Processing and Stablizing 8mm film clips from the 50's and 60's in Blender

Hi all, I didn’t know where the appropriate place to post this would be so I am posting it here since it is basicaly a test. I am also posting the video here because I think others can gather information about how 8mm film looks and how old film has dark spots and such so they can use it to make there artwork look more vintage/grainy. Not many people have, or are not capable of getting 8mm film into the PC so feel free to borrow my family clips for practice.

btw, I am also using blender to increase the video size and drop the interlaced in-between frames that are blurry.

8mm film is just a bunch of pictures recorded at 12, 15, 16 or 18 frames per second. This particular film is Eastman Kodaks “Standard 8”, all videos I post in this thread are that type. I will be uploading some more before and after shots and the origional unedited clips to youtube and linking more here in this thread. They will be of the former “Banco Del Central” in Quito, Ecuador and the Bank employee parties my grandfather recoded while he was the banks president until 1975. So any following videos will be for gathering data like what kind of cars people drove and what people wore for that era between 1950’s and 1960’s.

Unedited Origional Clips of the bank entrance 1960’s, upconverted to HD 720 using Blender 2.73a This one has some nice holes in the film near the very end, last 2 or 3 seconds, this is 18fps.

NOTES:

  1. Tracking these old videos requires that you increase the tracking markers to more than double their default size of 71 pixels to maintain a better lock.
  2. Using tracking markers to Rotate and Scale these videos requires more than one tracking marker to get a trapazoid effect, this is currently not available in the current versions of blender as only one marker can be used for both Rotation and Scaling/Zoom. Blender Coders/Devs are working on things like this so maybee it will be improved in the next few releases.
  3. Grainy and Unstable video may require manual placement of trackers during several frames. But it does work awesome most of the time.
  4. Dropping the in-between frames from interlacing might be necessary, even on stable frames.

Hope it will be helpfull to some of you or serve as good practice video for stablization and tracking. stay tuned…

I would prefer just to remove gate weave and jitter instead of camera wobble. I am interested to know what your telecine chain is? As the dynamic range seems a bit limited and you talk of interlace, are you just using a video camera pointed at a screen?

The video was recorded from 8mm film to a camcorder in the late 80’s, no screen, it was a mirror box and the person converting it did it on an uneven table that wabbled a bit too much. Later in the late 90’s it was put onto a home DVD. I would like to work directly with the 8mm film and projector using a modern digital camera to capture the film reels, However the 8mm film, projector, and recorder is currently in a storage unit about 2,000 miles away so I am toying/testing with the DVD I have on hand to se what I can learn to get a bit more experiance.

As for the first statement and question, I have heard the term telicine before but never realy understood what it meant. I was practicing tracking and stablization so I could capture a family member who passed in the early 80’s and my family has vary few videos/photos of her. I just looked up telecine so I belive I answered that above without realizing it.

My main intent is to clean the scratches and what looks like a dirty projector lens from those portions film entirely. I saw a tutorial on youtube about post production where the blender artist removed a running police officer from behind a moving vehicle in a scene. I am hoping to clear up some of the dark edges, scratches, etc using a method like that for clips of her. I hope it will be much better quality to re-record the actual 8mm clips using at least a 5mp camera. Then I won’t have any interlacing, but it may pickup something else unexpected.

I am very afraid that the poor old tape recording really won’t do the images any justice and you will find that there is little information available to retrieve in the shadows. But I understand the need to do something more than nothing at all.

BTW I wonder why you need more tracking markers to fix rotation, there shouldn’t be any skewing of the frame to correct. 2 markers will work just fine.