Maybe someone can help here. My father took a few Super 8 videos back in the late 70s and early 80s. His super 8 projector is about dead, his film is starting to wear out and deteriorate. Needless to say, I would like the best quality possible.

I have a Panasonic DV Digital Camcorder (NTSC) that I am using to capture the film that I am projecting with the old super 8 projector. The quality is farely good when I am capturing scenes that were taken in doors. The problem comes when the video was taken out doors.

I believe that Super 8 runs at 16 fps, and my camera records at the standard NTSC 29.97 fps interlaces. This seems to cause a flashing or flickering affect where the light seems to go bright and then dim and then bright and so forth.

I have ran a few filters through virtual dub and avisynth, and have been able to reduce the effects of the flicking lights, but I would love it to be a lot better.

Does anyone have any suggested scripts or tasks that I can use to increase the quality of the capture.

Thank you.

Hi scotthellewell,

I think Super 8 runs at either 18fps or 24fps, depending on the model. What model is that camera I don't think you can do much to help the flickering effect. The reason is that you are capturing at a very high frame rate, compared to the original, and the artifacts you are seeing are the "shutter closed" frames on the source (The super 8 film) because the capture was done at a higher frame rate.
The effect you see is like a "Strobe Light".
That's the closest example I can think of.
You turn on a fan and then turn on a strobe light, and if you adjust the speed of the strobe light to match the speed of the fan, the fan will look still.
In your case, the 8MM film (the fan) runs slower than the 29.97fps capture (The strobe light), and because of that, you will "see" shutter blanks on the capture, and this will appear as a darker section when played back on the capture.
I really can't think of a way to solve that problem.

-kwag

I am not sure what model my fathers camera was. He hasn't had the camera for years. He only got about 18 minutes of good video from it. It was always to expensive to purchase the film and get it developed. I know you get about 3 and a half minutes on one 3 inch roll of film.

My camera that I am capturing with is a Panasonic NV-GS35. I really enjoy my camera. It has 30x Optical Zoom and a light which works good in the dark. Of course this is my first camera, and can't really make any comparisons.

The avisynth file I used for helping the strobe effect was the following:

loadplugin("antiflicker.dll")
avisource("Super8 Videos.avi")
converttoyuy2()
antiflicker()
temporalsoften(3,20,20,2)

It helped quite a bit with the strobing, but at the same time took out some of the detail. Although the DVDs that I created no one has complained about. They think they turned out will.

Apparently my grandfather has tons of these films that need converting as well, so if anyone has any suggested changes to my script let me know.

Thank you.

See this link:

http://www.avisynth.org/fizick/getdups/getdups.html

It should help processing the video.

By the way, using a threshold higher than 5 in TemporalSoften is a bad idea, everything beyond that tends to smear the image. You will probably have ghosting with those values.

DGPulldown might help you when transferring the video to DVD. You can do a pulldown from 16.67fps to 29.97fps, thus encode as progressive at the original framerate, saving a lot of bits. I don't have any experiences but it can be done according to this thread: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...&pagenumber=13

There should be plenty of threads at the D9 forums regarding Super-8 capturing, they might also be of help.