OT: Super 8 and X

[Noah Kadner]

Film hasn’t gone away, many major motion pictures and TV shows are still being shot on it- for example Star Wars VII. So, not sure if you were being serious about restarting a trend but it’s not necessary if you were.

To scan Super 8 yourself you would need a motion picture film scanner. Scanning the negative directly in say a desktop scanner would result in a lot of registration problems- i.e. the frame would jump in every frame. And filming off the wall with another camera will look really cruddy.

The one you want is https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/cintel with the 8mm gate.

That said- buying a $30,000 scanner to scan 8mm film is probably not what you had in mind.

I would instead just suggest having a telecine house do the scanning for you.

Or to be honest shoot digitally and make it look like scratchy super 8. Lot more cost-effective. Tons of camera phone apps can also do this effect very convincingly as well for a lot less $$ to get visually nearly identical artifacts.

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training

[Bret Williams]

You could try the Logmar
https://www.wired.com/2014/07/logmar-super-8/

[Scott Thomas]

I’ve seen Super8 telecined to SD digital video. Had a neat grainy look.

There is an open-source method for scanning 8mm film that I believe is Linux based and uses a flatbed scanner.

Also there are other film scanning equipment like the FlashScan8.
https://www.flashscan8.us/

[Jeff Markgraf]

For DIY:
Retro-8 Professional. $2995 from https://www.moviestuff.tv/moviestuff_home.html
Company based in Texas.

Local transfer facilities:
https://www.texasmicrocine.com/HDTelecine.html
https://www.videopost.com/pages/contact.html

Transfer facility in Los Angeles:
https://www.yalefilmandvideo.com/filmprocessing8mm.php

Don’t know specifics about the equipment or the companies. VPT has been around a long time. So has Yale.

[Richard Herd]

These people are good too https://www.pro8mm.com/

[David Mathis]

Thanks to all the informative and quick responses, much appreciated. Richard, thanks for the link. I might purchase that Rhonda camera, looks interesting. Glad to see someone producing those cameras, hoping Super 16 cameras will be in production again, if not already. As much as I love my BMCC, film is a more appealing medium. Probably will shoot on film, edit in X then back to film with a digital copy as a backup plan, just in case. What would the workflow be with color grading? Would like to use Resolve but open to other options. Nucoda looks interesting but not sure if it runs natively under OS X, which might be a consideration. Again, much thanks for all the feedback!

[Joseph Owens]

Here’s another one: DIY with things you have around the house —
https://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/smozes/8mm.html

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Claude Lyneis]

I would do it outside, because doing it with cheap equipment results in poor results. I have used Video Conversion Experts out of Arizona and they have different levels of quality. They claim that the below conversion to 2k, you will be losing quality from the super-8. I don’t know what film and processing costs these days, but high quality conversion can be had for less than 50 cents/foot.

Of course if it is just for fun there is always projecting and filming, I have used that to sort through large quantities of unknown film to decide what is worth doing a quality transfer.