I did not appreciate that. The films that I am working with, although up to 90 years old, (fortunately none are nitrate based) amazingly, it seems, appear to be in good shape, but there’s no way that I would put them through a projector now. That’s why I have been working on a gentle pull-down mechanism of my own. However, I agree that something working on the lines of the Kinograph would be preferable, but I was initially concerned about the instability of the image framing, and the fact that I did not think I had a suitable optical capture device for continuous film motion.
Over the last few days, I think I have come up with something that may stabilise the frame triggering (I have emailed M about it for his opinion, but too early I guess to get a reply). The main problem then was to look at the digital camera aspect, the technology of which is something I knew least about, mainly because my past photographic experience has been with mechanical still film cameras.
The last few days of research on the subject have been enlightening, and turned up a few facts that surprised me, but answered a lot of questions that have been in my mind for some long time.
For example, I wondered how an image chip could capture a flash image, when the pixels on the chip must take a while to be scanned. I was relating this in my mind to the way a flat-bed scanner works, which was totally wrong. I now know that the image is captured globally as a charge stored in each pixel, Then the whole image chip is scanned and the charges converted to voltages once the shutter is closed. So the whole mechanism is very similar to conventional film cameras. So I then trawled around looking for an imaging camera that I could afford, that had most of the attributes required of telecine, but without a shutter and all the peripheral functions and glitz that goes to make up an expensive DSLR with remote triggering.
I won’t bore you with the details of my journey, but I have finally found something that looks very promising, and for which I have found full technical details of the image chip it contains from its well respected manufacturer. With a wry smile, I can see how the marketing people who sell the camera have taken these details and dressed up their product to appear better than it probably is, but I have taken little notice of that - facts are what interest me. Here is the camera - MC500 <$100
It is advertised as being a microscope eyepiece camera, which put me off at first, but I guess that is one of their strongest markets, together with telescopes.
Before you throw your hands up in horror, download and read this chip spec. Yes, I know its imaging performance does not compare well with a high-end 22MP DSLR, but so what? By all accounts, it should be more than adequate to capture stills from up to 16mm, and at a decent frame rate too, >5fps. If the data sheet is anything to go by, it promises a dynamic range just over 11 stops, which I think I would be happy with. It also has a standard C-Mount lens port, which is a big bonus. There is some confusion however over the pixel resolution, because I think this must include the three colours which brings the real resolution to nearer to 1.7MP. However, there are much more expensive cameras of a similar type out here that have similar real resolutions which quote 1080p performance (see Grasshopper3 from PointGrey the GS3-U3-23S6C-C is the cheapest - $995 ) , so I am not overly concerned.
Anyway, it’s too late - I’ve bought one to quell my curiosity, and it should be here tomorrow. I’ll let you know what I think.