I have been acquiring 8mm, super8 and 16mm film at swap meets, thrift stores and yard sales for years. The cost of transferring all the footage seemed cost prohibitive for my planned project. I discovered Kinograph in 2017 and have checked in on the site off and on but only now have signed up and posted. I like to tinker but I am, sadly, a hack when it comes to precision work. This does not stop me from hacking away. I love the idea of this low cost open source project.
I don’t believe I have anything of value to add to this project technically. All I have is my enthusiasm for rescuing orphan films before they are lost forever.
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Welcome, Squid! Hopefully we can help with those films soon. Glad to have you.
Hi everyone, I’ve just discovered the site after scouring the web for information on my DIY Super 8 telecine project.
I’m particularly excited about finding the site as I was starting to worry that the ‘movement’ of online enthusiasts I enjoyed years ago was starting to disappear. I used to frequent filmshooting.com forums a lot, amongst others, but sadly that site seems to have disappeared taking a lot of useful information with it.
I started shooting film around 2007 when I found my Dad’s Super 8 camera in the loft. As a teenager I remembered watching his cine films as a child, but as camcorders (and life) took over, and the projector had packed up, it was years since we’d watched the movies he made and I’d forgotten the wonderful quality they possessed. Finding that camera and processing the half finished Kodachrome 40 roll inside (complete with purple footage of me as a baby!) kick started a love affair with reversal film for me, particular Kodachrome 40 in Super 8 and K64 for my newly purchased SLR camera.
I’ve been meaning to build a DIY telecine machine ever since, mostly to transfer my Dad’s old films as he has hours and hours of footage - almost all Kodachrome 40, much of it 200ft sound film. My own footage is pretty sharp as it’s shot with a Canon 814XL-S, but whatever I end up building, anything frame by frame will be better than what I’ve achieved so far as the only proper transfers I’ve done are off the wall with a HV20. I’ve got a few hours of footage myself now to transfer, and plenty of rolls of S8 Ektachrome 100D in the freezer from when I had the foresight to use the last bits of my student loan to panic buy back in 2009 
I got quite far a few years ago before work, marriage and a baby took over, and managed to modify a Eumig 610D with a widened gate, diffused LED light source and a hall effect sensor to trigger a mouse click which was more or less internet best practice at the time. The only hurdle was I couldn’t get a decent quality image by aiming the camcorder at a plano-convex lens, so decided at some point I was going to use a machine vision camera.
I’m really impressed at some of the efforts I’ve seen here and fascinated to see Raspberry PIs being used as well. I’ve used them in the past for things like VPN servers or TV backends, but wouldn’t have thought of doing any telecine with them.
I’m hoping to learn a bit more from the forum about how to a) get my current system working so I can at least start doing some telecine properly, and then b) how to iterate the system to eventually align more with the fab designs you guys are creating.
I’ve just ordered a Blackfly U3-23S6C-C and will need to figure out how to mount the Schneider 50mm/2.8 enlarger lens everyone is using. Then once that’s working and capturing video, next step probably figure out how to improve the light source to do HDR captures and get as much out of the sensor as possible.
I’m hoping I will be able to contribute back both by sharing my progress with others, and also by pioneering on transferring magnetic stripe sound. It seems fairly niche to have a lot of sound film to transfer (I’ve read sound film was 5% of S8 sales at best), but I’ve got a lot to transfer and there’s enough that it has to be done accurately. Roughly syncing it might work for a 3m20 reel, but for an hour long feature film that’d be a right pain! I have a lot of experience in audio production and post processing, but will need to do a lot of research in how to mechanically transfer the audio as I’ve none whatsoever there.
So yeh, happy to be here and hoping to learn and share a lot. I love the open source ethos and it’s great to see you guys creating a very friendly and accessible space to share ideas.
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Welcome @bainzy! Sounds like you have a great collection on your hands. I’m looking forward to seeing your progress here. Glad to have you.
Hi Everyone
here Michael 28 years old from italy
I’m Videomaker and broadcast sound engineer for a FM radio network in Italy.
I’m passionate about local history. I have a collection of about 300 16 and 35mm film rolls that I want to digitize, preserve and upload to my youtube channel. Kinograph project is amazing! I’m not familiar with programming languages, 3D printing etc …
I would like to save my material in the best possible quality. I own the Wolverine scanner for 8 and super8. I can’t wait for the scanner to be ready to show all my fellow citizens the videos of our city in the past.
here is a link of my YouTube channel with local history films and videos
https://www.youtube.com/michelepatucca
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Hello!
My name is Julia and I’m an artist focusing on lens-based media and the archive. Years ago I was given my grandfather’s 8mm films shot in the 1960s/70s. While in grad school I began noticing how the imagery on these films bled out of the standardized frame, into the space between the film’s sprocket holes, and began making works appropriating this minuscule area. For a while, I used a flatbed transparency scanner to scan frame by frame and created animations of the space in between the sprocket holes, which took an excruciating length of time with inconsistencies. I also began printing large archival inkjet prints of the scans. You can find a lot of this work on my website here.
After discovering the Kinograph V1 project I began following along step by step to build my own platform so I can streamline my studio practice:
Which then turned into me altering an old 8mm projector, as I was having difficulties getting my film to hook on to the 3D printed rollers:
I’m in the process of finalizing the lighting, thinking about switching to a machine vision camera, and figuring out software for image capture. I had access to digital fabrication tools (3D printer, laser cutter, electronics space) and photographic equipment for a time, but I am now working on constructing a workspace from home and gathering my own equipment during quarantine. I didn’t have much of a background in electronics/fabricating at all before beginning this, but following the forums has helped me a LOT. I’m incredibly grateful for this community and can’t wait to continue growing this build!
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This is so rad @juliamarie. I can’t believe you built a v1. I think it’s only the 3rd in existence ever . Happy to support however I can. I have a laser cutter and printer at home. I can send you stuff in the mail if you need.
I really want to help support artists’ work with Kinograph so please let me know how the community can help.
Also have some ideas on an 8mm machine. Hopefully this quarantine will help propel that forward a bit too.
@juliamarie great to see your build and your artistic work. I harvested an 8/Super 8 projector for my first build, so I am intrigued by the last couple of pictures of your intro. You can see what I did, and a lot of information in this thread. Since your last two pictures appear to work out of turning the projector, would gladly share any information that may be helpful with. My background is more electronics, so I struggle a bit with the mechanics, and do not have 3D printing or laser cutting at home, so the work is a bit more of wood-hacking than anything else. But the electronics and arduino programming is much better than my mechanics. I also recover a collection of film negatives, you can read more about it here. Welcome to the forum and glad to provide any additional info that may be helpful.
@matthewepler That’s such a generous offer — thank you! I’ll be sure to reach out if I find myself in a situation where I need access to either. The v1 helped me learn a ton about the basics of building and the instructions were pretty smooth to follow along. I’m not sure if I would have found my way to my current build if I didn’t begin with v1.
There’s a decently sized artist film community in Baltimore, where I’m located. If I can get my 8mm up and running efficiently I’m hoping this will eventually lead to workshops where I can help digitize films from others, as well. A longer-term goal would be expanding to additional film sizes, but 8mm is my priority as of now.
@PM490 Wow that thread is incredibly helpful for where I’m currently at. Thank you for sharing that. I’m intrigued by your mentioning of digiCamControl — I haven’t come across something like that yet and it seems like it could be of use for me, too. The collection of film negatives are beautiful. Thank you for the welcome and offer!
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Hello Matthew:
My name is Brian Durham - I’m an archivist of a sort in north Texas in the United States.
I’ve been collecting film for about 25 years and posting TV commercials and whatnot to YouTube for about 15 years.
I currently use an old Sniper-16 from Moviestuff.tv - it’s an movie projector with an SD camera behind it. It’s an SD rig I got in the 2007 timeframe. It’s been fun trying to keep a Windows 7 machine with a firewire port running to continue to use the thing. It uses a Canopus ADVC-110 to do the A/D conversion to firewire to go into a PC.
I’ve mostly been a lurker on the forums so far - I hope to find an entry point to start working on a v2 Kinograph at some point.
Besides a couple of linux boxes I’ve got a Rasp Pi 3b’s - I was wanting to see if I could use one of those towards scanning. I’ve got the 8 megapixel camera (the prior camera before the new cool one I believe).
I’m an old linux geek - I used to program on the platform but it’s been forever. I convert videos from the native DV AVI format to an mp4 format for uploading via ffmpeg on one of my linux boxes.
I’m not into self-promotion but here’s my Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1YXjRzMF6UTX795tmfnw6A
I’m trying to post a new commercial and a new PSA once a week. Everything transferred from film, of course.
My question for Matt - for v2 where’s a good starting point? A hint or a pointer would be nice. Probably covered elsewhere but my apologies.
Thanks -
Brian Durham
Welcome, Brian! Glad to have you with us and thanks for sharing your work with us. Looking forward to those weekly scans. I just subscribed.
Your question about v2 is one that others probably have. V2 is still in active development, so it’s not ready to build yet. But it will be by Fall of this year.
The best way to follow along is on Instagram (@kinograph.cc) where you’ll see every step of the process. Or you can just check the website periodically (https://kinograph.cc). All of the documentation of the build, parts, files, etc will be on the wiki: https://wiki.kinograph.cc.
Glad to have you here
Hey all,
my name is Friedemann, I am currently 43 years old and I am a film nut and a maker, constantly working on way too many projects at a time. I got a darkroom in my basement since I was 15 years old, since about 20 years it has been used almost exclusively for film development. There is no process I am not doing or haven’t tried to do, I love optimising chemistry for old, expired color stock, adjusting bw stock to my liking or coming up with soups that solve a certain problem I have.
The access to “virtually free processing” makes me having a severe hoarding problem — I got a 7 ft freezer containing nothing but film stock, some of it most obscure, and I admit it’s not the only freezer. So yes, I film a lot, too.
I am also repairing (my) cameras and projectors with joy whenever necessary. Since I set up a nice shop over the years, and my day job is in (photogrpahy) software, I am also a passionate maker and love electronics. Beside smaller projects, I developed the “Synkino”, an OSH digital music player board that stays in sync with the pulse of any projector forever. Yes, I love making PCBs, don’t fear fine pitch SMT soldering and am a big fan of 8 Bit AVRs (still not feeling at home in the ARM world, probably b/c I am a pretty horrible coder).
Oh, and I run the www.filmkorn.org website (whenever I have time to write something, ahem)
Believe it or not, I have never really been interested in digitizing film, since I love real projection so much. However, I was given one of these horrible Wolverine film shredders a while ago for free, and could not imagine how horrible a product can be. I modded the heck out of it, but it just remained horrible — and before making it even more Frankenstein, I got the vague plan to build a film scanner on my own some day.
I now stumbled over the ne Raspi HQ Camera and ordered one, it should arrive next wednesday — let’s see where that ends up…
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Welcome, @peaceman! Sounds like you will be a perfect fit here. We have lots of builds for 8mm in the forums and some for 16 and 35 too! The search function works pretty well but if you can’t find something feel free to just ask in a new post and we will do our best to help out.
Looking forward to seeing what comes of your quest to build a scanner!
Hi everybody !
I’m Gregory, a french musician (oud and e.guitar player) and analog photographer living in Strasbourg, just near Germany where I grew up.
After the photobook I’ve made in Algeria about the french nuclear tests made in the 60s on the Sahara desert, I began too work a lot with S8 and 16mm films (instead of my habituals 35mm and half-frame work for stills). And I was digitizing (and precessing) myself with a simple setup. Being in isolation since 2 and a half month, and having lost all my concerts until september (musician is my “real” job), I decided to build a telecine myself… what a strange idea as I really know nothing about electronics, and just building a shelf is a real challenge for me :). So I bought an arduino, a RPI, began to light leds and learn python and arduino IDE 2 weeks ago with the small starter kit I offered to my 11 year old son (mmmh…yes it was a gift for him and me…), and really enjoy working on this project, slowy ! And while I was looking for informations, I found this website and I really enjoyed the mood of everyone here. So really nice to meet you, I won’t have any advices to give I think but I’ll be reading you with great pleasure ! And the story about Jordans films being the start of this story touch me a lot because as an oud player who travels a lot in arabic countries, I found this story wonderfull.
Best from France
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Welcome, @Gregory_Dargent! Your dedication to learning programming and electronics is impressive. Just the kind of “figure it out” attitude we love around here. Welcome and I hope you find some useful info here. If you need any help, feel free to ask and we’ll do our best to offer what we know.
Would love to see it!
So for the music: https://www.gregory-dargent.com/copie-de-h
And for the photobook: https://www.gregory-dargent.com/photography password HLeLivre
The book (and the CD) is about me being son, nephew and grand son of french military being in Algeria during the war, and going in the townss where the 17 essais were done (power of 35 Hiroshimas), and think about heritage and mutations, of the bodies of course, but my own mutations and heritage as a french man born 10 years after those tests… I hope you’ll enjoy it !
Hi Y’all
My parents made documentary films together, mostly on 16mm, though I also have a fair amount of 35mm and I am in the process of trying to save it. I’m wondering if there is anyone in California who has made a scanner with good results who would consider renting it out? I feel like the skills to make one of these from the plans provided would take me months and months of learning skills I don’t have and I’m not sure I could complete. I do have a 16mm viewer that I think could be converted into a scanner if I can find a way to use the sprocketed wheel to advance the film one frame at a time. I’m guessing some of you might have some good suggestions. I can post pictures of the viewer and the gears that connected to the sprocket wheel, but I don’t see a way to attach anything on this email.
Cheers.
Pablo
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