8MM Film & Improving Quality

[newsgroup guy]

A friend of mine has some 8MM film (from the '50s) and wants to try to improve their quality. He suggested that I record them as they are being played back, using my recently-bought camcorder. Perhaps at a lower shutter speed, to get rid of the flicker, he said.

I could do that, for sure, but will it really make the new recordings significantly better?

Can an expert give me some advice, please?

[jagabo]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=144271

[newsgroup guy]

Thanks, Jagabo.

But let me see if I got this straight: Are you suggesting that I use my camcorder to record the played-back 8MM film and then process the M2TS file with AviSynth?

[jagabo]

I was saying: regardless of how you get the video digitized you can probably do a lot to improve the quality.

Since I don't know what was used to make the existing recordings I don't know if shooting the screen with your (high definition?) camcorder will give you better results. But shooting the screen while projecting is one of the lowest quality methods of digitizing film.

Using slow shutter speeds will give you blended frames -- frames which are a blend of two different film frames. You generally want to adjust the projection speed to match the camcorders frame rate.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1618829,00.asp

The best techniques involve expensive dedicated film scanners.

[newsgroup guy]

The circumstances of my situation are as follows: I only have the one camcorder (- FullHD camcorder -) and I don't know how to work AviSynth. Probably my friend is looking for a quick fix, too, not something that might take me weeks in figuring out how to perfect the process.
(None of us is looking for the most professional results, I'm sure.)

What do you suggest, Jagabo? Should I just leave the camcorder shutter speed at default, and adjust the projection speed (to what?) in order to match 1080-60i?
As it says in the PCMag article, I'll do this, right? - "To minimize flicker, set your shutter speed to 1/60 second, and adjust the projector speed to either 20 fps, which produces 60 images per second, or 10 fps, which produces 30 images per second."

Then, of course, if the results are not satisfactory, I could try AviSynth as final step.

Should I proceed this way? What do you think?

And thanks again.

[jagabo]

Yes, generally use the procedure outlined in the pcmag article. Can your camcorder shoot 60p? That may work better than 30i (aka 60i). You'll have to experiment to see what works best for your camcorder/projector combination.