[MacDV] Super 8 -> miniDV transfer (again)

[Steven Rogers]

On Tuesday, December 17, 2002, at 11:53 AM, Randy Wilson wrote:

> . . .  I could see both fine with my eye, but the video camera had 
> either a black wall (i.e., couldn't see the rocks), or, if I turned up 
> the exposure so I could see the rocks, the lake was completely washed 
> out.  So it appears that I need less contrast in order to get a better 
> transfer in that case.  Any comments?

Good summary, and yes, that's the problem. Film (and your eye) has a 
lot more latitude than the video camera does. That is, it can take in a 
scene with sunlight and shadow without being blacked-out in the dark 
areas or white-out in the bright areas - particularly if the film is 
Kodachrome. Projecting a larger picture helps with this somewhat. I 
wound up doing three different kinds of runs - sometimes two on the 
same reel. One with the transfer box for dark scenes, one with an image 
about 18 inches across on a white card, and one with the image about 3 
feet across on a white card.  Changing the overall brightness may also 
change your shutter speed, which will give you a different sync effect, 
so it might take a while to find the best balance of exposure and 
shutter sync side effects.

Shooting with a GL1 in auto mode seemed to work flawlessly for me in 
just about every situation. You do get some blooms when the film 
lighting changes, but shooting with fixed exposure won't work well 
unless the original movie is uniformly lit. Most of the stuff I've done 
is poor amateur shooting - its the baby's face lit up like the surface 
of the sun, followed immediately by Aunt Matilda in the shadows 25 feet 
from the camera, then <sizzle>, back onto a close subject, etc. If you 
wanted to be a purist, you could meter and shoot each one of those 
takes, but I didn't find it worthwhile.

SR