Telecine
With lots of help from Fred Van De Putty "Video Fred" we have been able to get up and running a 8mm and Super 8mm Telecine System. I will try to include in this section things as the project has evolved. We are also working on a 16mm version. There are lots of helpful sites on the Internet to go to for ideas and suggestions. Here are a few things that I learned on the way.
1. I used diffuser material from a salvaged laptop monitor backlighter. It is very thin compared to the opal glass that I used at first and seems to provide a more uniform source of light.
2. I use a 20 Watt 12 VDC halogen bulb from Radio Shack and have it pointed directly into the diffuser. (This gives me exposure times of about 1/377 second.
3. I purchased a small X-Y stage off of eBay to provide precision right/left movement and focus for the machine vision camera.
4. I used a vibration isolation scheme that includes a big sponge rubber block and a concrete block mounted on top of that. This gives the system adequate isolation from the room floor and the projector vibrations. I had to experiment with this one a lot. Email me if you would like more details.
5. The avi files of the digitized movies are very large. I realized quickly that I could not keep (archive) everything. I am in the process of using VirtualDubMod to edit out the sections of the avi files only keeping the parts of each movie that I think appropriate. I am also doing frame grabbing to identify scenes for future reference. This will greatly reduce the size of the archived avi files that I will post process and edit into a project later. The scene frames can lead me back later to movie films that I did not use this time.
6. "Video Fred" came to the rescue again when it was time to learn about AVISynth. It took a while to get his script working but it was well worth the time and effort.
Please leave feedback on the feedback page if you have suggestions.