good morning Bill, I agree with you that old film should never be projected, I never recommended that to anyone, I am not sure who you directed your message to,hopefully not me. When I scan 16mm footage I use a machine without sprockets or pull down claws and the film glides effortlessly across the gate and the sprockets are located by a laser so there is minimal contact with the film. The film is captured as a sequence of high quality .tiff files and reassembled into a movie in After Effects, where the images are cleaned up and scratches and other blemishes are removed and the resulting film is stabilized for any gate movement as well as color corrected if required. This is the best way to restore film for most people. Older flying spot scanners are an older technology and rarely used today in Hollywood. There are many reasons for this but not really appropriate for this forum.
There are, I realize, many newer means of scanning than when I was around. But sometimes older tech gets aquired after it's commercial life is over and services offered at reasonable prices. It makes me sick to think of the old film chains that TV stations put in the dump or sold for scrap that could be providing services for many folks today. My main point is that projecting onto a screen, especially the ubiquitous glass bead screen, and shooting with a camcorder is like something Jedd Clampitt would have done.
What this boils down to is that there is no cheap way to get this done.
hi Bill,
I agree totally, I have been doing this for many years for museums and private collectors and it takes a lot of work preparing the film for scanning and a lot of work and attention to scanning it correctly and effectively "remastering" the film and preparing it for distribution or archiving. The worst advice was from someone on here telling the gent to send his films to a place like Cosco, worst possible recommendation. My work is not cheap but my most of my work is repeat business from very satisfied customers, I actually scan each frame and digitize with a large high pixel count sensor so no scan line issues or dirt build up , I also flash the film three times every frame so in effect taking three images of every frame as an HDR image and composite in After Effects, I also work with very brittle and shrunken film. I am not ILM but I am not Jed Clampert either lol
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