Interesting how the sprocket “dances” in the daVinci-stabilized image. While the vertical border stays quite stable, the horizontal sprocket position moves quite a bit. Is that clip something directly out of a camera or a commercial copy (via a printer or so) of some footage?
Hi ! Yes the film is directly out of my camera who suffer of some jitter, that’s really visible when nothing is moving like in this example, so I’ve stabilized on the sprocket hole first, and then on a point in the image. Not a big deal when I’m moving with the camera, but when it’s a fixed shot like here it can be disturbing !
Here is the footage with only sprocket stab:
2 Likes
Very interesting! It shows a general challenge with Super-8 material: the cameras are not really good in aliging the frame during exposure. One can notice also a slight jitter visible in the black stripe visible between the frames. This is something I have found in every Super-8 footage I have seen so far.
There is some talk that this is caused by ignoring the standard, which defines a two-frame offset between sprocket and frame and irregular sprocket holes, and using the sprocket right beside the scanned film for registration. Slight variations of the sprocket position in the original film would cause some jitter than.
Well, I cannot confirm this. Here’s an extreme example recorded with my own camera (a Chinon-based brand):
Evidently, the sprockets were perfectly punched into the film, however, the camera just didn’t care… 
Clearly, this vertical movement my camera is entertaining is more dangerous than the horizontal movement you are seeing - frames start to overlap easily with vertical aligment errors and there is no way to recover.
The above film strip was actually part of a little research project of mine where I looked into the feasibilty of combining sinlge frame scans into a continous film strip (that’s how the above filmstrip was created). One question I asked myself was whether the two-frame sprocket/frame-distance would make any noticable difference compared to just using the sprocket hole closest to the film frame. The answer seems to be: it does not make any difference, as the sprocket holes (at least with the material I have tested) are punched quite precisely into the film stock.
So thanks for this nice demonstration, it basically supports results of my tests: it’s perfectly fine to use the sprocket hole right beside the film frame for registering the frames (sprocket-registration). Imperfections of the camera and film require however to use occationally the film footage itself (frame-registration).
2 Likes