editing old 8mm, super 8, and 16mm home movies

musman wrote on 12/14/2003, 11:37 PM

I just had transfered a couple hours worth of home movies from the '50's to the late '70's onto minidv. I'm not exactly sure of the process he used, but it was definitely NOT the project the films onto a screen and point a camcorder at the screen approach. Anyway, the tech who did the transfer seemed very knowledgable about the films and said I'd be dealing with frame rates of both 18fps and 24fps.
My question is, should I set the Vegas capture settings differently for this material? I'm guessing not, as he's probably added some sort of pull down (though what you would do with 18fps material is totally lost on me).
Also wondering what would happen if I set things to remove the pulldown like you would if using the dvx100 at 24pA.
Thanks for any help!

Comments

farss wrote on 12/15/2003, 2:12 AM

As far as I know you can only put 50/60i onto tape.
8mm runs at around 18fps, 16mm 24 fps. Both need pulldown to get onto tape. You may be able to remove the pulldown from the 16mm as there is a normal process for applying the pull down. That assumes he used a decent telecine that output 24 fps and THEN did the pulldown.

On the cheapo gear I run the process is q bit different fro 8mm. The film runs at 16 2/3 fps nominal but the camera runs at 25 fps for PAL. Looking at the vido frame by frame I find some frames are the same frame of film duplicated and others seem to be blended from two frames of the film. You'd never remove that!

Amazing thing is it looks OK as video, in fact some of my work just went to air on national television. Some of the material wasn't mine, it was done on a Cintel. Couldn't really see any difference.

johnmeyer wrote on 12/15/2003, 1:36 PM

Pulldown refers to the process of taking scanned film (like from a Rank Cintel) and duplicating film frames across video fields in order to get 24 fps to play correctly at 29.97 fps. Film that is transferred to video by using a telecine projector (a projector modified with a special shutter), doesn't need pulldown because the video just captures whatever happens to be on the screen at each moment in time. Sometimes you get part of one two film frames, sometimes you get just one frame, sometimes you get black because the film projector shutter is closed. By slightly adjusting the projector film speed, and by using a projector with a modified shutter, the number of black frames is minimized, and therefore there is not too much noticeable flicker. The blended frames speed by quickly and actually degrade the viewing experience much.

Bottom line: Ask the transfer company if the transfer is done in real time. If it is, then a telecine projector was used. No pulldown is necessary. Just treat the videotape like any other video (i.e., 29.97 project for NTSC or 25 fps for PAL), and start editing.

Jsnkc wrote on 12/15/2003, 1:49 PM

It's easy to do, run the 8mm film into one of those copy kit boxes and on the other end have the MiniDV camera, you can do it in realtime and if you use a 3CCD camera it looks great, looks good with a 1 Chip camera too :) We do thousands of reels a year that way.