Super 8 cine film

[Darren Edwards]

Super8 is the latest codec to be supported? 😉

Seriously speaking, what’s so bad about the original rushes?

Darren.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Doug Helsby]

Darren

My kids do not have a cine 8 projector and so I thought it would be good for them to see their innocence by putting the film onto DVD.Now I have to convert .dat into mpeg for Pro to read. The disk that I originally burnt the cine onto by way of Pinnacle, which converts analogue to digital, saved them as .dat files to view through Nero.A simple task made more complicated again!!!!

Doug

[Darren Edwards]

How did you telecine the Super8 stock with Nero in the first instance?

D.

[Doug Helsby]

Darren
I do not understand telecine with Nero.I simply found the cleanest matte white card I had ,projected against it, whilst at the same time, videoing it with HD camcorder. The results were much better than I expected. I have started to edit in Pro and the evidence so far is that the camcorder has produced images on a par with the origional. I am looking to improve,(tweak) within Pro the quality if I can. As a newbie to Pro I have still to learn its capabilities.

Doug

[Mike Velte]

Try Auto Levels with a small amount of Smoothing.

[Darren Edwards]

Ah, okay. That’s not an uncommon practice. There’s
currently a big furor about the ‘WWII in HD’ doco series
because they up-rez’d a lot of library film by pointing
a Red One at a wall…
https://provideocoalition.com/index.php/shullfish/story/controversial_history_channel_wwii_in_hd_debate_the_truth/

Colour grading in Prem can be equally as sophisticated
as anything else out there.

If the footage is a bit murky, the first thing I’ll adjust
is pedestal. This raises the overall brightness/gamma
levels in a sympathetic manner whilst (hopefully) revealing
hidden details in the black areas. And vice versa if lowered.

Curves will crunch your levels whilst also increasing contrast.
Almost every tutorial here — or at places like
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/ — will have something
to say about curves adjustment, and how to do it. Go easy.

There’s a fantastic old-school method of sharpening imagery
in Photoshop, which up until CS3, was impossible to do with
video footage, but now that CS3+ versions of Photoshop support
video import, one can use the Photoshop filters on it.

*It derives from the days when Quark users wanted a way of
shrinking images whilst maintaining sharpness…

Import the video, duplicate the video layer, apply Filter/Other/High Pass
and select a Radius setting of around 0.5 (the higher the figure the
sharper the effect). After which layer blend the effected top
layer with Hard Light. Works great on still images, of course,
but for video footage in Photoshop you will need to do this
frame by frame. Prem’s sharpening filters are a bit clunky,
a bit low bit-rate, for me — but, any port in a storm.

To really go to work on your Super8 stuff, grab a copy of
Magic Bullet’s latest Looks suite plugin for Premiere. The user
interface is a joy to use.
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/products/all/magic-bullet-looks/

Alternatively, you can have my Super8 projector.

Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Darren.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Darren Edwards]

Never use Auto Levels for anything! It’s a horrible, horribly
unintelligent filter which hasn’t a clue what it’s doing
and will result in flickery footage. Very serious about this.

Darren.

youtube.com/darrenpce

[Doug Helsby]

Mike
Thank you I will give it a try.

doug

[Mike Velte]

I agree with Daren, Auto levels is bad for video, but for some strange reason it works well with video of film which flickers badly on its own and Levels makes it worse…try it…mikey likes it!

[Darren Edwards]

I didn’t mean any disrespect to Mike, of course – if he’s experienced positive results by applying Auto Levels to film captured via HDV camera, then go for it. However, my one and only time using it was applying it to music promo performance shot on a beach in Barcelona; the light remained the same throughout and its director wanted a crunched/saturated look, and Auto Levels seemingly did the trick, quickly. It was applied to all the live stuff, we awaited render and found it a waste of time. Whenever tentatively applied at a later date on other types of footage, the result was the same: flickery, unuseable garbage.

D.