Here at RHMG – HomeDVD we have developed a realtime video measurement and calibration software tool called MultiScopelite. A high performing yet low cost set of video software tools for the video professional. In the lab, the studio or in the field, getting your video right leaves no compromise.

Our video software tool set includes a built in vectorscope, a waveform monitor, a combined YUV/RGB parade scope, a high resolution histogram scope and an integrated video monitor calibrated for both SD and HD aspects and resolutions, all running together in real time.

The product supports many professional and consumer based video capture devices using PCI, PCIe USB or Ethernet connection interfaces. Products from BlackMagic Design Decklink, Avermedia, AJA and a whole lot more.

How realtime video is captured and analyzed

Having a lot of film to digitize before it deteriorates any further raises two choices to think about. One, getting the film transferred by a professional transfer facility or two, doing it yourself or DIY for short. Whether the choice is a Standard Definition (SD) or a High Definition (HD) transfer the concept is the same. The HD choice however will usually present a higher cost depending on the telecine method you choose.

So, what does going the DIY route mean? There are two main points to consider. First, researching the various telecine processes where you must figure out which method will work for you along with the related cost of that method. Secondly, investing the time necessary to learn and to develop a workflow process that gets the results you expect. You will have to learn the software tools and the hardware setups to get a good film transfer to work at all. There will be lots of experimentation.

But before all that happens you must first do a cost/benefit analysis before you spend a dime. That is, the cost of the telecine related hardware and the necessary software investment vs the cost of getting the transfer done by someone else represents your tipping point. You should have these figures already available as part of your research. Let’s assume your time for doing the actual transfer process is not included in your cost estimates. Do the differences in the numbers work for you? Is your time well spent on a project “go ahead”? Are you up to the task of the meaning of this project?

You may find your hard costs are way too high compared to getting the transfer outsourced and are faced with downscaling your expectations. Equally, you may break even or even save money. It all depends on what result you want out of the whole process and that will largely hinge on the telecine hard ware (scanner and camera) you are thinking about buying. There is very expensive telecine gear out there. You could rationalize that once the job is done you can always sell the equipment on Ebay and get a chunk of your cash back.

Made up your mind yet?

If you choose the cheapest real-time telecine method like shooting “off the wall”, you will certainly get your films digitized but don’t expect results that could have been had. Investment is simple and cheap: get a variable speed 8mm or 8mm/S8 combo projector from Ebay and a camcorder that has some form of digital out: for SD that would be Firewire and for HD; HDMI. Capture and processing software can be as simple as some freebees available on the web. You may want to try trial software where you would get a good bang for no bucks.

Expect output video to be cropped of up to 20% of the potential frame size just by the natural gate size restrictions in the projector. The video will be softer due to real-time frame blending going on. Additionally colors could be out and have slow rolling flicker if you didn’t get the speeds between the camera and the projector harmonically matched. Of course a biggie is to never freeze the projector playback in any way, as the hot bulb will destroy the unfortunate chunk of film that is stuck in the gate at that time. Using systems that use extra condensing lenses and mirrors in the optical path, will be slightly better, but the same issues of cropping and blending still exists.

Alternatively, you may choose a telecine method that gives very good results where investment in the necessary hardware and software could run you between $2,500 to $10,000, depending on where you put your nickels, the scanning device or the lens and camera and where you buy it, used or new.

Just as valid, it may very be that a project of this type does not have a consideration for cost at all as it does about learning and accepting a challenge.

“Boy oh boy a high end DSLR Nikon with a premium lens kit”.

You just can’t believe that you got this brand spankin’ new camera for less than half retail and just in time to record the vacation of your dreams to boot. The stars couldn’t have aligned better.

“The guy I bought it from just didn’t know what he was selling, his loss my gain. I should test the camera in more detail though. New batteries, check, a big capacity SD card, check, battery charger, check, take a few test shots, check.”

All is well with the world.

The camera sure was handy. You recorded great water skiing with those classy moves in tow, sky sailing, what a blast, and that wild coconut party. Some patrons should have stayed home though, but you just couldn’t help snap a few anyway.

Oh yeah, you can’t forget relaxing at the hot springs and that exhilarating horseback riding package you bought into and of course, your greatest joy, that just dropped onto your lap like manna from heaven, you meet one of your favourite musicians vacationing in the same spot as you and you shoot a few mug shots. The Gods must be looking down at you.

You just couldn’t wait to get home to sort out those many pictures and look at them again. You captured lots and lots of memories all frozen in those little digital bits. Those images will last forever.

You spent the time to properly compose the shot, in being a little artsy on the side, setting the right exposure, focus and picture resolution. Yes you were awesome. These are the best pictures you have ever taken and upon repeated reflection, reminded yourself that this camera was a great deal. You still can’t believe it.

You are home now and very anxious to unload the SD card on your computer. You empty the contents to a hard drive folder and run your favorite JPEG image viewer. You freeze, then look stunned at the output quality. “This really sucks”. The image looks really blocky. There’s got to be a problem with the software viewer or “heaven forbid” the SD card. The images looked so good on the camera LCD display. You double check the camera resolution setting, 12MPixel, yep, that should give awesome pictures. You collect your senses and you look at the image file size in the folder you just dumped expecting 10MB or so per picture, but you can’t believe only 192KB. All you got were postage stamp size pictures good only for viewing on a computer and that’s stretching the idea. It’s now hitting you like a ton of bricks that the camera was not such a good deal after all.

I know the above story is a bit lame, but it highlights a point. Recovering old memories from your personal films takes a special skill set, dedication and professional equipment. Like the camera of our imaginary guy, it did not fulfill the promise of great results even though it had all the hallmarks of quality.

Not all film transfer houses are created equal. Shopping based on price alone is a big mistake. Hidden fees, nickel and diming here and there, confusing pricing structure, poor quality DVD’s, poorly executed transfer processes and sub standard equipment all impact the final results of a film transfer.

Not all film transfer web sites report what they do clearly and how they do their transfers. When you call for more information, are you greeted with run around answers, difficult to understand pricing schemes, vague explanations of what you will get or bottom ended quotes that sound too good to be true, —all red flags in which to be wary.

Get your film transfer done right the first time. It’s your investment. There are so many transfer places out there giving you the false impression that pricing is all you have to consider in choosing your transfer facility.

If it’s not HomeDVD that does your project, there are several other very professional facilities out there that will also serve you well. Unfortunately, these shops are few that can claim to offer the right stuff. Price will vary widely, as does the quality of the end product. Just do your homework, look at the web site, does it invoke confidence, convenient shipping and payment methods, do they look secure, ask questions whether by phone or email and note the response. Does the response work for you?

So it’s worth repeating, price is not your only yardstick. In the end, what is your memories worth?

Add your comments here. To contribute, download my article here.

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Yes, there is a significant difference between these two concepts in terms of corrective processes and methods.

In a nutshell, film preservation has to do with the recovery of the physical film body itself, if possible.  Film frames that are very much degraded or heavily damaged are in the realm of those dedicated in attempting to get back those pieces of cinematic history as complete as possible.  Wide temperature variations, uncontrolled humidity and abuse are the main culprits to physical film damage.

For the most part many films made between the turn of the 20th century and surprisingly those well into the 1980′s are at high risk of being very compromised or lost forever.  The relentless effects of time, poor storage policies and environments (hot, humid, water damage, etc), lack of budgets for preservation activities and general industry neglect are all very large contributors to the complete loss of many old films.  Add to that the results of abuse, particularly when badly adjusted and maintained projection equipment is used coupled with  incorrect splicing technique and inferior cinematic repair and storage materials.

Alternatively, film restoration has more to do with the digital world, using digital signal processing techniques or  DSP for short.  Once films have been physically recovered to the point that they can be either digitally telecined by scanning or by projection, sophisticated image processing techniques can then be applied to further help recover and rejuvenate those at risk films.  Techniques like Dustbusting that removes dust, dirt and to some degree scratches from digitized film frames or by applying more aggressive and exotic digital ‘scrubbing’ algorithms that involve deeper image processing will take the film recovery process to the next level.

The images above is an example of a dustbusting cycle on a pretty rough 8mm film (believe me there is much worse).   Lots of dust, dirt with scratches.  I got a single frame from a film that is typical of the quality of the film strip itself.  I just used a single auto cycle of  dust and dirt filtering and a light setting for scratch removal.  You can see for yourself the bad stuff is removed without affecting the underlying image.   The film could use another scrub but you get the idea of what is possible.

Many digital image processing techniques used in film restoration take advantage in large part the image redundancy between film frames to recover missing information. Dirt impacts, lost image fragments for example are mainly single frame occurrences.  By analyzing within the film frames (spatial techniques) and/or by using before and after frames of the frame to repair (temporal techniques) many dust and dirt affected frames can be ‘cleaned’.

A film frame being recovered for example that has a big lump of dirt covering an image area, may have that same size image section uncorrupted and intact on the next frame or two.  The ‘good’ image section is isolated and cut out, then overlaid in the ‘bad frame’  and stitched so the edges can be smoothed out with little or no pixel distortions.  By taking advantage of slow inter frame content changes inherent in film sequences, most image fragments from other intact frames can be used for recovery without too much concern for fast movement from frame to frame.  In cases where there is fast movement frame to frame and the current filter setting is inadequate, would require other software functions within the resto toolkit to deal with these situations.  In turn, will affect changes in technician workflow to address the one of many corrective aspects of film restoration.

I  have several articles planned that will outline the filtering methods used by the many types of image processing algorithms, so check my blog often for new articles or just contact me for more information.

The industrial grade film restoration application space is not an overly occupied one.  You can count the number of these software vendors on your fingers.  Some are well known and well entrenched in the industry, yet others are relative new comers attempting to take a piece of the market pie in this narrow niche.  Did I say the tools are expensive?  The least expensive with a common set of filters costs $3000 and goes up from there.  Not your average pricing for the everyday Joe to buy into.  Packages range from software only to combined hardware/software systems bound together to yield the best efficiency and results.

Most old film regardless of its gauge, suffers from one or more effects of poor processing, bad handling and long term environmental stresses.  The larger 35mm to 70mm film sizes has and continues to have the benefit of professional restoration services due to the availability of industrial level financing driven by the urgency to preserve for historical reasons.  On the other hand the smaller amateur gauges like 8mm and Super 8 being a consumer gauge have been and are largely ignored.  Cost being the out of reach factor.

I have been looking into the software tools for professional film restoration and have compiled a list of these vendors along with some commentary.

The hardware platforms needed to run the software, even in its minimum system configuration is at the high performance end of the spectrum and thus will drive cost as well (in most cases the computer platforms cost more than the software).

Ok, so here they are:

Film Fix
A tool from Red Giant software.  Target users are consumer to semi-pro.  The product is discontinued.  It appears Red Giant is working on a revamped version with no indication of when it will be re-introduced.  It is a plug-in for After Effects v6 to CS3.  I tried this tool in CS3.  It’s clunky to use, but it does work quite well when it doesn’t crash.  Learning curve is so-so.  Render times are long.  Adobe and Red Giant offers render farm support, but I didn’t try it.  Introduced at about $2K about 5 years ago, but can be found on Ebay sometimes for $125.

Diamant by HS-ART
Based in Germany, these big boys have been around awhile.  They have three product lines, two just for dustbusting called Dustbuster (who could have guessed) and Dustbuster+.  The other called Diamant-File Restoration IV.  The latter has a sizeable set of restoration filters which can operate in automatic, semi-automatic and manual modes.  The tool is resolution independent (SD, HD, 2K and up and handle multiple bit depths) and works in Windows on moderate platforms.  Cost is unknown.  Offers free trial download for Dustbuster+ only.  Fully functional but cannot save your work.

Cinema Craft – ReNeat
Another big boy based in Japan, $50K for a typical system (software/hardware solution).  The associated US web site is better.  It looks like a limited number of filters.  Resolution support only to 2K.  Operates in Windows on a specially configured platform using their software to take advantage of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) computing techniques.  Let’s just say SIMD works very well for this type of computing.

PFClean
Another big boy, if price is any indication.  This product is distributed and supported by Pixelfarm in the UK.  It costs about $20K.  Has a powerful, but in my view a limited set of filters when compared to DaVinci Revival.  The claim to fame in support of the price I guess is the power of the algorithms in doing a superior job in defect removal.  Going to the forums however suggests otherwise.

Davinci Revival
Black Magic Design bought this long known venerable brand.  It comes in two flavours, one for about $1.5K, is limited to manual operation and has only one filter, Dustbusting.  The pro version is about $10K and has a lot more filters and offers automation.  Only MAC and Linux support.  If you want the Linux version it must be bundled with a custom configured hardware Linux box, (did I say the cost just went up?).  The turnkey hardware systems are sold by Film Systems which really drives the cost up beyond the advertized software only sticker price.  You can’t buy just the Linux version software from Black Magic.  The MAC version is sold as software only by Black Magic Design and FilmSys.  Marketing blurb looks glossy.

Fdshows Resto
Pricing on this product looks really promising for the many useful filters it offers, about $3K to $5K depending on frame resolution.  But their web site is way short on information and no one seems to be home when contacting them.  No blogs or forums, yields much info on these guys.  I wonder how they intend to sell this product without basic support!!  Laying out 5 grand for a piece software without any key information to make a confident decision is just plain dumb.

AVISynth
Open source software with many plugins, though have limited set of restoration filters.  Have to use a script to integrate filters of your choice.  No biggie, easy to learn.  Most of all it’s free.  Great for command line programming if you like that approach, but can also be integrated into GUI type interfaces for more intuitive operation.

VirtualDub
Another open source software with many plugins.  This product also has a limited set of filters available.  Again, you have to use a script to integrate them for use.  It’s also free.

MTI Correct DRS
From the web site, it looks like they have been around awhile.  It appears they have a good number of robust filters available for restoration and accepts up to 4K image sizes.  No indication that the software must be tied to some recommended hard ware platform.  Of course claim to fame is they are the best.  The web site is not very clear on the operating system(s) it supports either.  Overall from an information point of view, the web site needs more detailed content to make an informed evaluation of the product.  Cost was about $20K reduced to about $12K.

MSU Modules
Moscow State University has developed and offers a great number of image processing modules. Many are compatible as plugins for AVISynth and VirtualDub.  Require a licence agreement if commercial end use.  Many filters are free for the individual experimenter.  Some of the more fancy filters require MSU approval for use.  Cost between Free and license $$

Stoik Imaging
This company has some powerful yet low cost image processing solutions.  The product in question is the Stoik Video Converter Pro, a stand alone application for Windows.   Buried within this tool are some useful and effective filters.  Denoising, scratch removal and rudimentary dustbusting.  I do have a beef with some annoying aspects to the user interface, but this tool offers a lot of functionality and is very reasonable in price, just $29, yes just $29 bucks.  There is no HD support, other than an up-scaling feature.

Neat Video
From Neat Video.  Not really a film restore product, more like video de-noiser, but does bang up job on noisy video.  A Premiere Pro plugin, supporting versions 1.0 through CS5, 32bit or 64bit (ok, also supports Final Cut, Pinnacle, SONY Vegas, Virtualdub and OpenFx).  Supports SD and HD size files.  A very nice and effective denoising and smoothing tool for many formats of video.  I tried it out with stunning results.  You do need to tweek settings for best outcome to eliminate the effects of motion compensation.  Just drop the filter on your video loaded timeline and go.  To access the full filter set and its controls a little button is available (not overly obvious) and takes a little investigation to find out where it is.  Read the Help notes dummy.  Render times are about 1.5x to 3x normal.  The product is very easy to use.  Cost is just $49US.

Magic Bullet Denoiser
Another piece of software from Red Giant Software – they got some neat tools, you should check them out.  The cleanup tool features lots of flexibility in dramatically reducing video noise particularly in the image shadows and mid-tones as per its claim to fame.  The tool is a plug in for Adobe After Effects CS3 through CS5.  For what you get, $99 is a great deal.  Supports both Windows and MAC machines.

If there are more film and video filters out there not mentioned here please let me know, I’ll add them to the list , credit your name and post them with some comment if applicable.

As a B2C business owner in the home movie transfer business, I’m always looking for ways to improve and add to my services for my customers.  Where are things trending?   What’s next for the industry to stay relevant?

From my point of view, the next stage in services evolution is Film Restoration, which has long been available at the B2B industrial level but is considered too expensive for Joe (sorry, and Mary) consumer.  I’m referring to a complementary service where amateur family films are truly restored to its original unblemished state (or as close to…), like that seen on the day the little yellow boxes came back from the film processor.  Has the time come for true film restoration? I think it’s getting close as there are a few daring souls who do offer restore services at challenging prices like $0.60 to $1.00/ft of film.

Right now most B2C film restoration services is limited to two activities, one, physically cleaning and repairing the film and two, digitally applying colour correction and reducing video noise.  Any attention to the removal of other visual anomalies like dust, dirt and scratches is virtually non-existent.

In the B2B realm, there are companies that have been around for some time offering expertise in restoring old 16mm, 35mm and 70mm cinematic films.  Those restoration projects could run into the six figures and thus the equipment and expertise needed to get exceptional results are equally expensive.  This level of service and sophistication however, has long been a deal breaker for the consumer just due to cost.

Just suppose, if true film restoration services were to be made available to the B2C market, what price point would be palatable to that customer base?  The software tools are still expensive and the computers to run the specialized software must also be high performers, as those number crunching machines at the industrial level.  Sure, there are free to low cost options available to consider like plugins for AVISynth and VirtualDub,  but those have limitations.

Looking into the suppliers of film restoration software and their offerings, it is apparent the market is quite specialized and narrow just by counting the few numbers in the business is a strong indicator.  The very nichy nature of these software products screams high prices, which in turn could translate to big bucks for the consumer.

Most industrial level film restoration software vendors offer a standard set or sub-set of filters in their product lines to ‘clean’ old films.  Other more sophisticated filters are available in the form of add-ons or are made part of their ‘Pro’ advanced packages.

So what are we talking about when it comes to ‘cleaning’ films?  Here is a rundown of the most common cleaners or what’s commonly called ‘filters’:

Dustbusting and Dirt Removal
Those annoying little spots of dust randomly placed on the video frame.  Can be light or dark shaded.  Dust attraction perhaps due to effects of static electricity during film cleaning phase or in some cases buried in the film itself during recording time.  Dirt is usually attached to a single frame containing a transient gob of dirt.  Equally, the dirt can change shape and be spread over several frames and move frame to frame.

Hairs
Can be any length, creep in from any side of the frame, come and go as it pleases.  An annoying effect of poor film cleaning or static attracting airbourne ‘stuff’ or it is part of the film itself when it was first recorded.

Scratches
They are usually vertical, can run for many frames, jiggle frame to frame, be thin or thick in width, be light in nature or be very numerous in density, a toughy to remove.  After ‘removal’, may leave a slight residual track as to where the scratch was depending on the removal and reconstruction power of the algorithm.  Regardless, a big step in improving the digitized film’s visual presence.

There is a real-time process during telecine called Wet Gate which does a decent job in eliminating light scratches. A special liquid is squeegied over the film at the gate and fills in the scratch/gap in the emulsion providing a temporary fix as the film frames are captured.  The liquid dries up before it gets to the take up reel.

Blotches and Stains
Odd shaped objects or splatters on the film frame surface which can have various degrees of opaqueness and size.  May reside on single or multiple frames, change shape and opacity.  They typically are by-products or the effects of mould and other ‘crap’.

Degrain, denoise
Sometimes this term is a little confusing in its definition and understanding.  Once a film frame is digitized it carries with it the level of grain in the film body itself.  It is a property of the film.   Assuming no other sampling or compression mixing products acts on the ‘graininess’ nature during digitization and there is no video noise introduced, then what you see is true a representation of the film grain.  But from a digital point of view it is still seen as noise, but a distinctive noise and as such can be characterized and filtered.  Results of reducing the ‘noise’ can range from the subtle to the surreal.  Settings here are important.

Burned frames
You’ve seen ‘em. These are frames of film that have been partially or completely destroyed when the film has stalled too long in front of a hot projector lamp.  Destroyed film frames still represents time periods, so just cutting them out is not a proper solution, though is done as a quick fix (not good if there is an associated sound track).  Dead frames can be recovered by looking at frames before and after the affected frame(s) and applying some form of averaging filter to reconstruct the bad frame or frames in question or by just doing a simple frame copy of an adjacent frame.

Mould
Mould occurs when the film stock has been subjected to long term temperature/humidity cycling which introduces bacteria within the film emulsion.  It is manifested in many forms but the most common is a snow flake look.  The film, usually in long stretches, have many snow flakes of differing sizes and opacities within the frame.  It is tough to remove.

Image parts missing and tears
Another tough aspect to repair, where part or parts of a film frame is ripped or missing.  The filter will attempt to rebuild the affected frame with whatever information that it has to work with.  This type of filter will use techniques involving both spatial and temporal information processing.  Very sophisticated.

Image stability
Whether due to bad operator motion at the time of recording or frame jumping due to a mechanically defective camera, stretched/stripped sprockets, this defect when repaired makes for a smoother playback experience.

Image Brightness Flicker
This is an effect where film sequences change in brightness levels during playback usually in a quick cyclic fashion.  The look is due to fading in the emulsion or the color dyes from environmental factors.

Sure there are more filters to consider like, dead pixel repair, de-warping, registration errors and others, but in many cases not critical in a successful small gauge defect repair.  The lions share of 8mm or Super8 film restoration projects undergoing just dustbusting, scratch and hair removal with degrain\denoise filters for good measure will vastly improve the look of visually problematic amateur films.

So, is it time true film restoration services are made available to the consumer market even when the service price still weighs in as a heavy consideration?  On the surface it’s early to tell but things appear to be changing.  To offer a pretty good film restoration service a minimal investment of at least $10K to $25K must be considered for a turn key off the shelf solution, -not including learning curve costs.  So depending on the goals, ambitions, cost/benefit and risks laid out in one’s marketing plan, that entrepreneur could be among those early pioneers to offer this service and break some new ground for the slower to adapt competition to follow.

HomeDVD has gone ahead again to check out the competition on the quality of an HD film transfer for small gauge movie film, with some surprisingly good results.

A standard 3″ reel of  color 8mm film was assembled that exhibited a range of  transfer system challenges.  The film was old and was quite grainy making image sharpness tough to discern on some scenes.  The test film reel had a mix of dark, very dark, nicely exposed, clear and high contrast scenes.

The claim that an HD film transfer for home movies will take full advantage of the supposed high end properties of film like notions of realizing its high dynamic range and the capture of details better than the film grain is not strikingly obvious.  One could conclude then that the role of an HD film conversion is to really provide a superior transfer than that of SD to bring out the the best the film can offer which at times is not always the case for a lot of the common 8mm film out there.

Yes there is fine grain industrial type Velvia film stock, (and others) that may provide a higher test standard to really exercise an HD telecine system, but represents such a low volume of film when compared to  the overwhelming abundance of the cheaper Kodak Ecta and Kodachrome product out there.  Ok, that’s my opinion, see my last post on this issue.

I picked out 4 competitive vendors (plus HomeDVD) who offer HD film transfer services and have page one standing in Google and Yahoo SERP using at least five of the most used keyword phrases to find these businesses.  They represent a mix of Canadian and US vendors.  These service vendors are the following:

• HomeDVD – but of course
• Debenham Media or MyMovieTransfer
• Videoconversionexperts
• Film2HD
• Digital Transfer Systems

Each of these film transfer service providers have a claim to fame in terms of the systems and processes they use.  The range is from high end film scanners to simple frame by frame telecine systems.  I’ll make comments on each submission as they are presented.  The results shown will be untouched – ie: not Photoshopped,  and be presented as I got them, including the HomeDVD submission.

I am in the process now of assembling the reference shots using a 12MP Nikon camera.  So this post is an ongoing work in progress.

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Vendor                                                       Claim to fame

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Comparison Tests

• Detail
• Texture
• Contrast
• Shadows
• Crop/framing

<Put pix here>

Preliminary conclusion

Right now, when comparing the various results, there is not much difference between each the vendors work (you can see this yourself once results are posted).  I think another go around in evaluation might be a consideration using much higher grade unblemished film stock.  The results of that exercise may show the performance differences between telecine systems.  Equally, it may also mean a hill of beans when the bulk of the film stock out there can’t take advantage of the depth of telecine that is possible anyway.

The fact is that that old 8mm and Super 8 mm film (and yes even some 16mm) is not all that it is cracked up to be in terms of its supposedly inherent super properties.  There is lots of talk in the forums, other discussion groups and blogs about how 8mm film has great resolution and high dynamic range. I say phooey!!

Yes there is film stock like Fuji’s Velvia line and Kodak EKTAR 100 that exhibits great colour saturation, exceptional contrast and of course fine grain properties, but as for the rest (if not bulk) of the consumer grade film stock, it really begs the question, where did these notions come from?  Eight mm film even in its untarnished state does not exhibit high resolution and does not have a high dynamic range as one is lead to believe.  I touched on this on another post in this blog.

Lets break this down.  The resolution of this size of film gauge (even though the same film stock could be used in the higher gauges like 16mm and above), is really measured by its finest level of grain.  When measured in terms of line pairs per millimeter, the standard metric, 8mm at best is claimed to be better than 80lpm to 100lpm, for a resolution of about 700 to around 900 horizontal lines. When captured using a DV AVI system in standard definition, the maximum line resolution is 550 lines for DV.  So yes there will be image decimation. An HD system in 1080p will do more than capture the finest details in this case.

ref:  8mm film frame =  4.5mm x 3.3mm;     Super 8 film frame  = 5.8mm x 4mm

In practice however and in many cases, the line pair count is inherently in the 30-50lpm range despite the poor quality of the film itself adding to the deficit.  Films in this category will just meet the sampling range of SD DV – just good enough.  Will HD digitizing do a better job, sure, but why?  The film quality is poor and the dynamic range is low, which gets me to the next overblown property of small gauge film, dynamic range.

What is dynamic range?  Not to be confused with contrast ratio which is the ratio of the darkest to the brightest elements in an image, all without crushing and clipping respectively quoted in db.  Dynamic range is more subtle.  It is the measure of how well an image sensor can discriminate  shades in an image being digitized at the smallest quantized bit level – from the noise floor to maximum white.  Higher ratios suggest the capture and reconstruction of an image with all of its finest details intact and maintaining all the shades in between.  High pixel quantization levels can achieve this assuming the image depth within the film frame is there to capture; 8mm doesn’t have it.  Ratios like 60db or more are quoted at times.  A ratio of 60db, says a telecine system can resolve up to 1000 pixel shade differences.

A high dynamic range of 60db can be comfortably attained for a photo using 12 bits of pixel quantization, but not video from 8mm telecine.  Standard SD  and HD video uses 8 bits per pixel, for a maximum of 48db+ or 256 levels of shading (assuming a gamma of 1).  If this full range can be attained the video will look pretty damn good, but not 60db worth. In many cases small gauge film stocks offer mainly flat and washed images, dramatically reducing a high quality experience where even the performance boundaries of an average frame by frame telecine system are not stressed.  There is no discussion yet on the effects of gamma adjustment on dynamic range.  Another blog comment.

Professional telecine systems for 35mm cinematic films can get 12 bit pixel accuracy and be tweeked for 60db performance, but don’t count on it for 8mm films.  Bottom line, in many instances, 8mm film transfer using an SD frame by frame scanning will provide for quite good results and save money to boot.

Having a telecine system with 12bpp capability, incorporating high end mega pixel lenses and 2K-4k resolution imagers for 16mm and larger film gauges coupled with film restoration techniques applied like dustbusting and scratch removal is quite another discussion.