As I think I have gone over once or twice on this site, I have a deep and irrational passion for analog photography. About a year ago I expanded this passion from still photos into movie film. The curiosity for the movie film comes from a combined interest in the mechanics of film, as well as a deep and incurable nostalgia that I have for the ‘good old days’. There is something so powerful to me about watching an old home movie from the 1950s. I think it’s the mix of the tack-tack-tack of the projector, the 18fps of the film, and the colours. It transports me right back to a time that I never lived through, like a window in time. I can see the way that people lived. The differences in style, and the incredible similarities that the people in the past share with us. Somehow, when we learn about history, we imagine in our minds a time where people were so different to ourselves. But watching a family playing together, celebrating birthdays, going on holiday together. It all seems so...familiar. Like a tool that I can use to place myself in their shoes. For me this is a fascinating experience that helps me understand and witness history as it was seen at the time.

It is one thing to shoot my own analog photography projects, and teach myself the ways of shooting, developing, and digitizing. But it is a slightly different project to take old films and go through the digitizing process.

This project was my attempt to go through a huge collection of family films dating from between 1920 and 1970 and digitizing them. The films came in the format of 8mm, 16mm and super 8mm. The first hurdle was acquiring a projector to display the films. With the collection of films came a super 8 projector that shows only super 8 cartridges matching the projector. The projector is a really cool piece of technology which allows quick changing of cartridges, and fixes the hassle of feeding the films onto leaders and rolls to play across the projector bulb. The problem is that it leaves me unable to play the loose 8mm and 16mm films. Later on I will discuss my attempts at adapting the films to be able to play through this projector.

There are multiple ways of digitizing films. The proper (and expensive) way is to either send them out to a professional service, or buy a Telecine machine. These machines run from between $20,000 to $500,000, depending on condition. So I pretty quickly struck that off the list of possible solutions. The next solution is to build your own Telecine machine. This has been on my mind for a while now, especially after reading from a couple different sources about it. Here are a few example sites that show the build process:

The first site goes through the entire build process and it is unquestionably complex and a pretty intense investment in time and energy to complete. It is really interesting to see how high quality the results of these machines were. Below is an example from the Attempts of Freddie Van de Putte and his DIY Telecine machine in conjunction with his Avisynth script:

These are some pretty stunning results in my opinion, but for the moment, ill leave this project for another time.

The most DIY, and least cost and energy intensive approach, is to set up the projector against a clean white backdrop and focus a good DSLR camera on the projection to record the film. This method is also by far the worst quality solution. Lag of contrast, hotspots and interference of the shutter are the main problems that come with it. The resulting digital film looks flickery, out of focus, and dully coloured. But for me, It was 'good enough' to simply get the films digitized. We can improve the techniques as we move forward with the process. Below is a quick film of the recording set up, followed by the result of one of the first attempts.

First digitized movie:

Immediately we can see the less than stellar results of this technique. The most glaring example is the rolling shutter effect caused by the interruptions of the shutter blades of the projector. This causes that light and dark rolling effect from top to bottom over the film. The second thing we notice is that the film seems to blow out highlights and fail to correctly capture the dark areas of the film.
So I went through each of the cartridges to digitize them, and then bit the bullet and bought another 8mm projector that could handle both super and regular 8mm films. I was able to digitize the rest of the pile with this new projector