Workprinter Master Class

[woods01]

So I recently rejected about a 1000 ft of transfered film to my local
Workprinter owner to do over. I had complaints over darkness, a blue
tinge on some reels and framing issues on others. The film ranged from
1970s home movies on Super & Regular 8 to my last two reels of K40
shot in early 2006.

The main complaints I had were the darkness of the reels. These
Workprinter transfers had less information than the wall DIY transfer that
my dad did in the mid 90s on a Hi8 camera!

My transferer is a pretty open person and didn't take my complaints
personally and saw a chance to learn a few things. This opened up a long discussion on white balance & camera exposure stratagies. He was hoping for one perfect setup but in the end admitted that he'd have to
make adjustments on a reel to reel basis.

So for all the Workprinter users out there I'm interested in knowing a
few of your stratagies.


What do you white balance to? Use your camera built in setting or WB to
the projector bulb?

How do you choose an exposure for a reel? I think we settled on a 3.8
on his camera (I know it will vary by camera). For me, I'd prefer some
shots be a bit overexposed and get more image from the darker shots.

When framing regular 8mm, do you fill the frame or do a larger frame
and include the image between the sprocket holes?

One of the films had really thick frame edges with really jagged/fuzzy
edges from a regular 8 reel. Any guesses as to why this is? I'm
suspecting old grandpa never cleaned the camera and that its from dust
all around the gate.

Thank you for the replies.

[woods01]

One other question. I recieved the video as files on dvd-r. For some
reason when I play back the video in Final Cut the movie stutters and
freezes up. But plays back fine when dragged into the timeline. He has
the same problem on his PowerMac setup. Anyone else experience
this problem?

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

How do you choose an exposure for a reel? I think we settled on a 3.8 on his camera

You don´t. Here is what you guys did wrong.

You need to use auto-exposure.
If you want to use manual and locked exposure he needs to sit there and look at the transfer all the time and adjust the exposure as the scenes change.

No wonder you got dark images, a onelight transfer for home movies ain´t gonna be perfectly exposed for most of the shots. ;)

One of the films had really thick frame edges with really jagged/fuzzy edges from a regular 8 reel. Any guesses as to why this is? I'm suspecting old grandpa never cleaned the camera and that its from dust all around the gate.

Yep, dust and dirt in the camera.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

One other question. I recieved the video as files on dvd-r...

Did you copy the files to your harddrive before playback?
If not, this is the problem. Your DVD player is not fast enough to read the files in real time. Copy the files to your computer, then they should work just fine.

[Patrick]

I'm not sure if I would agree that auto exposure would give the best results. I had some time lapse footage transferred at a cheap transfer place once and it looked like they used auto exposure. One particular group of shots of mine featured a gathering of trees in late afternoon light with long shadows. It was a time lapse shoot, showing the movement of the shadows sweeping across the trees and the ground with one minute intervals. I exposed for the mid tone sunlit areas and so the processed film revealed good exposure on the sunlit areas while the shadows were a deep ink black which was exactly the look that I wanted. There were roughly equal amounts of shadow and sunlit areas at any one time in the frame.

However, when I viewed these same shots in the transferred footage, it looked like they used auto exposure. All the shadows were lightened significantly and looked more like a weak greyish colour rather than black, destroying the look that I had created in the original film footage. Obviously, whatever equipment they were using in the transfer, looked at that scene and saw all the black shadows and adjusted itself to compensate.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

However, when I viewed these same shots in the transferred footage, it looked like they used auto exposure. All the shadows were lightened significantly and looked more like a weak greyish colour rather than black, destroying the look that I had created in the original film footage. Obviously, whatever equipment they were using in the transfer, looked at that scene and saw all the black shadows and adjusted itself to compensate.

This has nothing to do with auto exposure. If the exposure would be drifting and changing during the scenen, THEN it would be a auto exposure-thingie. ;)

This is just a easy matter of fixing the shadows and colors with colorcorrection.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

I'm not sure if I would agree that auto exposure would give the best results.

No, probaly not, but it gives the most "affordable" good results.

The best results you get if you change exposure manually, but it also digs a deeper hole in your wallet.

Using a onelight transfer lets you get away cheaper, but with some scenes overexposed and some scenes underexposed. But home movies are very seldom so evenly exposed that a onelight is a good choise, and then you end up with a lot of scenes too dark or too bright. This of course depends on the footage.

[Patrick]

"This has nothing to do with auto exposure."

Actually, I think it has a lot to do with auto exposure. Both the shadow areas and sunlight areas were brighter (in exposure) in the transfer. The sunlit areas were almost burnt out in fact. Good point about the brightness drifting throughout scenes with auto exposure - that wasnt particularly evident from memory.

What I am suspecting may have happened was that auto exposure was used initially to analyse the first scene (those time lapse tree / shadow shots were the very first shots on the reel) and then the iris (if the equipment utilized had an iris) was locked at the setting suggested by the auto exposure. Sensing all the black shadows in the footage, the iris would have been set at a large opening.

By the way, Ken, I have only seen one example of your transfers - Mattias' videoclip - and I thought it looked stunning.

[Ericus]

I'm not sure if I would agree that auto exposure would give the best results.

The best results you get if you change exposure manually, but it also digs a deeper hole in your wallet.

Using a onelight transfer lets you get away cheaper, but with some scenes overexposed and some scenes underexposed. But home movies are very seldom so evenly exposed that a onelight is a good choise...

I change the exposure manually, that is the way to get the best results.
You have to remember that the home movies were meant to be projected with a onelight projector Now we can make the films look even better with manual exposure adjustment.

I am not after big bucks, but happy customers 8)

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

"This has nothing to do with auto exposure."

Actually, I think it has a lot to do with auto exposure.

What I am suspecting may have happened was....then the iris was locked at the setting.....

Hehehe, if you are correct then they 100% definetly absolutely did NOT use auto exposure. ;)

By locking the iris you are disabling the auto exposure, and setting for a locked down manual exposure. ;) A onelight transfer if they didn´t stop and adjust in the middle of the reel ;)

Thanks for the compliment on the transfer!
You can find another thread here with a link to a few images: viewtopic.php?t=11641&start=0

And if you are interested in more images and clips you can find it here: http://www.uppsalabildteknik.com/provfilmer2.php but all the text is in swedish... ;)

[Patrick]

"Hehehe, if you are correct then they 100% definetly absolutely did NOT use auto exposure.

By locking the iris you are disabling the auto exposure, and setting for a locked down manual exposure. A onelight transfer if they didn´t stop and adjust in the middle of the reel."

Correct, I used the wrong terminology. I was actually going to edit my post but I didn't bother. However, I am roughly 15% correct in that the problem had a little to do with auto exposure in that auto exposure was likely used briefly to initially assess the scene before switching to manual exposure! Regardless, the problem appears to be exposure related.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

However, I am roughly 15% correct in that the problem had a little to do with auto exposure in that auto exposure was likely used briefly to initially assess the scene before switching to manual exposure!

Ummm, OK. But if that is the case then it is only a case of the operator being too lazy to set the exposure himself, don´t blame the auto for it... ;)

Also, perhaps the reel wasn´t the best suited reel to be transferred with a onelight transfer at all? If the exposure changed quite a bit from scene to scene then all you really can expect is "bad exposure".

The way I see it, if you order a onelight you cannot complain for bad exposure at all (if the first scene of the reel is correctly exposed of course).

[Patrick]

Every shot on that reel was correctly exposed but I won’t even go into detail about the other issues I had on that transfer on the rest of the reel such as dull colours and also washed out colours, blown out sections of the frame in shots that were filmed on overcast days with diffused lighting, and a tilted horizon despite me using a tripod and keeping my horizon level. They put a still image showing their business name on the beginning of the tape with some slogan saying something about a 'quality product' and even that was tilted! I won't be returning to that place for my transfers.

[Uppsala BildTeknik]

:lol:

Sound like a true Quality company! LOL I bet they just did a "off the wall" transfer, or used a crappy old telecine junk to transfer it.

I know there are many many idiots in this game, sadly.

If you check out my webpage with images you can find a comparison I did with another swedish company that transfers 8mm film. they say they have years of experience and they are expeerts at filmtransferring, high quality yadayada. You can find the comparison here: http://www.uppsalabildteknik.com/provfilmer2.php#test

If you move the mouse over the images (after you click on them) you can see the difference between their transfer and my transfer. It truly is terrible that people charge money to do this kind of shitty transfers, they didn´t even dial out the flickering from their off-the-wall transfer! 8O

The images are not tampered with, this is how it looks like, and the flickering from the non-synch transfer is very obvious. Unreal. :roll:

[MovieStuff]

Whether shooting directly off the film with a WorkPrinter or off the wall with a projector, there is no way you can do a quality transfer off of reversal with a one light set up.

Auto exposure will be beneficial but much depends on what type of auto exposure you use. Most prosumer cameras use center-weighted frame averaging, which looks at all the dark, midtone and light values in the scene and sort of swirls them together into one over-all grey. If the grey value is high, due to lots of white in the scene, then it will bring the exposure down. If the value is low due to lots of black, then it will bring the exposure up. This type of exposure cirtcuit can work pretty good for most footage but large areas of black can fool the camera and the auto exposure circuit will then try to correct an exposure problem that may not exist. The example I use is a guy wearing a white T shirt with black jeans in front of a black 57 Chevy on a sunny day. The old Kodachrome may be exposed dead on but the camera sees all the black and tries to then push the exposure up to correct for what it perceives as an underexposure problem. This will make the white areas burn out, resulting in a permanent loss of detail in those areas.

The alternative auto-exposure system that we use on the Sniper-Pro units, and is also found on some higher end cameras, is to use peak sensing, which simply looks at the lightest thing in the scene and makes it as bright as possible before clipping and losing information. But because video doesn't have the contrast range that film does, the dark areas will appear even darker on the initial transfer. However, there is actually quite a lot of detail in those areas if you have a decent NLE system that can do gamma or basic contrast adjustments to the captured footage.

Protecting the white areas is really the better way to transfer because once that information is gone, you can never get it back. On the other hand, you can almost always pull additional detail out of the black areas after transfer.

The bottom line is that someone, at some point, has to interact with the footage and make an asthetic judgement. There is no "one setting" that is going to give you the best results, regardless of what you use to transfer the films.