?️ ?️ ? ⤳?✨ DIY ?️ 8mm / Super-8 Film Scanner, Part 1: Overview

? This is a video about film, my project using a projector. ? The goal: "scan" film using a mirrorless camera + macro lens set-up, making a 4K+ RAW digital photo-to-video workflow a possibility. Commercial film scanners exist, but I wanted to try building my own, and also have the benefit of best "theoretical" quality. With an uncompressed source, I have the ability to edit scanned footage in a lossless way before exporting a final video - either in lossless, or compressed-only-once format. Certainly, 4K raw etc. could be considered overkill. Most exports I&done thus far have been at 2048 x 1536, given the 4:3 aspect ratio of film. Notwithstanding - in the words of Tori Belleci from the TV show, Mythbusters: "If it&worth doing, it&worth overdoing." ? HARDWARE MODS Using a Canon film projector as my base, I added my own stepper motor, 12V automotive LED light and Arduino hardware/software controllers to orchestrate the entire sequence. ? PROCESS The process, roughly, is "advance the film one frame, and take a picture" ... thousands of times, up to three times a second. At 18 frames per second, a 3-minute Super-8 video has 3240 frames. ? With my current set-up, that&a little over 64 GB of raw .ARW files. It&a lot of data, but it&worth it! ? WHAT&HERE, WHAT&NEXT Part 1 covers most of my early work and findings, in the process of getting digital copies of film. In the next part, I plan to dig more into the camera, film, and post-processing workflows that worked for me.