📽️ 🎞️ 📸 ⤳💾✨ DIY 🛠️ 8mm Film Scanner, Part 2: Film cleaning, camera set-up, test scan
Channel: Scott Schiller
Date: 2020-12-13

This is part two of a series. The goal: "scan" 8mm and Super-8 film digitally using a mirrorless camera + macro lens set-up, making a 4K+ RAW 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.

In this video, I talk about how I physically clean the film, how I set up the camera (physical alignment and software / hardware settings,) and finally, how I run a "test" scan of some film and determine a target lighting / exposure balance.

RELATED VIDEOS
If you haven't seen, Part 1: https://youtu.be/M-tMGYSVngg
Part 2.5, an interim update with Q&A etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hthVoeRgbos

In the words of Tori Belleci from the TV show, Mythbusters: "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing."

Comments, critiques and questions are welcome! I've had fun both working on this project, and making this video. I'm not an expert by any means, on any of this stuff; I'm a software engineer by profession. Hardware and tinkering as such is not my usual hobby. Like many other things, I consider it a work in progress. 😅

🙇 CREDITS 
I owe thanks to a number of people, videos and web sites for inspiration and guidance.

Ken Eckert's adventures in using a *real* scanner to digitize film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6FErTrXV2k

Related studies in motorizing projectors, etc.:
http://keneckert.com/kenfilms/telecine/index.html

Dronebot Workshop on Stepper Motors:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qwrnUeSpYQ

Curious Scientist, Arduino + TB6600 controller:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LZ_v3Jldwo

🎼MUZAK 🎵
If you caught it, there's a subtle background soundtrack on this video. It's from a live mix that I did which is also on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-c9V1PltpU

⏲️ Timeline:
00:00 - Introduction
00:18 - Cleaning film demo
01:35 - Loading film into the "scanner"
02:35 - Updated Arduino Nano Electronics
02:47 - Loading film leader, mechanical test
03:01 - Camera, lens and mount hardware details
03:32 - Camera set-up (live view, etc.)
03:55 - Aligning camera, focus highlighting
04:32 - Beginning film scan
05:01 - First scene, adjusting exposure
06:41 - Highlights vs. shadows
07:21 - Camera shutter, aperture settings
07:55 - Adjusting for under-exposure
08:36 - Adjusting for over-exposure
10:04 - Increased scan speed, finishing scene
10:25 - Demo: Video from scan test (post-processed)
10:49 - Post-scan: "Rewind" mode on projector
11:21 - Thanks, ending, Part 3 teaser (post-processing)