The old DIY super8 film scanner project rides again !

Well I've been at home this last month and sorting through a lot of old things. High on a shelf in my studio I found a plastic box with my abandoned cine film digitizing project inside; so I dusted it off a bit and decided to see if I could get it running again.

Amazingly it DOES seem to be working!

I documented this project a bit back in the day. I stopped working on all this cine film stuff around 2014 when I had more pressing work/life commitments to attend to.

So not only have I now got it up and runnig again, but I've even made some small improvements! I've got the device working now with my newer Panasonic GH4 camera rather than the Canon 600D DSLR I was using before. I figure that the smaller micro 4/3 sensor is better for this application requiring less extreme macro magnification than the larger APSC sensor needed. Also the GH4 has an 'electronic shutter' mode which should be a lot more durable than the all-mechanical shutter on the Canon DSLR.

The electronic triggering circuit of my device needed a slight modification to trigger the shutter of the GH4. But I got it working after some web searching and a few hours of further tinkering.

So to show the world the current status of this project I've made this short video...