Home Movies on 8mm film to DV

hello all:

i'm working with a guy who offers telecine services to scan some old 8mm home movies that are on film ( not 8mm video tapes). at my request, he's going to return to me a drive full of image sequences of each frame on a given reel. i can easily use the QuickTime player to create 18fps .mov files. however, i want to be able to edit these and eventually author them to DVD, so the 18fps needs to be converted to 29.97fps video for editing in FCP.

so, what is the best tool to use for this job? i've been hunting around inside the CinemaTools user manual and it seems like its conversions are tailored toward mostly 24fps film and the associated pull-down methods of converting that to DV or HDV footage. so, i'm thinking CinemaTools is not the right application here. especially since there's no need for me to go back to the original film masters for cutting.

so my question is should i be using Compressor to convert from an 18fps .mov to a 29.97fps. will compressor produce a video that's both editable in FCP and something that looks good on a DVD?

thanks,
scott

PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Jul 28, 2006 8:04 AM

Jul 31, 2006 6:16 AM in response to David Bogie Chq-1

hi david:

thanks, this was pretty much the direction i was heading and it seems like CinemaTools isn't really the best tool for the job here. i did some experiments this weekend and this is what i found:

i first imported the images into an image sequence .mov file at 15fps. this .mov file can then be resized and compressed with Compressor into any of the standard formats including NTSC DV, HDV 720p, etc. the key to getting the in-between frames to look spectacular is to set the frame rate conversion to Best (High-Quality Motion Compensated). you can also set the resizing method to its best setting as well. this significantly increases the compression times, but the results are very good.

the only caveat i found was that when using a sequence of digital photos with a 3:2 aspect ratio, this doesn't matches neither the DV or HDV native aspect ratios. and compressor doesn't create letter- or pillar-box bars, instead it just stretches or sequeezes the image into the format's frame (4:3 or 16:9). automator can take care of this by processing a folder full of images with the cropping action that's part of one of the suites (can't remember which one right now). if you crop the image into the proper aspect ratio for your source media, it will create the proper black letter- or pillar-box bars.

there's no doubt that this is a time consuming process, but if you want to maintain each frame's quality and fidelity, this certainly works very well.

scott