super 8

12 Articles

8MM Digitization For Anyone

June 28, 2024 by 8 Comments

There’s a pleasing retro analogue experience to shooting Super 8 film, giving as it does the feel of a 1970s home movie to your work. But once you’ve had the film developed, there’s a need for a projector to enjoy the result. Far better to digitize it for a more modern viewing and editing experience. [Elbert] has made a digitizer for 8mm film which takes the best approach, snapping each frame individually to be joined together in a video file as a whole.

The frame of the device is 3D printed, but some parts of a film transport must be higher quality than a printed part can deliver. These, in particular the sprockets, are salvaged from a film viewer, and the movement is powered by a set of stepper motors. The steppers are controlled by an ESP32, and the optics are provided by a USB microscope. All this is hooked up to a PC which grabs each image, and finally stitches them all together using ffmpeg.

As anyone who has dabbled in 8mm film will tell you, there is a lot in the quality of a film digitizer, and it’s often worth paying for a professional job from someone aimed at the film-making world rather than you local photographic print booth. It would be interesting to take a look at this device, and see whether its quality is worth pursuing. After all, some of us have been known to dabble in 8mm film.

Sometimes It’s Worth Waiting: Kodak Finally Release Their Super 8 Camera

November 23, 2023 by 32 Comments

Think of all those promised products that looked so good and were eagerly awaited, but never materialized. Have you ever backed a Kickstarter project in the vain hope that one day your novelty 3D printer might appear? Good luck with the wait! But sometimes, just sometimes, a product everyone thought was dead and gone pops up unexpectedly.

So it is with Kodak’s infamous new Super 8 camera, which they announced in 2018 and had the world of film geeks salivating over, then went quiet on. It’s abandoned, we all thought, and then suddenly five years later it isn’t. If you really must have the latest in analog film-making gear, you can put your name down to order one now.

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Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer

August 23, 2023 by 10 Comments

Despite the near-complete collapse of its ecosystem in the face of portable videocassette camcorders in the 1980s, somehow the 8 mm format, smallest of the movie films, has survived the decades. There’s a special aura around an 8 mm image which electronic recordings don’t replicate, plus for film makers there’s an attraction to working with real film. Unsurprisingly almost all of the devices used with 8 mm film have ceased to be manufactured, but a few items escaped the cut. It’s still possible to buy an 8 mm digitizer for example, and it’s one of these with a Kodak brand that [Mac84] has. Unsatisfied with its image quality, he’s set about tinkering with its firmware to give it some video adjustment possibilities and remove its artifact-prone artificial sharpening.

Helped by the device having a handy EEPROM from which to extract the code, he was able to recover the firmware intact. From here on he was in luck, because the digitizer’s Novatek CPU is shared with some dash cams and this had spawned a hacker scene. From there he was able to find the relevant area and adjust those settings, and after a few false starts, re-flash it to the device.

The results can be seen in the video below the break, and perhaps reveal much about what we expect from an image in the digital age. The sharpened images look good, until we see untampered versions which are closer to the original.

If you don’t have a Kodak scanner you can always build one yourself, and meanwhile like many people we are still wondering what happened to that new Super 8 camera they announced in 2018 but never released.

Continue reading “Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer” →

A terminal window with a search for "Guineau Pig Olympics" is inset on a photo of an ortholinear keyboard attached by a yellow USB cable to a 70s aluminum and plastic Super 8 film editor/viewer. The device has a large screen on the right hand side, a silver grate on the left, and a tray at the bottom for slotting in film.

Super 8 Film Editor Reborn As A YouTube Terminal

October 30, 2022 by 14 Comments

We love hacks that give new life to old gadgets, and [edwardianpug]’s YouTube Terminal certainly fits the bill by putting new hardware inside a Super 8 film editor.

[edwardianpug] could have relegated this classy-looking piece of A/V history to a shelf for display, but instead she decided to refresh its components so it could display any YouTube video instead of just one strip of film at a time. The Boost-Box keeps the retrofuturistic theme going by using the terminal to search for and play videos via Ytfzf.

The original screen has been replaced by an 800×600 LCD, and the yellow USB cord gives a nice splash of color to connect the ortholinear keyboard to the device. Lest you think that this “ruined” a working piece of retro-tech, [edwardianpug] says that 20 minutes would get this device back to watching old movies.

Are you looking for more modern and retro mashups? Check out these Dice Towers Built In Beautiful Retro Cases, a Vacuum Tube and Microcontroller Ham Transmitter, or this Cyberdeck in a Retro Speaker.

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Super 8 Camera Brought Back To Life

September 30, 2021 by 32 Comments

The Super 8 camera, while a groundbreaking video recorder in its time, is borderline unusable now. Even if you can get film for it (and afford its often enormous price), it still only records on 8mm film which isn’t exactly the best quality of film around, not to mention that a good percentage of these cameras couldn’t even record audio. They were largely made obsolete by camcorders in the late ’80s and early ’90s, although some are still used for niche artistic purposes. If you’d rather not foot the bill for the film, though, you can still put one of these to work with the help of a Raspberry Pi.

[befinitiv] has a knack for repurposing antique analog equipment like this while preserving its aesthetic. While the bulk of the space inside of this camera would normally be used for housing film, this makes a perfect spot to place a Raspberry Pi Zero, a rechargeable battery, and a power converter circuit all in a 3D printed enclosure that snaps into the camera just as a film roll would have. It uses the Pi camera module but still makes use of the camera’s built in optics which include a zoom function. [befinitiv] also incorporated the original record button so that from the outside this looks like a completely unmodified Super 8 camera.

The camera can connect to a WiFi network and can stream live video to a computer, or it can record video files to an internal SD card. As a bonus, thanks to the power converter circuit, it is also capable of charging a cell phone. [befinitiv] notes that many of the aesthetic properties of 8 mm film seem to be preserved when using this method, and he has several theories as to why but no definitive answer. If you’d like to take a look at some of his other projects like this, check out this analog camera that is now able to take digital pictures. Continue reading “Super 8 Camera Brought Back To Life” →

Soviet Super 8 Camera Hides Raspberry Pi Zero

May 4, 2021 by 14 Comments

A few years ago [Xabier Zubizarreta] got it into his head that he wanted to put a modern digital image sensor into a classic Super 8 camera, but he didn’t want to ruin a gorgeous piece of vintage hardware in the process. After a bit of research, he discovered an export version of the Avrora camera made for the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow that could be had for cheap. Figuring nobody would miss a camera built with the utilitarian aesthetics you’d expect of a Soviet-era piece of consumer tech, he set off to cram a Raspberry Pi into its film compartment.

On the Hackaday.io page for this project, [Xabier] explains a bit about the optical properties that make this project challenging. Specifically, the miniature sensor used by the official Raspberry Pi camera module is far smaller than the 8 mm film the camera was designed for. So when the sensor placed at the appropriate focal length for the original film, the image will be cropped considerably. As you can see in the video below, this gives the impression of everything being filmed with a fairly tight zoom.

To perform this modification, [Xabier] first had to liberate the sensor of the Pi Camera from the original optics, and then carefully install it in proper position on the Avrora. To make sure he had it aligned, he watched a live feed from the camera while the epoxy holding the sensor down was curing. This allowed him to make slight adjustments before everything was solidified. With the sensor in place, he only had to stuff the Pi Zero and battery pack into the film compartment, and wire the original camera trigger to the GPIO pins so he could read it in software.

Considering the incredible amount of effort some photographers have put in to adapt their vintage cameras to digital, it’s refreshing to see such a straightforward approach. The resulting video might not be up to modern standards, but with projects like this, that’s sort of the point.

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Hackaday Podcast 034: 15 Years Of Hackaday, ESP8266 Hacked, Hydrogen Seeps Into Cars, Giant Scara Drawbot, Really Remote RC Car Racing

September 6, 2019 by 5 Comments

Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys wish Hackaday a happy fifteenth birthday! We also jump into a few vulns found (and fixed… ish) in the WiFi stack of ESP32/ESP8266 chips, try to get to the bottom of improved search for 3D printable CAD models, and drool over some really cool RC cars that add realism to head-to-head online racing. We look at the machining masterpiece that is a really huge SCARA arm drawbot, ask why Hydrogen cars haven’t been seeing the kind of sunlight that fully electric vehicles do, and give a big nod of approval to a guide on building your own custom USB cables.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

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