How do you capture old 8mm cine film without the flicker ?

Tommaso · Post by **Tommaso** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 2:11 pm

Hi,
Having bought VS9 and captured my home movie Hi8 tapes and VHS tapes with satisfactory results I am now trying to capture even older 8mm reel cine film. I am playing the film back onto a whitescreen, fairly close up, and recording on my Hi8 camera. Not being able to find any other way of getting the projector hooked up to anything modern.

My problem is that I get a flicker on the recording which gets faster or slower depending on where the playback speed is between 18fps and 24fps, but doesn't go away.

Is this a permanent restriction due to the conflicting speed of the cine projector and the Hi8, is there a clever solution or am I just doing something daft?

Any help or suggestions much appreciated !

Tommaso

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Mon Sep 05, 2005 2:50 pm

You are not doing something daft, in fact this is my current project and I am getting very good better than expected results.
I set everything up in my loft as this is the darkest pace in the house.
I mounted the projector on top of a tall cabinet, the projector on a tripod as close as possible to the projector. The screen about 5 feet away.

The projector did not have form of variable speed control and I was using a digital camcorder. I read somewhere amongst my research that an anologue camcorder ( hi-8 ) would in fact produce better results than a modern digital one. Apparantly the more modern machines detect the flicker more than an older hi-8. Having said that I was quite satisfied with the results from my digital camcorder.

The Main thing I had to do was try and turn of anything "automatic" on the camcorder and set it manualy (focus etc)

Then simply shoot your film into the camcorder. I am now using Video Studio to tidy everything up with adjustments to brightness, gamma etc.

Tommaso · Post by **Tommaso** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 5:51 am

Thanks, I took your advice and have managed to get my footage into VS9. The biggest difference was increasing the cine playback to max of 24fps. This reduced the visable flicker which I guess is because the camera must also be around 24fps, althogh it doesn't state in the manual. Downside is of course that footage recorded at 18fps now looks a bit like 1920's film with everything speeded up by a third. Still, that's better than the annoying flicker.

Thanks again for your help, much appreciated.

Tommaso

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Tue Sep 20, 2005 8:51 am

Tommaso wrote: Downside is of course that footage recorded at 18fps now looks a bit like 1920's film with everything speeded up by a third. Still, that's better than the annoying flicker.

Thanks again for your help, much appreciated.

Tommaso

Use the Playback Speed to control the speed of your video in VS 9

Trevor