Posted by Rick Rieger on 04/24/06 03:11

<chris@groupinfo.com> wrote in message
news:1145298244.888796.196680@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> Hello:
>
> I know this is a highly discussed topic, and I have done a lot of
> reading up to this point so far. I am interested in capturing some old
> Super 8 film movies with sound on my PC (to AVI files for encoding and
> burning to DVD later). I am looking for more feedback at doing the
> capturing part myself instead of taking the film in somewhere. I have
> found some posts of people that have been able to successfully capture
> their old films, but I haven't seen much information on capturing Super
> 8 with sound (I have seen mostly articles on capturing films without
> sound).
>
> Has anybody been able to capture their films with sound and get close
> to telecine quality somehow (good image quality, color, and minimal/no
> flicker)? And if so what capturing equipment did you use and what
> settings worked the best? I currently have a projector and analog
> capture card for the PC (and firewire port), and will probably have to
> rent a digital video camera. If there is no way to match a telecine,
> what are the recommendations for those (hopefully for rent)?
>
> Thank you very much for all feedback. I hope this in turn helps others
> down the road decide which way to choose, too.
>
> Thanks...
> --
> Chris
>

Chris,

I have done it successfully at home. I used equipment sold by MovieStuff
http://www.moviestuff.tv/

There are various units for 16mm and R8/S8. I bought both the 16mm Video
Workprinter-16 and R8/S8 Video Workprinter XP. Together with my dad's
footage I had a total of 40,000 feet to transfer. You can read about how
the equipment works on the website. Essentially, you are capturing 6 frames
per second focussing on an arial image of the film projector gate. You need
a video camera with at least a 12x zoom (I used a Canon GL2) and a computer
with a fast hard drive system (RAID 0 recommended). The camera is connected
to the computer with a firewire cable. No DV video tape needed. The
results are very good with no flicker, no cropping and very sharp images.
You end up with an AVI file on your computer. The only method I believe
that is better is a wet gate cine transfer system. As these systems cost
more than $100k, it's not a practical choice for the do-it yourselfer.

After capture, you apply a speed change transform to the captured files to
render them at the proper speed (15/16, 18, or 24fps). Your video will now
run dead accurate at the chosen speed. Moviestuff recomments the
Cinecap/Dodcap program to do this, available for download ($).

Now for the sound. MovieStuff's equipment does not transfer sound. To do
that, I used 16mm and S8 sound projectors each driven by an external
synchronous motor. The sound was recorded into the computer using Adobe
Audition and then dehissed and dehummed using the Audition noise reduction
tools.

To put the sound together with the picture you need a video editing
application like Adobe Premiere. You import the AVI and WAV (audio) files
on the same timeline and then adjust the time axis position of the audio
track so that it is in sync with the picture. Since both the video and
audio are running with no speed variations, once you have one portion of the
audio and video in sync, the whole movie is in sync.

Now, what to do if you cannot capture the audio synchronously? You can
still do the job. It just takes a little more work. Premiere lets you
adjust the duration of the video or audio down to the frame level. I tended
to work by adjusting the speed of the audio, because adjusting the speed of
the video can introduce interlacing artifacts. However, you can adjust the
video speed if that works for you. You will have to take this approach if
the soundtrack starts out more than a few percent longer or shorter than the
video. Changing the audio duration in such cases will alter the pitch
noticably.

In your video editor program adjust the start points of the video and audio
as best you can and start playing both using the monitor function. As soon
as you notice an out-of-sync condition, stop the playback. Apply a cut at
that point. Your audio (and video) is now each in two pieces. You then
adjust the duration of the first audio piece to bring in into sync with the
video. Move the unaltered audio piece to butt up against the piece you just
worked on. Start playback again. When you notice an out-of-sync condition,
repeat the cut/duration change process. At the end your video and audio
will show as a number of pieces on the timeline. Since these pieces all
butt up against one another, there will be no visual or audio breaks when
playing the movie. I had to use this approach on several films that had the
sound on reel-to-reel tapes. My dad had a way to synchronize these tapes
with the picture. I won't go into that here. I could not use his method.
The reel-to-reel recorder I have runs "wild" (i.e., not synchronously).

When complete, export the movie (picture and sound) to a new AVI file, and
then export to a DVD using an authoring program like Adobe Encore.

Let me know if there are any questions, and good luck!

Rick Rieger

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