> My co-worker purchased a digital SLR with a good macro lens and
> extension tube for slide scanning. He has it set up with a diffuse
> white light below, then the slide, and then the camera mounted above
> pointing down. Locking the auto focus and exposure, he can easily do
> 8 slides a minute. The slide image fills the camera frame, and with
> his 6Mpixel camera (Pentax K110D) he's getting the equivalent of
> 2600dpi. With a 10Mpixel sensor, one would get nearly 3,400dpi.
>
> We can clearly see the grain with his 6Mpixel camera, though, so
> there's not much reason to go further than that. I assume if one had
> to image better slide film the grain would be finer, perhaps requiring
> the 4000dpi.
>
> Quite frankly, though, the film scanner costs more for less overall
> utility in my estimation.
>
> At 2.5 minutes per slide, you'll spend over 41 hours doing the work.
> If your time is worth $5 per hour, then you're spending an additional
> $210 to do the work, on top of the cost of the slide scanner. One
> should be able to find a service to do that near that cost - I see one
> service that charges 24 cents per slide, so right around $240 for your
> 1000 images.
>
> So many ways to do the same thing...
>
> -Adam
>
> On 5/15/07, Carl Denk <
@spam@cdenkKILLspam
alltel.net> wrote:
>
>> A few years ago, I had (7) 400' reels of 16 mm. silent color/and b&w
>> film transfered to DVD with complimentary sounds dubbed in for about
>> $250 USD. The process was to project onto a screen 2 or 3 foot wide and
>> used a good quality camcorder to capture the images. Looks good on 42"
>> TV screen. If someone is interested in the service located in Northern
>> Ohio, contact me privately and I'll put the contact together.
>>
>> As a separate issue, I have about (1000) 35mm. slides to convert to
>> digital. I bought a Microtek scanmaker I700 scanner that does 4000 dpi.
>> and has both 35 mm slide and film strip holders. The scanner is very
>> slow and would probably take 20 minute to do 8 slides. I would like to
>> obtain an extra set of the slide holders so I could be loading one
>> while the other is scanning. The scanner is slow even with normal
>> copying compared to the 2 HP scanners that I can't find good XP drivers
>> for. I also have 4" x 5" (6 x 9 cm) and 6 x 17 cm film holders for the
>> scanner that I never will have a use for. I'll ship (USA only) free to
>> someone that can put them to use. :)
>>
>> Lee Jones wrote:
>>
>>>> What I want to do is a device to transfer traditional 8mm film to
>>>> digital media. As you know, the film has very high "resolution"
>>>> and to be somewhat "future-safe" I want to do it with as high
>>>> resolution as possible.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>>> I'm looking for a resolution at 2048x1024 or higher.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> I think you're asking too much from 8mm movie film. I don't recall
>>> the actual size of a frame of 8mm, but as I believe 8mm refers to
>>> the width of the stock. So the frame has to be smaller than that.
>>>
>>> Film has a resolving power topping out about 50 line pairs per mm
>>> under good conditions. Some films can do up to 100 lpmm under
>>> optimum conditions with an excellent lens and no camera shake.
>>> That means, top end, you need about 200 pixels per mm resolution.
>>> With an 8mm wide film frame and and aspect ratio of 4:3, you are
>>> going to get less than 1600x1200 pixels of _usable data_ from
>>> each frame of 8mm movie film.
>>>
>>> High end film scanners resolve 4000 pixels per inch (PPI) or about
>>> 157 pixels per mm. And that resolution is more than adequate because
>>> they resolve the film grains. Personally, I think that 2700-2900 PPI
>>> (106-114 pixels per mm) was an optimum "sweet spot" in film scanning.
>>> I'm doing a long term project to convert my 35mm using a 2900 PPI
>>> scanner. It's quicker than my 4000 PPI scanner and "looks better"
>>> for normal size prints or projected images.
>>>
>>> Again, assuming an 8mm wide frame and 4:3 aspect ratio, I think
>>> that 1200x900 pixels is all that an 8mm film frame has to offer.
>>> And probably slightly lower resolution than that would be fine.
>>> Recall than when viewing it, even greatly enlarged, you only have
>>> a fraction of a second to see each individual image.
>>>
>>> Before going farther, maybe you should beg or borrow or buy time
>>> on a film scanner. Scan some of your 8mm film frames at various
>>> resolutions and see exactly how they look. I'm willing to scan
>>> it for you, but you being in Sweden prevents doing it quickly.
>>> If you are willing to mail me a short length of film (via post),
>>> I will scan it and email you back the resulting images. Now you
>>> have me curious. :-) (If you are interested, contact me off-list
>>> for mailing information.)
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> My idea is to do it fram by frame, and then asseble all the frames
>>>> in a computer. First i was thinking of using a digital camera but
>>>> the optics creates a problem since i basically want to do a
>>>> "contact-copy" of the film, i.e. project the image directly on ccd
>>>>
>>>>
>>> If you have a Canon interchangable lens digital SLR, get (buy or rent)
>>> a Canon MP-E 65mm Macro Photo lens. It's optimized for doing macro
>>> work from 1:1 to 5:1 image scale (yes, that last is an image that is
>>> 5 times the size of the original object). New, they's US$800. You
>>> can easily fill a DSLR frame with an 8mm film frame (properly backlit).
>>>
>>> I expect that Nikon makes a similar lens, but I know & use Canon.
>>>
>>> Then hook the camera to your computer via firewire or USB, use the
>>> supplied software to run the camera in tethered mode, and capture
>>> all of the 8mm film you have.
>>>
>>> Then you can spend your time building hardware and programming a PIC
>>> to automatically advance the 8mm movie film, frame by frame, under
>>> coordinated control of the image capture computer. :-)
>>>
>>>
>>> In another message, you mention having a "couple of km" of 8mm film.
>>> Let's do "back of the envelope" math. 2kM is 2,000M is 2,000,000mm
>>> of film. If each frame is 6mm tall, you are looking at 1/3 million
>>> images. If each image is 3MB (1200x900 pixels at 8 bits/pixel with
>>> 3 color channels, stored as TIFF), then you are looking at 1 terrabyte
>>> of storage for this project. That's a couple 750MB disk drives or
>>> 250 full single layer DVDs. And way over 300,000 image files.
>>>
>>> It may be pedestrian, but I think you may be underestimating the
>>> raw effort needed to manage that many images or that much storage.
>>> And I doubt most video editing programs would do well with it, even
>>> if it were broken up into multiple projects (one per 8mm film reel).
>>>
>>> Lee Jones
>>>
>>>
>>>
