Hello -

I'm digitizing old 8mm and Super 8mm film. For reasons outside the scope of this question, I'm doing it the cheap-o way, where I project the film onto a screen, and capture that with a digital video camera.

The digital video I record has several issues, the first of which is that it's not cropped correctly. As you can imagine, projected film doesn't have a nice sharp border, and the edges are a bit fuzzy. I've done my best when recording the video to center the image, but I still need to crop, center, and zoom the image.

I've got a variety of other issues that need to be fixed too, like deflicker (due to the 18fps projector gate flicker), and color correction. The builtin deflicker filter works very nicely, and color correction seems straight forward enough. I think I'll use temporal NR and spatial NR to clean the image up a bit, and maybe sharpen it after that. I'm thinking about using the dirt removal filter too, but still experimenting.

I've tried cropping the video by:
- Going to the Edit screen
- Looking in the Inspector pane
- Enabling Cropping, and adjusting the dimensions accordingly

However, this alone does not seem to do what I want. While I do see a nice crisp black border around my cropped video, it's not centering the video, and not zooming/ scaling to fill the frame.

How do I center and zoom the cropped video?

Also, do I need to concern myself with maintaining aspect ratio? I'm OK with black bars on the sides, but I'm not sure what the "right way" to output the video would be. I'd assume it'd be to crop to actual dimensions, and leave scaling and adding black bars up to the device doing playback.

Try doing all the adjustments on the color page input sizing controls.

If the gate flutters, you may need to put a motion tracker on it to keep it centered.

You need to use the zoom and position settings in the inspector instead of the cropping settings. You might also want to use a perspective effect to correct any keystoning caused by your camera being off axis from the screen. I think the dust removal effect works by comparing adjacent frames. Your video will contain duplicates of frames because of the 18fps projector speed. You might want to look into a program I wrote that processes video captures of projectors without a shutter running at slower than real-time and produces true progressive output without flickering. You’ll find it at:

cinextractor(dot)blogspot(dot)com

Import the processed video into Resolve and do your noise reduction, dust removal, and centering/zooming.

jdelisle wrote:Also, do I need to concern myself with maintaining aspect ratio? I'm OK with black bars on the sides, but I'm not sure what the "right way" to output the video would be. I'd assume it'd be to crop to actual dimensions, and leave scaling and adding black bars up to the device doing playback.

What I usually look for is the camera aperture edges in the 4 corners of the picture, then I zoom in slightly to eliminate them and choose a 1.33 mask from the Timeline menu. The modern convention seems to be to show old Super 8 and 16mm images with the full image including the 4 corners of the image, just because it looks "nostalgic." I see this done all the time for faux-Super 8mm images on TV series.

There are very affordable 8mm/Super 8mm scanning companies out there that will convert your material to digital files, and that will avoid a lot of the flickering/smearing issues you're seeing. Scanners generally tend to be steadier than a projector as well.

Marc Wielage wrote:What I usually look for is the camera aperture edges in the 4 corners of the picture, then I zoom in slightly to eliminate them and choose a 1.33 mask from the Timeline menu.

Thanks Mark I'll give that a try.

Marc Wielage wrote:There are very affordable 8mm/Super 8mm scanning companies out there that will convert your material to digital files, and that will avoid a lot of the flickering/smearing issues you're seeing. Scanners generally tend to be steadier than a projector as well.

Right, I plan to do that, but I have like 60 reels of 8mm+Super8mm, so I first have to make them accessible to family/ friends so we can identify which we'd like professionally digitized.

Maybe one of these? https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/ ... per_8.html