I’m Roger and I’m interested, like many here, in converting some old 8mm family movies from the 60s to digital format. I want to build a machine and see that as a good project. It seems like a simple concept but my progress has been slow.
I started by designing some sprockets, which I haven’t made yet, before deciding to investigate the optics. To this end I have built a simple ‘proof of concept’ test machine using a raspberry pi camera, an old SLR 50mm lens and a 10w LED. It is solid and can capture some good images; I’ve attached a photo:
Hi my name is Kelly Saxberg and I have an archival digitizing project called Reel Memories. We are in Thunder Bay, Canada and we are working with our local museum to digitize 16mm film footage from 1956-1980.
I am a filmmaker and have made use of some of this footage in my film Long Walk Home - The Incredible Journey of Sheila Burnford. You can watch it here Long Walk Home: The Incredible Journey of Sheila Burnford | [ShebaFilms] - YouTube
I’ve been a collector of Projectors, movie cameras and film for may years. Recently my interests in the hobby has changed to restoration of early equipment and at the moment I’m working on an early Powers #6 Cameragraph 35mm silent projector. Part of my collection is some early 9.5mm & 16mm film which I’d like to preserve and this is how I came across you all.
Looking forward to build a scanner!
Hi everyone,
I’m Daniel and in the past couple of years I somehow drifted into the world of analogue film, especially 35 mm. Right now I’m in the process of building a scanner from a projector and while I’m struggeling at some places with my very limited engineering-skills I hope you guys will be able to help me out to get this thing running.
My name is Rutger and I’m from the Netherlands.
You have a really nice and interesting forum and I have been reading posts for a while now.
I’ve worked a couple of months for a company digitizing 8mm film on a MWA flashscan.
My family films were digitised on the flashscan as wel. I sort of liked the colours of the Flash scan files but they seem off and unnaturaly boosted. The scan also had analogue video noise in the frame. Neither did it capture all of the detail in the highlights or in the shadows (it had bright white or black spots). After searching the internet on how you would get all that detail, I came to this forum.
I am most excited about the fact that on this forum people are working on how to get all of the image data out of the frame using multi-exposure.
No relevant skills for building a scanner unfortunately, just the wish to see you guys develop a scanner that can do everything. And occasionaly ask some advice.
BTW I also had the films scanned on a “Filmfabriek” scanner recently, they turned out so much better.
my name is Adriano, I am a Berlin based filmmaker. I shoot 16mm films with a Bolex camera and would love to be able to digitalize my movies and the ones of the other analog guys here around. Also very intersted in found footage. I found out about Kinograph one year ago by chance and I have spent the last months reading every single post of the forum and learning tons of things from the community. It is a great project and I am very exited about the progresses. It is nice to be part and spectator of this!
Hi all I’m excited to finally register an account here, I’m a friend of @Doc and also @Peter. There are some other names I recognise here as well. There’s a really good research paper from 2018 called Film Material - Scanner Interaction, it does have limitations (like I think they only used one physical scanner of each makes, and the makes can vary a lot over their lifetime and also the operator makes a difference) but it is well worth the read to understand that no single scanner is perfect for all types of film. I possess basic hobbyist-level electronic knowledge, so I was able to answer Doc’s question about how to wire the hall-effect sensor right away. Although I don’t have experience with such a component, so I don’t know how close or far away from the magnet it should be to work effectively as a switch to trigger the camera, but if it was my project I’d work it out by trial-and-error.
I know a very small number of professional scanners as well. Price isn’t always commiserate with quality, especially for positive film. I’ve seen a small raw scan from Frame Discrete in Canada, and I think their results are excellent and with an approachable price point. I had no association with FD, but I referred someone there who insisted he wanted to get the very best quality scan no matter the cost (it was only a small scan I might add, not even a 20 minute short). I wasn’t 100% sure they’d do a great job because Scanstations vary a lot, and from what I understand FD mostly scans brand new negative film for independent filmmakers and students, it even has on their order page “Are we picking up your processed film from Niagara Custom Lab for you?”!! But they really did do a fantastic job with the positive print film at less than half the cost of most of their competitors.
Back onto the topic of collector-built scanners, for Doc and his friends involved in their Kinograph project, it will really mean a lot to them and be very special that they can possess their own scanner. It will mean they’ll be able to scan much more of their collections, as well as help out their fellow collectors who want to preserve their films as well. They’ll also be in control of the quality, and able to upgrade and rescan if they need to.
It was really cool to hear about Perry’s @friolator new 70mm scanner AND the insane 6.5K upgrade in the GRD Scanstation! WOW. I don’t know Perry, but his reputation precedes him. I think they used to have a Northlight scanner at GRD if my memory serves? That would be a massive difference, how many seconds-per-frame was the Northlight?! I really love to hear about this kind of innovation, even if it is out of the hands of collectors directly - we’re still able to learn from it and I feel it helps to improve the collector-level equipment.
Welcome, @filmkeeper. We’re glad you’re here, especially with your knowledge of other systems and experience in electronics. Hobby level is all I have too and that has gotten me this far
My name is Moriel. My main interest in 16mm film (and Kinograph) lies with the fact that my late grandfather used to constantly film using this format. He was an avid film maker, working both professionally (filming medical instructional and educational films) and as a hobbyist. After he sadly passed away, he left us a very large collection of 16mm film reels (around 50 reels, all black and white with no sound, ranging from ~10 minutes all the way to ~50 minutes). He led an incredible life as a fighter pilot in the USSR during WW2 and as a film maker - a hobby that I tinkered with when I was younger as well.
Currently I am looking for a method to digitize all of his film reels at a high enough quality to honor his work. Sadly digitizing services are very expensive for this amount of footage (quotes range from $4.5k and upwards), so I’m now looking into a way of procuring a 16mm film digitizer. Sadly, all the ones I have found for sale are professional grade and are way too expensive - while building a DIY system based on Kinograph’s specs is unfeasible due to time and material constraints.
If anyone has knowledge of a high quality 16 mm scanner/digitizer that can be purchased for hobbyist use, I would love to discuss the possibility of purchasing it.
Please be aware that with your B&W film for best results you want to use a monochrome camera, not a colour scanner. So if hypothetically you had a colour Kinograph I would highly suggested buying a monochrome camera for B&W film, and likewise I’d advise against scanning commercially on a bayer-sensor scanner.
Whereabouts are you located? It’s possible that a film archive may be able to help you, especially if you have material that is in the public interest to be preserved digitally.
Thank you for your reply. I am from Israel. Most of the footage is family related, but there are some unknown films in the mix that had their labels damaged. I know there is footage of Yuri Gagarin in there playing volleyball with his wife that my grandfather filmed during a holiday, but other than that I doubt that there is something there that is of public interest.
We do have a 16mm film projector and we thought about filming directly from the lens. It won’t be as high of a quality as a frame-by-frame scanner, but considering the prohibitive pricing of scanners and commercial digitizing services, it seems quite appealing.
Welcome, @Mr_Muki! I hope Kinograph can help keep your grandfather’s films accessible for generations! We are hoping to have a prototype of version 2.0 ready by Spring of 2021, and kits for sale in Summer/Fall of 2021. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Hi! Thank you for your reply. This is very encouraging to hear! I assume you don’t have an estimated price point yet if the project is still in development though. On a side note - I’m a Mechanical Engineering student and I work on Solidworks. I have yet to acquire experience in real world CAD work, but if you need any help in the CAD aspect, I can do parts, assemblies and drawings as well.
You can build a functioning scanner from a projector. You just take out the light, replace it with a decent LED light and a diffusing cone like you can find in hobby stores (the commercial scanners probably get their diffusing cones 3D printed or something), a USB3 camera (monochrome!!) and a lens (the second-most expensive part), a hall-effect sensor and a magnet to trigger the camera to take a photo, and the most expensive part, a workstation PC so you can edit and encode your scans. You also need to mount the camera on a track so you can focus it precisely as these cameras have a shallow focus. All up maybe about $1500-2000 plus the cost of the PC if you’re buying a projector to use as the film transport. If you have colour film then you can either pulse the LED light C/M/Y to get a triple-flash scan but this will be much slower, or you can buy another USB3 camera. You are limited by the speed of USB3, or if you had a 6K camera with a faster connection to your computer somehow, then you’re limited by the speed of the SSD array. So keep that in mind. There’s no point in buying a 60fps 2K-USB3 camera if you can’t send the raw frames over USB3 at that speed.
One of the hardest parts will be getting the gate in focus, as projection is more forgiving, this is why an engineered polished steel film gate for a commercial scanner might cost $10K, because the job of the film gate for a scanner is to keep the film flat and at the correct focal distance. As an engineering student though I expect you’ll be able to solve this problem when you come across it with a gate modification engineered to keep the film at precisely the same distance from the camera.
Thank you very much for the reply! Really a treasure trove of information! I have considered this solution, but the information you provided really boosted the possibility of actually doing it. I saw another project similar to what you suggest on IEEE Spectrum using a jerry-rigged Raspberry Pi based solution which churned out really high quality digital frames. This would be a serious undertaking indeed. We are currently waiting on delivery on another 16mm projector of the same model we already have, so it might be a great chassis for experimentation for this idea.
I would love your help with CAD. Especially when it comes to assembly diagrams. I have no idea how to do that. Do you have any familiarity with Fusion360?
