Help needed in scanning 90 year-old movie film frames
 

Hi, I'm new to the forum and have an interesting problem. A friend bough an old projector that had some ancient film. The dates I could decipher were 1923. Some of the film fragments were in fairly good shape and was able to scan a few images with my V500. I'm not attempting to reproduce the movie, just lift a few of the still images.

Scanning movie film is essentially the same as scanning photo film. I've moved this to the photo forum.

Describe what you mean by "fragments" ... are the film cels complete, or have they been brittled and broken into cellulose shards?
Are the images B&W (likely), B&W with tinting or toning, or color? While less likely, color did exist in 1923.

If the images are damaged, the Epson V500 should do an admirable job. We have Epson V600 for document and print scanning.
The only better way to scan would be to use the pressed glass slide method, found in some older nuisance-to-use Minolta professional scanners.
Standard film scanners would be useless here, if the film is too damage to be run through sprocket-based loading.

Hi and thanks for the reply. The fragments are complete cels of two to three feet in length. There are places that are way too deteriorated to use. The first one I tried produced good images to a point. I think the film curled and brought the image out of focus. I'm sending a couple of examples. I guess I need the glass pressing method. What would you recommend?

Thanks

What you'll need is anti-Newton glass, which prevents Newton rings from happening. Newton rings are the round discolorations you see when glass is pressed against glass.

- B&H has some for $36 with free shipping: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...p.html/bi/4166
- Adorama has it for $36 with free shipping: http://www.adorama.com/SD246003.html?kbid=64179

Your scanning method would be:

1. Clean the flatbed gently -- I suggest using a $5 large round soft goat hair paint brush from the local art store.
2. Place the film on the flatbed.
3. Put the anti-Newton glass on to, to flatten it.
4. Close the flatbed.
5. Scan.

The only other alternative is to get an expensive medium-format film scanner, which uses anti-Newton glass. The only benefit here is that the higher-end scanners have manual focusing. However, I don't know that any of this is needed, since the film appears to be rather grainy with motion blur already. I think $36 more is a good enough investment for what I perceive to be some fun scanning, and the method is going to yield decent quality.

Rebuild the movie in Premiere or VirtualDub, after editing and realigning in Photoshop.
It would be neat to see the video put back together -- and then I'd also suggest uploading it onto Youtube.

Thanks for the reply. The film goes directly on the scanner? I thought it had to be above the bed a mm or three.

If the scanner has a specific focal length, then you'd need to add more glass under it.

Without looking at the Epson V500 documentation, it would seem logical that a flatbed scanner would see an image just fine from the same distance as a print or paper placed on the scanner.

At any rate, the glass mentioned (anti-Newton) is what you'd need. Since you don't need much of it, a small medium-format 4x5 piece should work. What's expensive is when you try to get 8x10 and larger sheets of it.