Shooting TV screens...

[N. Foster Tyler]

Hello! I was wondering how to shoot a TV screen close-up with Super-8 without getting 'lines' across the image. For my last short, I shot a TV screen up close with Plus-X stock and got unwanted lines in the image from the sceeen.

With my next short, I want to shoot predominantly in Super-8 (I'll be splicing the whole thing), BUT I need to shoot a few things on video for a couple of video sureillance shots. Instead of paying a lab a bunch of cash to transfer the video to Super-8, I want to just shoot it straight off my TV.

Any suggestions?

Thanks...

[tripplezero]

You could use a lcd screen from a laptop,camcorder, any flat lcd will work fine.

[Mikko]

is there a lab that can put video image to super 8 film???

M

[mattias]

if you can slow down the video and shoot at a slower speed, the blending/motion blur will take care of the lines. you will have to go as low as under 10 fps or something though. or you can shoot an lcd screen as suggested. the only way to shoot a crt properly otherwise is to get a camera with crystal sync and a variable shutter.

[ekoe]

the canon 1014xl-s manual states that you can shoot a television screen at 18fps with the shutter set at 220 degrees. the 85 filter should be in place.
the manual admits diagonal scan lines will occassionally result using this method.
keep in mind that i have not used this method, so i cannot attest to it's results.
but it's worth a test.

[yak]

strange, i ve done it sometimes and had no problems.
we have pal, where i live, maybe thats the reason, but i dont think so.
i cant remember the fps i shot with, but anyway, it looks great if you take really bad quality videofootage, which has been copied a few times.

[Alex]

What great responses!

On my laundry list of options, the top three were stated...slow down exposure time,...use a camera with a very wide shutter (220 degrees), or liquid crystal screen, (although I've never tried that one myself),

and the PAL playback idea might work because they use 50 fields instead of 60 per second, and 50 is almost a direct 2-1 ratio to 24 fps.

Slowing down the video is a good idea...but you may lose resolution.

When video is played back at any other speed but normal, video playback function is such that it drops half of the resolution, by dropping one of the two video fields found in every frame of video.

This effect also happens when you pause a video.

The "work-around" to this issue is if the video footage on the TV was film to begin with, then re-transfer the film to video at half the speed that the film was originally filmed at.

...then if you undercrank the filming of the scene (half speed, either 9 FPS or 2 FPS), the speed of the TV screen will look normal.

If you have live actors in the same frame as the TV screen image, the actors would have to move at half-speed, unless they are sitting in a couch potato position...and no one will notice the undercranking.

-Alex



[This message has been edited by Alex (edited April 18, 2001).]

[Carlos8]

Hey guys,
I never transferred Video to Super 8 film, but soon I will have to do it for some scenes of the short film that at the moment I?m shooting. I have worked enough with Premiere Adobe, reason why I have an idea of how we could transfer video (Pal) to Super 8:

Since the television image is something greater than what we observed normally (approx 10 %) we can reduce it until obtaining an image of dimensions similar to which provides the TV screen (with cropping). For example: in the Pal system we have an image of 768 X 576 pixels, but if we used cropping TV function in Adobe Premiere, we will obtain a 720 X 540 pixels frame.

When we reducing the size of frame, we increased its quality just a little bit and we obtain 100% of the same one, thus if we must reduce the speed of video (75 %) to film it in Super 8 at 18 fps, we can do the following thing (using Adobe Premiere):

1 Apply Field Interpolation
2 Apply Camera View function (to reduce 10% the frame size)
3 Apply Sharpen More function (to improve the quality of the image)
4 Reduce the video speed at 75 %
5 Apply Frame Blending function (to mix each frameuniformly)
6 Apply Flicker Removal

That?s what I think to do when I?ll shoot video in Super 8 film soon.

Carlos.