questions...

[alain]

Hi. I'm entering now the super8 world, and want to know a couple of things. If anyone can help me, the questions are:

- Is the Nikon R8 a good camera?
- Does Super8 have a good resolution, better than video Hi8?
- I have heard about frame rate problems when you try to telecine your film only filming a screen projection. Is it really this bad, or just a little bad? What can I do to telecine S8 films in my house without this problem? After capturing the video to my pc, can I just delete some frames to kill the flicker problem?

Thanks everybody,

Alain

[tom hardwick]

Yes, the NikonR8 (and its big and better selling brother the R10) are very good cameras indeed, and you wouldn't go far wrong going for one of those. The R10 has a built in lap dissolve feature which endeared it to many.

The resolution question is a difficult one to answer. If you use a Super8 camera and a mini DV camera (the XL-1 say) for stills, then yes, a Kodachrome 40 frame of Super 8 will produce a far more detailed print than a 720 x 576 pixel picture. I have proved it; my 11" x 14" Cibachromes from movie frames make stills from my TRV900 look awful.

The film also has a greater dynamic range and the frame size of Super8 (at 7,1mm) is much larger than the Mini DV frame from a 1/4" chip, so the enlargement for a given print size is less for Super 8.

Are you NTSC or PAL, Alain? If you're in PAL land then the flicker on transfer is not a problem at all, and film transfers beautifully to video. The flicker is caused by the shutter starting to close or actually being closed when a video frame is captured, so removing such frames using a PC programme tends to loose information along the way.

But After Effects can do it. It's not a cheap programme and it's not easy to learn, but is a way to cure the flicker. If you don't mind your film being recorded to tape at the wrong speed, then you can use a variable speed projector and play around with the projection speed till the flicker dissapears. Then in your NLE programme you can vary the speed back to normal.

tom.

[mattias]

we do have flicker here in pal country too. it's easier to avoid because you can use basically any shutter and just set the frame rate to 25, but if you don't nail the frame rate exactly, voila: flicker. i'm very interested in your method for reducing flicker with ae by the way. care to explain further?

[tom hardwick]

Can't elaborate further on using AE to remove the flicker by the way, it's info picked up on the Computer Video web site. I don't need to remove flicker as I project at 16 2/3 rds fps with a camcorder shutter set at 1/50th, and the picture is absolutely flickerless. (PAL).

Of course this makes sound film sound very slightly slow, but Premiere can fix that in seconds.

tom.

[alain]

Hi. Thanks for the fast answer.
I am PAL here. That means that if I project a S8 film at 18 fps and record it to video at 25 (PAL is 25, right?) the transfer is perfect?
By the way, is the resolution any better if I instead of shooting the screen, shoot a direct projection (project directly on the camcorder lens, and using a mirror to invert the image)?
I made some filters for VirtualDub that make my video look like 8mm film (not S8). If you want to take a look, the hp is http://cinemalook.vila.bol.com.br . I made also 16 and 35mm filters, but they are not so good.
Thanks for all!

Alain Meunier

[tom hardwick]

If you're using a 3 bladed shutter in your Super 8 projector (and most of them were - though some Beaulieu and Fumeo projectors could be ordered with a 2 bladed shutter) then you'll have to slow the projector slightly to sync with the 50Hz mains.

18fps will give slight strobing but 16 2/3fps is spot on, the transfers will be perfect. Use a camcorder shutter speed of 1/50th.

There have been tests done to rephotograph the Super 8 frame itself onto video, but it's a very difficult operation indeed. For a start the lamp is far too bright, the frame is incredibly small, the lateral reverse means mirrors of timeline filters must be employed.

As I say, it has been done but I wonder if it's worth it. The front projection method can be very good indeed I find, especially if you use a very high quality, slow (small aperture) prime (non zoom) projection lens.

tom.

[mattias]

alain, your processed footage looks great, although a little over the top imho (after all, film is supposed to look *better* than video). anyway, i'm on a mac myself so i can't try the filter out. could you provide before and after pictures or maybe process only half the frame in the example. what exactly does the filter do? i'm a "film look" plugin developer (ae/fcp) myself and i have come a really long way in grain simulation, with results even better than cinelook's.

and by the way, i though it was illegal to mirror divx ;-) on your own site. :-)

[alain]

Hello.
Thanks everyone for the answers, you helped me big time.

You are right, film is suposed to look better than video, but regular 8mm *old* film dosen't look so good (this is why the 8mm filter blurres the image, but I must say I blurred it too much). The 16mm and 35mm are not blurred, but in my opinion they still do not look like real film. They look like a more colored video...

The filter I made isn't really a filter, because I don't know how to make a filter, I'm only 15 now. In the .zip files to download in my site, there are two plugins that are necessary to the process. There is also a .txt file that tells you what to do with the plugins, step-by-step. Finally, there are 20 .bmp files that will be applied over the frames of the video, making a flicker effect and adding the little spots that film has (other thing to change in a next version: there are too many spots).
Maybe that illegal thing that is divx is the reason I tried to download the videos in my site and they didn't work. I will soon update it and put there MPEG files or zipped divx so the examples can work.
If anyone want to see the examples, I can send them by email. my email is [email protected] .
Thanks again for the help and care.

[mattias]

cool. to avoid being illegal and still offering divx ;-) download, just link to the official site. part of their license agreement is that you mustn't redistribute the codec.

[alain]

ok, now you can download the videos. I zipped them and they work now.
What is the divx hp?

alain