Capture software made just for film scanning

[Andyw]

@friolator

I’m more thinking along the lines of someone who has scanned a lot of film. Sure - you can separate that stuff and as in the robinoscan, the system works like a “tape deck” - hit record on the software and play on the device and just capture. And this is fine for some things. But as soon as you have a reel that has both color and B/W film on it (extremely common with home movies, I might add), you may find the need to use different settings for those films.

Yeah I’ve had 8mm stapled onto super 8 mid reel, and sections backwards. But this is the type of stuff I pick up when I run a customers film on the rewind bench and check and clean.

@friolator

Or it may be that some of the framing is different from some shots vs others. This happens a lot in 8mm, but it’s also very common in 35mm where whoever spliced the film wasn’t careful to splice along the same perfs as the rest of the frames, and you might wind up with a 3-perf frame. This throws off the racking for the rest of the reel, and you need to stop, back up, reframe and go. A lot of this stuff can be easily automated, but you can’t do that with a “wild capture” which is basically what you’re looking at.

This does get annoying, but I will normally overscan enough to accomodate it. If I’m stupid and didn’t overscan enough, I’ll just rewind a bit and go from there. I’ve never seen it as a problem. With 8mm, you can almost predict it that every 25ft it will jump up or down the distance of a sprocket hole from when they flipped it.

@friolator

It would be great to see something that could actually control a wide variety of devices (cameras, lights, motors), receive responses from sensors, etc. But that stuff is complicated to do in a generic enough way that it’s useful for everyone, and takes into account the vast variety of cameras, controllers, etc that everyone is using.

I’m not really sure how this helps your argument though? this sounds terribly complicated. I was under the impression the “Kinograph” idea was to produce a scanner and parts that everyone could duplicate at home. Although funnily enough, nobody on this forum actually sticks to the “kinograph” build, everyone just does their own thing totally different from the original built. This is the perfect example where people can just build their own scanner however they want, and whack a machine vision cam on there and start capturing.

@PM490

Just about every 8/S8 reel of more than 150 ft is likely to have sections with bastly different exposure too.

this is an issue, and I don’t really have the best solution for it apart from use a basic auto exposure system where it will change the exposure time, but have a maximum exposure time hard stop to avoid smearing. when it gets to there it would push the gain up. This is pretty much how the bundle software with the moviestuff scanners work, and for a basic user, it’s totally fine. When I spoke to Boris at A&B software, he said that they might be able to produce an autoexposure algorithm looking at peak pixel values, and adjusting to avoid overexpose. But you’d have to have a couple sliders to adjust sensitivity and reaction speed. And it would cost around 9k lol.