The
last time I did a major conversion from actual film to video was
(yikes) at least 16 years ago back in the high school days. The film was
Super-8 in cartridges with an optical soundtrack, however there was
one small caveat. I didn’t have a functioning projector. I had audio,
but no shutter sync. The trick was to play the film through a std Super 8
machine to capture the picture, and run it through the broken cartridge
unit for audio. Then the two had to be brought
together after the fact. Of course the speeds were different and this
meant trying to adjust the picture to match the soundtrack using a
powerful array of PowerPC towers after the VHS footage was copied to a
hard drive. If your film was 20 minutes long (or
you had a stack of these short films totaling a couple hours) then
that’s exactly how long it would take to copy in and to copy out that
footage. And you got to watch the same thing over, and over, and over
until you were sick of it.
So this week I decided to
convert a 16mm film put out by NCR to a format I could post on Youtube.
This was interesting. The film is 17 minutes long. Take 1 was by
projecting it on the big screen and using my iPhone
on a mini-tripod mount. I wasn’t sure if the iPhone would adapt to
shutter roll (a mismatch between frame rate of the projector, and “frame
rate” of the camera) or if it would be something I could adjust after
the fact. The initial results weren’t bad, but
there was definitely a flicker I couldn’t resolve in iMovie.
Take 2 was by projecting
onto a small screen and with new software for the iPhone that would let
me adjust shutter speed and aperture. Initial setup looked promising but
there was a new problem. The film was too
bright for the camera, and thus cranking down the aperture actually
affected the sample rate (obviously there isn’t a mechanical iris or
this wouldn’t be a problem). After trying a few things (including
projecting through a window screen), I found that blocking
off ¾ of the projection lens would reduce the brightness enough that it
wouldn’t overload the sensor. Now we were in business. Roll film!
First things first, I
imported this footage into iPhoto in order to copy into iMovie (it
wouldn’t go direct). Take 2 was much better than take 1, but again, a
slight rolling. What was going on? I had a hunch. Sure
enough, the camera had locked in at 25FPS instead of 24. Ugh. Time to
get all the equipment back out.
Proceed with take 3.
24FPS, ¾ lens blocked, audio adjusted, image focused. Let it roll. By
now I was getting sick of this film and escaped to the downstairs for a
few minutes. Things proceeded nicely until I checked
on the recording a few minutes later (audio blasting away). With a
minute-30 left, the iPhone had stopped recording to tell me it was
running out of memory. Argh. Okay, let’s back this film up, delete take
2, and record the final 2 minutes of take 3. I could
deal with splicing and framing in post-production.
Good. No frame roll. Good
audio. Time to transfer to the Mac. But what’s this? A manual import
into iMovie from the camera results in failure. And an import into
iPhoto results in an ‘unrecognized format’. Yes,
those crazy .movs! Take 2 worked fine, why not Take 3? How about
emailing them? Nope, too big to send as attachments. Let’s try a program
I’ve got that lets me access the phone via an IP address in my browser.
OK, I see the files, let the copying begin. The
2 minute clips comes over in half an hour. I let the big clip run over
night.
Next day…after work. Ok,
the files are on the desktop, let’s review. Hmm, what’s this random
static and audio spiking? Excellent, they’re _slightly_ corrupt.
On the plus side, they play crystal-clear on
the iPhone so I know my source is alright. Looks like they must have
dropped a few bits during the transfer. Okay, let’s try Dropbox. I
download the latest version for the Mac and install. I pull down my copy
from the cloud to the phone and log in (it’s been
a couple years). Clip 1 copies over just fine and, good news, a half
hour later, I have it on the desktop playing clearly. Clip 2 starts but
after a few minutes times out. Alright, I guess I have to set the phone
prefs to ‘Never Lock’. Really? Okay, let’s try
again. It cranks away for half an hour and….surprise! Upload size
exceeded!
I had already tried manual
navigation with the phone plugged in to the USB and came up empty. Now
what? And then I remembered…possibly Apple’s best, yet most secret
app…Image Capture. I fired that up and BINGO.
There were my .mov files listed and with a click-and-drag, they were
both on my desktop in seconds. So, after 3 full viewings and several
nights of futzing around, I now had the files.
Thankfully, iMovie was a
breeze once I had them in the queue. I was able to compensate for color
drift, crop the framing, increase saturation, splice the two clips
together, and adjust the audio to minimize projector
noise (I didn’t use a patch cable this time around). Down-conversion to a
compressed file took around 40 minutes..or so it said. It may not be
perfect, but at least it’s out there.
