I shoot the film onto a very smooth fairly nonreflective white paper mounted on the wall and shoot video off of the sheet. I control the flickering by adjusting the speed of the projector. You HAVE to be able to adjust the speed so the flickering will stop (at least in NTSC land anyway...). On my TRV-900 that I use to do this with, I just set the white balance for the projector lamp . Frame rate is 60 fps. Also, I will usually back down on the AE exposure, as the whites of the movie will tend to overexpose the picture on the camera. Usually 2-3 stops down works for me. No need to spend big bucks on equipment when you can do the same thing with stuff in the office already. I have shot this way for years and the only problem is my projector is getting old and has went thru too many bulbs :( Bottom line here - get a projector that has adjustable film speed.

good luck
dave

Just went to the site for the workprinter that Jason suggested and was impressed. A little pricey for me, but looks like that unit would give you about the sharpest picture if money wasn't an issue.

dave

Unfortunately, money IS an issue. Well,...I might be willing to spend a little bit, but not THAT much!


Brian

Jason gave you a good link to the Super8 forum. Here's a link directly to an article on that site that briefly discusses all the various approaches to getting film into your video camera:

Telecine

Thanks for the link. Read the article. I'm not sure if the Super 8 Camera has manual variable speed. I'll check.

As for my Camcorder, I can adjust the shutter speed, but only to 1/60, not to 1/50 as indicated in the article. Does this mean I'm out of luck?

I'm blessed with having Elmo telecines however I'm also trying the projector and camera approach and so far it looks OK using my D8 camera with manual shutter. Quick tests I've run show no flicker even though the projector only has a three blade shutter.

Just be careful with your frineds projector, a lot of the home style 8mm projectors were pretty good at eating the film. Your other problem will be the condition of the film. A lot of 8mm was very poorly shot ot start with and then it's just gone downhill from there.

1/50 would be for PAL land and 1/60 would be for NTSC land (US).

Often the shutter can be varied using one of the "special effect" modes on the camcorder. Sony has all sorts of modes ("sports", "spotlight", etc.) Many of these change the shutter speed. If you have a Sony, I think I have a document that shows the shutter speeds used for these various modes.

My camcorder is a Panasonic DV953

There are a couple of filters for Virtual Dub that do a remarkable job of eliminating flicker. It makes it quite possible to videotape a projected image even if the frame rates are mismatched.

Virtual Dub

The filters are available here:

Donald Graft's Filters
(Go to "Mine" and select "Antiflicker Filter")

Keep in mind that you will need a VFW compatible DV codec to use Virtual Dub sice the DV codec used in Vegas is not available to external programs. Optionally, if the clips are short enough, you could export them as "uncompressed" AVI's out of Vegas, process them in Virtual Dub and then import them back into Vegas to convert them back to DV format. Actually, while your're at Donald Graft's site, get the "HuffYUV" codec from the "Mirror of Ben RG's Site" link. It is a good intermediate codec that is lossless but makes smaller files than just straight uncompressed will.

John