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Preserving Very Old Memories

By: Brien M. Posey

 Reprinted With Permission From

A few weeks ago, I was helping my grandmother to clean out her basement when we stumbled onto a large box of old home movies. The movies were on 8 mm film and ranged in dates from 1963 on up to the time of my grandfather’s death in 1983. After my grandfather passed away, the movies were put in the basement and soon forgotten about because no one in the family knew how to work the projector (I was only ten years old in 1983). To make a long story short, after going through the box of films, I realized that the films contained memories that I would love to preserve forever. I immediately began getting excited because of all of the possible things that I could do with the old films. Maybe I could put them on DVD, or possibly extract some still images from the film. As the excitement began to build, I had no idea what I was in store for. Working with old film presents some truly unique challenges that you never have to deal with when working with magnetic or optical media. In this article, I’ll explain the difficulties that I encountered and how I overcame them.. I’ll also share with you some of the techniques that I used to restore and preserve the films.

 Issues Involved In Working With Old Film

 Any time that you set out to restore old film, there are some serious issues that you need to consider before you begin. The first issue that you must consider is the condition of the film itself. Over time, film tends to lose its color. As the images fade, the film also tends to become brittle. In my particular case, I got lucky because the film had been stored in a cool, dry basement completely hidden from damaging sunlight. Even so, the film had to be handled with care.

 The best advise that I can give you when working with very old film is to handle the film as little as possible. The less that you handle the film, the less chance that the film will break or crumble to dust. I also recommend that any time that you handle film, you wear latex gloves so as to avoid getting skin oils on the film. Any time that you touch the film with your bare hands, you leave fingerprints on the film.

 Under normal circumstances, a fingerprint on an image is annoying, but isn’t the end of the world. The problem with getting a fingerprint on 8 mm film is that the images on the film are extremely small, almost microscopic. This means that a single fingerprint could easily span ten frames of film. When viewed through a projector, this single finger print would likely appear as a blur that lasts for a second or two. You can get an idea of how small the images on an 8 mm film really are by looking at Figure A. Although you can make out the individual images on the film in the figure, it’s important to remember that the film is only 8 mm wide. You’ll also notice that half of the film’s width is consumed by a series of holes that are used by the projector’s tractor feet. This means that each image on the film is only about 4 mm wide, or about the width of the tip of a ball point pen.

 Figure A

The images on an 8 mm film are extremely small.

 The next concern that you must contend with when dealing with film is that the film must be played through a projector. Unfortunately, in this day and age, 8 mm projectors are a little hard to come by. There are Web sites such as http://www.pardeescameras.com/projectors.html that sell vintage projectors, but some old projectors can cost as much as 600 dollars. Additionally, if you were to purchase a projector, you must know if your films are standard 8mm or super 8 mm. Projectors exist that play both formats, but these projectors tend not to have the playback quality of a machine that’s dedicated to a specific film format. Additionally, dual format projectors tend to be hard on standard 8mm film, because standard 8 mm film is designed to use tractor feeds for pulling the film through the projectors. Dual format projectors use rollers rather than using tractor feeds.

 In my case, I was lucky enough to find a couple of projectors in my grandmother’s basement. However, locating a projector is only half of the battle. The film reels on an old 8 mm projector are belt driven. On one of the two projectors, a belt had dry rotted, and the projector was therefore useless.

 Another consideration is the projector’s light bulb. As you can see in Figure B, the projector uses an old fashion light bulb that would be very difficult to find a replacement for. Therefore, the trick is to make the light bulb last long enough to copy the film to video. Most of the time, if a light bulb is going to burn out, the burn out will happen when the bulb is first turned on. Therefore, if you leave the light bulb on the entire time that you are transferring the film, you’ll minimize your chances of having the light bulb go out on you. If you do happen to have a belt break or a light bulb burn out, you might be able to locate a replacement at http://www.pardeescameras.com/projectors.html or elsewhere on the Internet.

 Figure B

Old 8 mm projectors don’t use modern light bulbs.

Transferring The Film

Regardless of what you may eventually plan on doing with the content from the film, your first goal must be to transfer the film’s contents to a more stable media format. Initially, I decided to transfer the film to digital 8 video tape. I chose the digital 8 format because of its high resolution, and because its easy to import a digital video tape into a computer for the eventual creation of a DVD.

Since a film projector doesn’t have any video out jacks, I had to project the image from the film, and then use my digital camcorder to record the movie as it was being played. While this technique sounded simple enough, I ran into a couple of unexpected obstacles.

Initially, I projected the movie onto an empty wall, and set my camcorder on a tripod ready to record the movie as it played. Everything seemed to go well as I recorded the first film, but when I played back the video tape, the quality wasn’t very good. The images on the video tape were dark, but had bright pulses of light every few seconds. I assumed that the problem was related to my cameras exposure settings, and began making the necessary adjustments. Although I was able to lighten the image, it didn’t solve my problem. In fact, it created a new problem. The images on the tape now appeared washed out and still had the pulses of light.

As I thought about the washed out images and experimented with the projector, I realized that the projector’s light bulb has a limited amount of light that it’s capable of releasing. The further that the projector is from the screen (or in my case, the wall), the more spread out the light is and therefore, the lighter the image will be. With this in mind, I scooted the projector a few inches from the wall. The image looked great, but at this close range, the movie appeared small and was difficult to video tape.

To solve the problem, I acquired a video transfer kit. The idea behind the video transfer kit is that you can project the movie onto a three inch screen on the side of a black plastic box. Mirrors inside the box then send the image to a port that’s designed for your video camera . You can see what the setup looks like in Figure C.

Figure C

The video transfer box allows you to video tape film based home movies.

At first the process seemed easy. I focused the projector on the tiny screen and setup my video camera to tape the movie. However, when I played back the video tape, the images on the tape were out of focus and the pulses of light were still present. I decided to put my eye up to the video port to see what the camcorder sees while the movie was playing. Sure enough, while the movie appeared focused on the screen, it was out of focus by the time it got to the video camera’s optics. I corrected the problem by adjusting the focus on the projector. As you can see in Figure D, this meant that the image displayed on the transfer kit’s screen was now out of focus. This meant that I had to use the video camera’s LCD screen to watch the movie as I transferred it and to make any necessary focus corrections along the way.

Figure D

You must project the movie out of focus on the screen to get the movie to be in focus on the video tape.

Now, when I previewed the video tape, the images were focused, but the pulses of light were still present. That’s when it hit me; a digital video camera and a projector are two totally different and incompatible machines. As you probably know, a film strip contains a series of images. To display these images, a projector shows an image and then covers the lens as the film strip moves to the next image. When the next image is in position, the lens opens thus revealing the image for a split second.  The entire process works so quickly that the human eye can’t detect the opening and closing of the lens, however, the fact is that the projector is constantly switching between displaying an image and displaying nothing at all. The clicking sound that you hear when you run a projector is the sound of the lens opening and closing.

Now, consider the way that a digital video camera works. Digital video cameras typically create movies in the MPEG-2 format. In order to conserve space on a storage medium such as a video tape or a DVD, and to save bandwidth when an MPEG file is transmitted, the MPEG file format was designed to conserve as much space as possible. Like a film strip, a digital video tape contains a series of images. To save space, most of the images are incomplete. Rather than saving an entire image, each frame simply includes data for the pixels that have changed since the previous frame. Therefore, if two frames are very similar, then very little storage space is used for the second frame.

So what does this have to do with the pulses of light. The digital video camera is fast enough to record the opening and closing of the projector’s lens. Because of the way that the images are stored on the tape, the opening and closing of the lens is very pronounced when the tape is played back. To get around the problem, I switched from using a digital camcorder to using an analog camcorder with the Hi-8 tape format. This solved all of my problems.

Although I was disappointed with having to use Hi-8 tape, I was eventually able to import the tape into my computer via a firewire link to a digital camcorder. Once the videos were in the computer, I was later able to fulfill my desire of turning my grandmother’s old home movies into a DVD.

Scanning Film

In addition to transferring my movies to video tape, I also experimented with scanning the images directly off of the film. I had two different reasons for doing this. First, I had hoped to be able to make some high quality stills directly off of the original film. Second, I had hoped to be able to scan in every single frame of a favorite reel of film and digitally enhance each frame. I had then intended to use a video editing program to reassemble the individual frames into an AVI file, resulting in a digitally restored movie.

By far the most difficult part of scanning film is the size of the images on the film. To scan the film, I had to use a prism that’s intended for scanning 35 mm slides. The prism works by using mirrors to focus light from the scanner into a concentrated area. The concentrated light is passed through the slide (or film in this case) illuminating it so that it can be scanned. You can see what the prism looks like in Figure E.

Figure E

A prism relies on a series of mirrors to pass concentrated light through the film.

The scanning process requires you to position the prism sideways on the scanner and pass the film beneath it, as shown in Figure F. The toughest part of this process is keeping the film straight. However, it’s been my experience that closing the scanner lid puts some weight on the prism and helps to hold the film still.

Figure F

The film is passed between the prism and the scanner glass.

You might have noticed in the figure that the prism has a small notch in it near the scanner glass. This notch is the area that’s normally used for 35 mm slides. Only film that’s beneath this portion of the prism can be scanned. You can see in Figure G, how much better illuminated the film is beneath this part of the prism.

Figure G

Only a portion of the area beneath the prism can be used for scanning.

Earlier I mentioned that the most difficult part of scanning film was the film’s size. Figure H shows a strip of film that I scanned beneath the prism. Notice in the figure that there are about 14 usable frames of film. These 14 frames consume only about 1.75 inches of film. Because of the tiny size of the images, the frames must be scanned in at a minimum resolution of 4800 DPI to achieve adequate results.

Figure H

These 14 frames consume less then two inches of film.

 The required resolution creates some interesting problems. First is disk space. The images shown in Figure H occupy almost 6 MB of disk space, even though they represent less than two inches of film. When you consider that some 8 mm films are 400 feet long, you can see how quickly your hard disk could fill up. Scanning 400 feet of film at 4800 DPI resolution would require roughly 14.4 GB of disk space.

The other problem that you run into is that scanning at such a high resolution reveals a lot of microscopic defects in both the film and in your scanner’s glass. Figure I shows what a 4800 DPI scan of the film really looks like. As you can see by the figure, it is possible to digitally extract still images from the film, but be prepared to spend some time using Photoshop or a similar product to do some clean up work. As you can see, my idea of digitally enhancing every single frame of film is too much work for all but the most dedicated individual when you consider that a 400 foot film strip would contain roughly 38,400 individual images, each of which would have to be painstakingly scanned, touched up, and then reassembled.

Figure I

Scanning a frame of film reveals a lot of microscopic defects, which must be digitally removed.

In the end, I found that although digitally restoring a film frame by frame was impractical, making single still images from the film was a lot of work, but is feasible.  The toughest part of the process is locating the frames that you want to use. I accomplished this by playing the film until I came to the part that I wanted to capture. I then removed the film from the projector without rewinding it, and used a magnifying glass to locate the strip of film that I wanted to scan.

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