Our Telecine Machine- Success!

[Sean Dungan]

Thanks to Dominique's excellent application, guidelines & instructions (not to mention his generous help!), based on Joe's original machine recipe, and with help from nice people in this Group, we now have a working telecine machine and are capturing film. It's been a long spare-time road, with a lot of detours and steep learning curves, but we got here!

It's based on a Sankyo Dualux 1000, Pi 3 B+, Pi cam v1 w/ C lens mount, and a TB6600 motor driver. We are running the TelecineApplication on an old PC, and the Pi and PC are connected through a gigabit switch. The results are excellent and I'll add an example clip to this soon. In the meantime, here's the machine:

https://youtu.be/SrZaFDOozaA

[Nathan Miller]

The raw footage looks great. About as sharp as I've been able to get regular 8mm. Now the real fun begins - the plunge down the deep dark rabbit hole known as Avisynth. https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=144271

[Sean Dungan]

Thanks! For us, the sharpness and overall image quality is incredibly good straight out of the machine, using the Mertens merge function. 

For what it might be worth, I've decided to detour around Avisynth; I've done post on the first few reels in the free verison of Davinci Resolve on a Mac. It was far easier for me to figure out the basics of that program- avoided having to learn how to use Avisynth, which is probably pretty easy to figure out, but was initially bewildering for me. These days I feel I have to really prioritize time. It looks like there are some excellent restoration scripts available though!

[Dominique Galland]

it seems that the free version of Da Vinci does not include denoise.
It is however important for a good restoration.

Note however that the GUI interface of a professional product like Da Vinci is not simple!

[Dominique Galland]

@Nathan

Hello Nathan,

I see that you have digitized many films, probably with Joe's project.

My project uses the same hardware but I rewrote all of the software.

I will be interested in some aspect of your assembly, in particular

For optics do you use Joe's solution, an additional close-up lens in front of the stock lens, or a non-stock lens like me

Joe's documentation is not very explicit on this subject (focals, distances, ...)

It would be nice if in the group of my project you could share your experience

Best regards, Dominique

[Sean Dungan]

Here's a clip straight out of the machine, with no post applied:

https://vimeo.com/406916941

[Peter Bonney]

Hi all. Thanks to everyone for posting such valuable information. It has been very useful as I slowly work my way through my build. A quick question....how much of the sensor have you managed to fill with image? I'm currently getting about 60%, do you think this is enough? I'm using a pi camera v1 with a m12 lens, this makes it very close to the film gate. I'm thinking of changing the optics. What do you reckon?

[Dominique Galland]

What is the focal length of your lens?

Yes we can capture with 60% of the sensor by defining a ROI.

You can see a post "Optics" in the group of my project

https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!forum/yart

Dominique