[HM] 8mm *MOVIE* film, to digital, to firewire

[Bob K]

On Thursday, Oct 2, 2003, at 23:46 US/Eastern, Jack Honeycutt wrote:

> At 08:22 PM 10/2/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>
>> Since you seem to have a digital camcorder, your best bet is to use 
>> it for digitizing
>> your 8mm video's.
>
>
> Bob...
>
> I was not clear in my post.  I am converting 8mm movie *film* that was 
> shot in the 1950's and 1960's.
> So I have to project it, then capture it with my digital camera.

My fault too, Jack. I misunderstood that.  I thought that the original 
was an analog camcorder.

So, your process, once captured by the digital camcorder is completely 
identical whether you captured
an old movie from a screen or, a new video of a live subject.   (I have 
to assume here that you meant
digital camcorder, not digital camera in the above sentence.)

In this situation the frame loss, if any, happens in the capturing 
process.  This is why:  Although it
appears continuous to the eye, the image on the screen goes on an off 
with brief dark periods in
between, and occasionally the camcorder could snap a dark frame, as 
there is no way I know of,
to synchronize the projection with the capture.

> I have done this in Windows, but the bus speed was twice as fast, and 
> I had a much more powerful processor.
>
> I know that I can record onto the digital tape what I film with the 
> digital video camera, and then feed that into the firewire port of the 
> Mac.

I suggest that you take a capture  that you did with your Windows 
process and check it out frame by
frame in iMovie.  I think you will find faded or dark frames in there.  
The bus speed of your G4
should be more than adequate for the throughput required, as long as 
you don't do to an external
HD (in which case it may or may not be).

> What I don't know is if I can just take a feed from my digital video 
> camera and feed it directly into the firewire port with out loosing 
> enough frames for it to be noticed.
>
> I also don't know what the difference in quality would be between 
> dumping a digital tape image into the firewire port, or skipping the 
> tape and just using the digital camera to feed a signal to the 
> firewire port.

I hope someone will correct me if I am wrong, but to my best knowledge 
ALL the quality loss you
suffer will be in the capture and digitization process, before it gets 
memorized, whether the memorization
occurs on the tape or in the computer.   Either way you do it, the 
digital stream via the firewire
connection will be identical in content and speed.  Thus, you choice 
for doing it one way or the other will
have no influence on either image quality or on frame loss.  However, 
not all camcorders are able to do
it directly.

I suggest that you copy two minutes, or so, worth of movie by both 
methods, and click through frame
by frame in iMovie, to compare and see if you can find any noticeable 
difference in image quality and
quantity of dark frames.  Compare also with the results of prior 
conversions via your Windows computer.


Bob



jack
>
>
>
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