Transferring Home Movies to Video
and Taking Microscope Images
Eumig Wien Type P8 8mm projector.
This classic projector with speed control was adapted for telecine work.
Three revolutions of the shutter shaft moves the film one frame. It has the
old spring belt to the takeup reel. The rubber belt from the motor/fan to the
shutter shaft has to be crossed over in order to run the film in reverse.
Baia Super 8 editor and Bolex dual splicer.
Movie film cleaner is hard to find. Calumet Photo still has Edwal's. It has
dry cleaning fluid perchlorethylene, which is best. Isopropyl alcohol works
fine as long as you have the reels far apart or go slow so that it will
evaporate before the film winds onto the takeup reel. Use "non-sterile" (not
individually wrapped) cloth gauze pads ("sponges"), never tissue.
The basic camera inside a Logitech C260 webcam.
Hot glue holds the lens in and focussed. Remove the hot glue and the lens.
A piece of microscope slide protects the chip. The camera must be plugged
into a USB 2.0 port.
The webcam mounted on the projector.
This is adjustable on three axes and rotation. The lens slides to focus.
The webcam mounted on a microscope.
The same camera can be used with StopMotionStation to take images and even
stop-motion animation of microscopic activity.
The three best of six lenses tested .
The Super-8 camera lens had too much spherical aberration. The Baia film
editor lens had no spherical aberration, but was an old design. A symmetrical
Voss 25 mm f3.5 enlarger lens worked best. Set f-stop to about f5.6 or f8.
A Plossl telescope eyepiece is also symmetrical, but they have no f-stops.
Complete configuration.
Five layers of fiberglass cloth are used to lower the 100-watt lamp's
brightness so as not to overheat the film when running at slow speed. The
Enter key is pressed twice every six rotations of the shutter shaft. In
Control Panel click on Keyboard and set both Repeat Rate and Repeat Delay
to 0. The keyboard must be in a USB 2.0 port. Do not use a PS2 keyboard.
The Harbor Freight speed control/dimmer.
These can be used to adjust lamp brightness and speed on some projectors.
One frame from a regular-8 movie.
This is about as good as a good regular-8 frame focussed on the (800 x 600)
webcam chip can get. A 16 mm frame could could go to full high-resolution.
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Transferring home movies to video properly requires several pieces of gear
that are becoming almost impossible to find. I have had a Bell and Howell
8 mm projector and a combination regular-8 and Super-8 splicer since the mid-
1970s. The Baia editor is mid-80s. By chance these have remained in perfect
condition. I recently bought a Eumig 8 mm projector and a 25 mm lens locally.
If you have a good projector that does not have variable speed, you may be
able to use a variable speed control made for routers. But when running too
slowly, many projectors have a system to avoid burning the film which will
have to be defeated. Telecine work will not burn the film, even if it stops.
Regular 8 mm film has 80 frames per foot. Measure a segment of the film,
such as the titles, or from the first frame to some obvious scene change, and
measure it. When you are setting up Stop Motion Station, check that the number
of movie frames and the number of frames captured match. Use your photo
software to view the individual images. Since the Eumig projector was erratic
at slow speed, we connected a gearmotor to the shutter shaft. The drive belt
from the motor/fan to the shutter shaft had to be removed.
Silent home movie speed is 16 or 18 frames per second. Set .AVI and .WMV
video to that rate. Standard NTSC is 30 frames per second. When Stop Motion
Station is set to NTSC (30 fps), it will double each frame.
The scenes you filmed were focussed by the camera lens onto the movie film
emulsion, which faces the lens, and the image is upside down. When you project
the movie, the projector lens focuses the emulsion image onto the screen and
turns it right-side-up. But if you were to focus the video camera onto the
emulsion instead of turning around to see the projected image on the screen,
the view in the camera would be upside down and mirror-image.
Regular-8 frame size is .130 in. x .177 in. Super-8 is .158 in. x .228 in.
Regular 8 mm movie film has a resolution of about 756 x 553 and most webcams
are 640 x 480. So get a webcam with higher resolution which will also fit onto
the projector properly. Shooting at 800 x 600 works well.
The Logitech C260 webcam is connected to a USB 2.0 port. All unnecessary
parts were removed and the LED was covered with black lacquer (nail polish).
Punch a hole in some double stick foam tape and secure a clean piece of
microscope slide over the camera chip housing to keep dust out. Do NOT install
the Logitech software! Let Windows find the camera and install its drivers.
The software used is normally used for claymation, where clay figures are
moved a tiny bit between frames and so appear to be alive when the movie runs.
"Stop-motion" is actually very-high-speed filming to slow down a bullet in
flight or a hummingbird's wings. This program is actually Time Lapse used to
show a flower blooming or a seed sprouting. For slow-motion, the film moves
through the camera very fast. So when projected, the action appears slower.
For speeded-up action, like early silent films, set the frame rate slower so
it will appear faster when projected.
Artwork animation (cartoon drawing) shows each frame twice.
Stop Motion Station 1.3 ($50) works well in Windows XP. F1 pulls up the
basic info. F2 brings up the working menu. Click on Shoot Movie. The Enter
key stores one video frame. Delete drops the last frame. The spacebar starts
the movie and also stops it. Set Camera and Path for 800 x 600. Set Camera
Options for unchanged, full, high and vertical. Set Other Options for play
once, 30, square, 15 and 1.
NOTE: Be SURE to have the Enter key UP when booting up or else the computer
will keep trying to start SMS 1.3 endlessly! The software is by Andrew
Jaremko, whose emailed assistance was crucial to overcoming some problems.
You can animate the titles for your movies and even do an original animated
movie from your own imagination and script. Just put the webcam lens back in
and focus on the title lettering or clay figures. Get creative and have fun.
SMS 1.3 saves the images as sequentially numbered .JPG files. After Stop
Motion Station puts the .JPGs in the Stop Motion folder, move them all out and
into their own folder for use by your video conversion software so that the
next movie can go into the Stop Motion folder. To move all frames, hold
Control down and then hit the A key. Right-click and select Cut. Go to the
folder where they are to be moved to, right-click on it and select Paste.
Burn all the film frames to a DVD-R for permanent storage.
To eliminate all the first frames that are the film leader and the film
trailer at the end, open the movie frames in My Computer, click on the drive
and the folder where the frames are stored. To select a contiguous string
of images, click on the first one, hold the Shift key down, then click on the
last image and they will all be highlighted. Now hit Delete. (If they do not
appear as thumbnails, go to View, then click on Thumbnails.)
Delete internal bad frames, such as splices, major scratches, spots, black
frames, etc. Then open the folder with the edited frames and use Stop Motion
Station to renumber them consecutively. (They must be numbered consecutively
or VirtualDubmod will stop at the first non-consecutive number!)
To use VirtualDubMod, click on the icon to bring up the program, then File,
Open Video File (the folder with the .JPG images), click on the first image in
the folder, now click on Open (see *), File, Save As (.AVI), Save In (down
arrow), click on your choice, File Name (type the title), Save.
(*) To change the frame rate, click on Video, Frame Rate, Change To 15, OK.
Then continue with the above steps.
To convert the .AVI video onto a DVD, WinAVI video converter ($30) works
well. Click on Options and set whatever DVD burner software you have that you
want it to use. The freeware program Shrink works well. Then click on the
DVD button to convert the .AVI to .DVD. Highlight the .AVI movie, Open,
highlight it, Output, directory, OK, Open files, Backup, OK.
Finally click on the Burn button, far left, to have your burner software
burn the DVD. Select Open Files and continue.
Stop Motion Station allows a maximum of 32,767 frames stored at one time.
That's 34 minutes of 16 FPS film. You can string several of those together if
your film is longer. You must have your computer in NTFS format, not FAT 32.