, oh it's only 500 dollars." Yeah, not if you're a "no budget" filmmaker like me. At first, I recorded sound on a regular audio cassette using a shotgun mic I bought from MCM electronics for $60. Then I took that audio, played it back via headphones to my characters after the shoot, and had them re-vocalize their dialogue into the mic jack of my computer recording it as a .WAV file.( so that this time it would be recorded without all the background noise). But still there was some fuzzy background noise, like white noise.

"Oh I know what I need, a soundproof booth!" I said to myself half jokingly

So guess what, I've spent the last month building a 5X5X6 ft tall soundproof booth out of plywood and 2X4's. Hey if I can do it so can you!! I'm just finishing it up now. It's sweet! On top of the plywood walls, I used a 2 inch think layer of styrofoam from Home Depot and on top of that I put egg crate bottoms filled with this foaming spray called "great stuff", (also from Home depot, $4) then painted the egg crates black. (Note: I was going to buy actual soudproof foam from the foam factory, but it would've cost me $500 to do the whole booth- what a rip). After carpeting the floor of the booth with a cheap remnant I can now record dubbing voice and instrumentals that sound great. It was worth the hard work. You should do that if you're really going to do dubbing unless you know somwone who has a studio.

Anyway, I hope I answered some of your questions. Oh yeah, one more thing about computers. Are you going to build one? If you have one already what kind've Processor, motherboard, hard drive, RAM, video card, etc does it have in it? Remember that editing video on a PC takes TONS of system resources.

I reccommend Pentium 4 at least 2.4GhZ with a NON-INTEL CHIPSET motherboard. That motherboard should support:
-up to 2Gigabytes of RAM
-AGP (video card)
-SATA (serial ATA hard drive)
-have onboard firewire port.

I recommend using:
-serial ATA hard drive (for fast video data tranfer) but a regular IDE hard drive will still work.
-NVidia GEFORCE video card with at least 128Mb ram on the card.
-buy a cheap soundblaster soundcard, do NOT use the soundcard that's built into the motherboard the quality is MUCH better from a sound card and plus then you can buy a cheap MIDI keyboard and create your own music!!!

NOTE: If you do build your own computer, you may be tempted to buy an INTEL motherboard, or a motherboard that boasts an '800MhZ front side bus' but don't be fooled!- to get this you must overclock the processor which is very bad! and it runs like crap, always locking up. I've used motherboards with the INTEL chipset on them and they ALWAYS NO MATTER WHAT have tons of BLUE SCREEN ERRORS and lock up. They're worthless peices of garbage. Get a motherboard with an SIS or other non-INTEL chipset. [img]smile.gif[/img]

**encryptdesigns** · January 27th, 2005, 03:25 PM

Wow have a got some great, great feedback here. Thanks also to Michael (Fast Films) for his email with a bunch of ultra useful information. I'm actually surprised at the amount of positive feedback that I have received here. So for that I am very grateful. I definately have a lot to go over this weekend and couldn't thank all of you enough.

Rock on,

Mark