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Scanning Super 8mm Movie Film to Digital

posted 8 years ago by mikekuhlman-415-393642
9 replies | jump to latest

Anybody doing this themselves? If so, what do you use? I've been reading the $1,500 Reflecta scanner is one of the highest quality ways to do this, but it has a guide or pulley that goes right through the center of the film frame, putting a scratch right through the center of the picture area. Is there a home scanner, made by film leader Kodak or another company, that is gentler on the film?

I've been paying a company in Chandler, AZ called Video Conversion experts to do this. They use a $30,000+ scanner that can scan as high as 4K and it's sprocketless so very gently glides the film along on rollers. I've been having them scan my film at only 1080p, because, to my eyes, 1080p already mercilessly shows all the detail, including grain, that I remember seeing
in the film when it was projected.

Their scanner has an "auto color" feature which automatically adjusts for changes in brightness and color on the fly. It does a great job when the film was perfectly exposed and the color balance was set perfectly in the camera to begin with. However, sometimes I intentionally underexposed to make day seem night or did weird color effects, which their scanner attempts to compensate for when I don't want it to. This results in dark shots being way too bright revealing horrendous grain and colors looking flat or otherwise different than I remember them looking on projection. I want more shot-by-shot control.

With Super 8 seemingly making a comeback as a viable filmmaking alternative to digital HD, I thought maybe now the time has finally come for more home scanning products. Thanks in advance for any info.

[–] Speed_Daemon 8 years ago

That's one nice thing about scanning to large files: you can take as long as you need on correction. That's one thing that I liked about the project that used the flatbed scanner--it left most of the work for later. As long as you have more than enough aeral pixels and more than enough bits of dynamic range, you can fix everything in post. And as better algorithms come out, you can keep on improving the final product. What's more, since you're processing a digital master made at one point in time, things like color grading start from the same known quantity. The film will continue to degrade, but the DI master will the same forever.

The thing that caught my eye at Pro8 was the cameras. Now that I'm Albuquerque I'm looking at business opportunities. It's a popular place for both TV serials and movies, but there's no "1 stop shop" here like the old Victor Duncan was for Chicago. There's a guy who has a crane truck, and another who rents tripods...all piecemeal. I've been looking at Craigslist, and it looks like there are plenty of small budget productions here too. I was thinking about making my video gear available for rental, but I could see renting small format film cameras to all those UNM film school grads who, if they're lucky only work half the year as crew on a major production.