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8mm Film Telecine

Telecine is a procedure that allows motion images captured on film to be viewed on standard video equipment. The benefits of telecine are numerous, most commonly we are speaking of the film to video transfer which allows 8mm film to be transfered to digital video such as DVD. Being able to use traditional video equipment to view and produce their projects generally allows film makers easier and more affordable solutions, especially in the areas of editing and distribution.

The first telecine machine was invented in 1938 by Cinema Television Limited or "CINTEL," who later was bought by the Rank corp. to form Rank-Cintel. Cintel was originally a specialist division exclusively devoted to film transfer for television. The first application for such a process was to allow networks to broadcast filmed materials. It's no surprise the demand for transferring film to video coincided with the rising popularity of television. The ability to broadcast movie film over television was as vital in the early days as it is now. Television producers looking to fill gaps in programming could broadcast filmed shows instead of having to rely on live performances. Rank-Cintel machines are now used to transfer Hollywood blockbusters to DVD.

The telecine process works much the same way as when film is projected onto a screen. The difference is that instead of projecting the image onto a screen the image is projected into a camera lens. Some telecine processes do project to a screen and then point a camera at the screen and record the image, but this is method provides very poor quality. Generally in higher quality telecine processes the image passes from the projector directly into a camera's CCD. A CCD (Charged Coupling Device) is a sensor made up of photo-sensitive elements (pixels) that convert light into electrical pulses that are then recorded on tape or saved in memory, to be viewed later as a video or still image. The quality of the CCD has a profound effect on the quality of the image that is produced. Generally speaking the best images are produced with higher resolution equipment. Good telecine services will use broadcast quality (3 CCD) cameras with high quality lenses and optics throughout.

The trickiest part of the telecine process is the synchronization of the frame rates between film and video. This is not difficult when the film is photographed at the same frame rate as the video camera will sample. If the frame rates differ, a complicated procedure is required to change frame rate. In countries that use the PAL or SECAM video standards, the process is relatively simple. Film which is to be used for television is captured at 25 frames per second, and PAL video is broadcasted at 25 frames per second. The speed of motion pictures originally photographed at 24 fps is increased by 4% to 25fps. This may cause an increase in audio pitch, which can usually be corrected by other means. For countries that use the NTSC television standard, like the United States, the transfer is more complicated. The NTSC standard broadcasts at 29.97 frames per second which causes problems with film shot at 24 frames per second. To convert 24 frames per second to fit the NTSC standard a process called 3:2: pulldown is used. Basically this process "stretches" the 24 frames in a second of film into 30 frames. This allows the film footage to be viewed correctly instead of "sped up." We must remember that for each frame of video we see, there are two video "fields." Each frame we see on television is produced by scanning the screen twice, in a manner in which the second scan fills in the gaps left by the first. The information from the two scans are what we refer to as fields. During film-to-video transfer alternating combinations of 3 and 2 video fields are brought into play. 30 frames per second leaves us with 60 fields every second. If we transferred 24 frames per second without 3:2 pulldown we would have 48 fields per second. If we alternate frames to produce 2 fields then 3 fields and repeat the process for each second of video we notice that after 12 frames of each (24 frames total) we can do some simple math. 12 frames x 2 fields (24) + 12 frames x 3 fields (36) = 60 fields. Therefore we have slightly extended our original film image in a way that is not visible to the viewer.

Let Home Movie Depot transfer your 8mm, Super8 and 16mm film to DVD. We have developed our own telecine equipment for high quality transfers. Our computer controlled telecine projectors virtually eliminate flicker, color shifts and hot spots on the film. Monitored at all times by both a compuer and a transfer technician, your transfer will be the highest quality. Visit our online calculator and get your free estimate.