A DIY Telecine
December 10, 2016 8:20 PM   Subscribe

When Joe Herman's uncle uncovered a trove of more than 130 reels of film shot by Joe's grandfather, some as old as 1939, he decided to digitize them for preservation and to share with their family. With commercial digitization being fairly costly, Joe decided to build his own, out of an old projector, a Raspberry Pi, and some home modifications. The results are quite impressive.

If you want to try your hand, Joe shares his code. Here's what it looks like in action.
posted by fings (25 comments total) 65 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is impressive. I thought these were going to be blurry & look like a bunch of experimental Stan Brakhage movies, but if you didn't tell me, I'd have no way of knowing that this was done with DIY digital preservation.
posted by jonp72 at 8:41 PM on December 10, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'd have thought frame registration would have been a significant issue, optical printers have/had incredibly precise pin registration, so each frame would be aligned precisely, avoiding jitter. I guess the openCV code takes care of this somehow. Incredibly impressive!
posted by sammyo at 8:55 PM on December 10, 2016 [2 favorites]


Quite impressive indeed. Wow.
posted by azpenguin at 9:13 PM on December 10, 2016


I love the you-are-there feel of these HQ color films from a time frame (1940s) I am not used to seeing color home movies of.

And the things that strike me about them, like the fact that no-one's clothes have logos on them, even the boys in t-shirts. Or that the sisters often wear identical outfits, which makes me think that their mother likely made their clothes.
posted by fings at 9:40 PM on December 10, 2016 [4 favorites]


Wow, these are a treasure. Thanks so much for posting this!
posted by chinston at 9:56 PM on December 10, 2016


Wow! My very first job in broadcasting was in the Telecine Department and the equipment was very complex and very expensive. Just the camera alone was in the order of $125,000 and the projectors (or telejectors as they were called) were the same or more each. I spent many hours calibrating, adjusting and cleaning just to air movies or transfer films to videotape. I thought then that Telecine was a dead end.

By contrast, this seems like a cross between MacGuyver and Sci-Fi to me. Bravo Mr. Herman! Telecine lives!
posted by Zedcaster at 10:25 PM on December 10, 2016 [7 favorites]


Wow. This is amazing.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 12:06 AM on December 11, 2016


Amazing, impressive, just wow! I'm blown away.

While watching the vids with the priests and nuns, I almost had a panic attack. Those people freaked me as a kid and I'm still scared to death of any religious in an "uniform".
posted by james33 at 4:25 AM on December 11, 2016


What a wonderful and amazing project.
posted by Songdog at 5:28 AM on December 11, 2016


Not just no logos -- notice that nothing they have is made of plastic. The Lake Erie transfer especially -- no plastic bucket or spade, and the "hard parts" of the dolls are all porcelain; clothes are made of plant fibers alone.

Imagine, not having to have a recycling industry because everything you own can break down through natural chemical and biological processes over a few tens of years...

Still, amazing work. Bravo!
posted by nonspecialist at 5:34 AM on December 11, 2016


everything you own can break down through natural chemical and biological processes over a few tens of years...

Mm, not quite.

Watching these was exquisitely frustrating-- I just wanted to see everyone's hats and outfits closer up!
posted by nonasuch at 7:54 AM on December 11, 2016


I love the yak shaving. "It'd be too expensive to pay an expert with the proper equipment to scan this film. So I'm gonna spend a year of my life building a hack and writing code to solve the problem. Think of the money I'll save!" I mean, I admire the hell out of the hack, but hoo boy someone's got a lot of yak hair lying on their office floor.

I took the lazy route and paid an expert. The result is great! Except the films themselves aren't very interesting, my partner's father took a whole lot of handheld long shots of lakes. Yup, there's Lake Shasta, just like a photograph only shaking a bit. Fortunately he'd use up the end of every film reel pointing the camera at his son. Ten seconds of nothing specific, just my partner being a goofy kid. Turns out that's the most precious part.
posted by Nelson at 8:08 AM on December 11, 2016 [8 favorites]


You both might have got memories out of the deal, Nelson, but it sounds like he also wanted to learn how telecine worked. Is it bad to want to learn how things work now?

Additionally, there's now the basis of an affordable cine conversion system out there. How many libraries and archives are sitting on boxes of film that they don't have the money to pay an expert to digitize?
posted by scruss at 8:19 AM on December 11, 2016 [4 favorites]


Yeah, you can say that the opportunity cost of making this is more expensive than going to a shop, but that's not the point. Making things is by itself a very good experience - people happily spend a lot of time and money on hobbies without a care for the economics, because it's not actually a heresy to note that life isn't all about the bottom line.

And of course, as with open source anything, as if by magic a great deal of economic good can come out of it anyway. It doesn't necessarily accrue to the original inventor - another heresy to rentier corporations, who'd have us believe that maximising this is the only motor for creative success - but it can do. Instead, new markets are created, further creation encouraged, and often far more than one might expect because it removes one of the major barriers to developing or exploiting someone else's work. They've already had their expected reward, and are happy to see others get value for it.

As scruss says, there's going to be a lot of old cine stock out there in the hands of people who simply can't afford professional conversion and who couldn't have built their own converter. Now a market in much cheaper conversion can develop, with a potentially significant cultural upside.
posted by Devonian at 10:00 AM on December 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


"...like the fact that no-one's clothes have logos on them, even the boys in t-shirts. Or that the sisters often wear identical outfits, which makes me think that their mother likely made their clothes."

That, and everyone in the movies is thin.

This is a really nice article! It explains the idea behind his homemade system well, and uses photographs in an illustrative (rather than decorative) manner. And it gives the reader the impression that we understand what he's doing, even if there's an enormous amount of work and detail hidden within the sentence "A year (and lots of programming) later, though, I’ve managed to address each of these issues." Excellent writing.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:19 AM on December 11, 2016 [2 favorites]


This is awesome & exactly what I need. I'm just starting a project to digitize a cache of family films. It might not have saved the designer much but now that it's tested & proven it'll save me a bundle & have fun in the process.
posted by scalefree at 3:33 PM on December 11, 2016


Just discovered this thread, and it's making my day; I'm glad anyone besides me found it interesting, and delighted (and surprised) that anyone enjoyed any of the videos, apart from relatives of the subjects. Thanks for the comments.
A few responses:
sammyo, I was naive enough not to know registration would be an issue, and it just turned out not to be. Part of it may have been how well-engineered old projectors were, and part of it may have been that I run them at much slower than normal speed. But the only times I saw real jitter was when it had occurred in-camera, and then it it was corrected not with openCV, but with aviSynth processing (which includes a deshake function).
nelson, devonian eloquently describes my post-facto rationale for doing it this way, but if I'm honest, what really happened was that I started out thinking this would be simple, and learned one hurdle at a time why it wasn't. In retrospect I can't claim it was the most rational use of my time, but it was (and continues to be) tremendous fun. I never seriously expected it to get any use beyond my own, so if it does I'll consider that a huge bonus. Yak hair, it turns out, is a great insulator, and I've used mine to make a comforter that keeps me cozy at night.
Some of these films (the Wozniak reels, not shot by my grandfather) had been 'professionally' transferred before, and the results were, frankly, awful; I will try to post a comparision reel soon.
posted by joeherman at 3:55 PM on December 11, 2016 [18 favorites]


I kinda agree with Nelson - it's an amazing hack, but I can't help think it would've been a lot simpler (and potentially a more interesting learning experience) if he'd approached it by doing a bit more research & chosen a few things more appropriately.

I'd written an example of one reason I think that (bodging around the limitations of the RPi camera in software vs spending ~ the same effort interfacing a better camera) - but since, on preview, joeherman has dropped in & explained things in terms of thinking it'd be easier than it turned out to be, I'll leave it be. I've certainly been there, done that myself!
posted by Pinback at 4:14 PM on December 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Oh gosh I didn't mean to suggest to anyone that this project was a waste of time or frivolous or dumb. It's a glorious hack! And it's great that the results are published so someone else can build the same thing quicker and cheaper. I've shaved lots of yaks myself and generally am better for the experience. Just amused at how big a project it turned out to be.

(And welcome to Metafilter, Joe Herman! Sorry to be That Guy who snarked on your project. I know your comforter will keep you snug and warm.)
posted by Nelson at 4:46 PM on December 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hey, any lipreaders on the Blue? I'm pretty sure there'll be a lot of "for heavens's sake, stop filming me." but what else?
posted by Mogur at 5:38 PM on December 11, 2016 [1 favorite]


No offense taken, Nelson or Pinback; your points are good ones, and as a new metafilter user, I'm genuinely impressed with the level of civility with which even pointed critiques can be delivered. I'm new, but I like this community so far.
(I also hope my presence on the thread helps foster, not chill, discussion.)
To expand a little on my thinking/process concerning this admittedly hacky design:
I did do a bit of early research on alternative cameras, but found many of them to be an order of magnitude more expensive than the one I had already invested significant time in understanding, and which was delivering *almost* good enough results. Also, they were big enough that they would have required different placement and an additional investment in lenses; so at any given point the incentive to tweak a bit more was always high enough to prevent me from throwing out the current design and starting over. I can't claim that what I ended up with delivers the best possible picture, only that it's much better than I had a right to expect for being super cheap wrt. hardware.
Also, FWIW, the effort in dealing with the PiCamera's limitations was a fairly small fraction of my time investment compared to general self-education on python, interface building and image processing in general, which (a) I will pretend is 'professional development' and (b) would have been necessary regardless of camera choice.
There's been a real sentimental factor at work too; physically handling these movies myself, which were literally the same stuff that was in the camera there with my ancestors, 2+ decades before my birth... if I was capturing someone else's movies, I wouldn't care, but when dealing with my own history, it feels ok to spend too much time on it.
Fings, you're right! Their mom made their clothes.
posted by joeherman at 6:19 PM on December 11, 2016 [9 favorites]


It's the making of the thing - that is the thing.
posted by quinndexter at 2:57 AM on December 12, 2016 [2 favorites]


joeherman: but if I'm honest, what really happened was that I started out thinking this would be simple, and learned one hurdle at a time why it wasn't.

I'm about three years into my own telecine project -- for years I've been collecting projectors and film in many formats, and a few years back I stopped running through the projector due to worries about damaging things. I'm at about version four or five of my telecine on the drawing board -- first considered retrofitting a projector like this, then moved to a purely mechanical version, now I'm working on an Arduino-and-3d-printed-sprockets version but I'm still a ways off from having a working one.

I also have to say you did it right: I see other people's homemade telecines and they're using cameras with shutters (slow, mechanical failure likely), have sprockets on motors pulling the film directly (asking for torn sprocket holes), but you've gotten it down to the most efficient. Also, shining the light through the lens backwards is an inspired solution :) Congrats!
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:01 AM on December 12, 2016 [1 favorite]


A really great project. Maybe I'm an oddball but I think it is always great to revisit old mediums - whether it is 8mm or slides or laser discs. Always forces you to remember have far we've come and what we have lost.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:49 PM on December 12, 2016


There's been a real sentimental factor at work too; physically handling these movies myself, which were literally the same stuff that was in the camera there with my ancestors, 2+ decades before my birth... if I was capturing someone else's movies, I wouldn't care, but when dealing with my own history, it feels ok to spend too much time on it.

I get this. So much. The experience I had simply scanning in family photo albums was what I think the kids call, 'transcendent.' Every step of the process could be done by someone with more experience, with better equipment, with better artistic instincts, but none of that would have helped me appreciate the journey that landed us here. We're still animals, physically handling things alights our wires differently.
posted by DigDoug at 8:57 AM on December 13, 2016 [1 favorite]


« Older Blimey, if it don't look like mutton again...   |   American Life Expectancy Drops Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments