Red One Telecine

[Harry Clark]

Hey Red Team,
I have an idea for all those returned Red Ones.
How about making a desktop film scanner?
Simple, gentle transport that triggers a single frame on the Red each time a frame of film lines up. 35mm, 16mm, regular- and Super-8 transports. Maybe a pin? Maybe another way to steady the frame.
Additional project rates of 16 fps and 18 fps.
Cool daylight LED backlight.
RAW capture and add Redcine-X! Bam. Telecine.
A guy can dream, can't he?
Cheers,
Harry

 

[L. Langer]

Somebody already did that several years ago.

 

[Peter Stelzhammer]

Somebody already did that several years ago.

I'd love to see a link… we do 8mm and sometimes 16mm filming off Projectors on a HVX200 and ground glass like all the time…

 

[L. Langer]

Unfortunately, the source blog by the people who did it is gone but you can find bits and pieces that talk about it if you poke through Google. In short, someone took a RED One and a few other doodads, threw them together, and made a telecine to use for 8mm telecine work. A few others have tried it since then with 16 and 35mm but I do not know the specifics of any of those efforts except that Discovery Communications used a RED One to telecine old film reels for their WW2 IN HD project.

 

[martinnoweck]

http://cs.brown.edu/~shay/8mm.html

 

[Harry Clark]

Well, I have seen loads of cobbled together homemade telecines on the internet. Some of them look amazing. Some look amateurish.
Here is a particularly cool one, very finished and compact, in addition to having retro cool:
http://telecine.godiskind.com/2009/01/introduction/
I'm sure as part of the hobbyist movement, someone has tried it with a Red One.
None appear to be pin-registered. All either involve shooting still frames, or Super-8 at 24 fps, which is (usually) incorrect.
I was really asking for a finished product... plug and play. Red already has the back end covered with a high resolution finished product camera, RAW capture, and grading and transcoding software. They would just need to make the transport, sync, and optical systems, and create a firmware that allowed 16 and 18 fps project rates..
Red could develop and sell the film transport as a kit, and we could use our existing Epics, Scarlets, or Red Ones to attached to the "scanner" side.
But I mostly posted to stir the pot. I'm sure they have no intention of developing this kind of product. More of a joke than anything...
Cheers,
Harry