Kinograph: Open-Source Film Digitization

Looked at it a few years ago, the gate stuff was meh, bought a good old projector off ebay, added a 95 CRI led instead of the bulb and replaced the motor with a stepper to accurately control film advance and used a modified canon with magic lantern firmware to do the capture with silent shutter to not kill the camera or use beyond video resolution (which is overkill, i know, but I wanted both hdr and wdr so multi shots). Fun little project if you have the image processing knowledge. Else, the lazy best bang for the buck deal is getting a wolverine film digitizer, too bad the firmware isn’t open tho.

an excellent project!

The golden standard for film scanning is still this badboy: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/282841082109 It was designed to be the very best. the marble slab comes from the same mine as Michelangelo's David (or so I was told).

Its so thick to provide both heat and inertial damping, so that when the linear scanner moves, it doesn't cause wobble.

The film gate is designed to be repeatable, supposedly you can rescan film and any VFX that you have overlaid will still line up. I never tested that.

the one thing I can't see with the kinograph is how the registration of the film gate is done. it looks like its friction only, rather than pressure plate. A good pressure plate make sure that the film is as flat as its going to be, making the optical scan much clearer. This means that in theory you can lower the light needed and have a lower f-number

I would be interested in a good open-source software workflow for enhancing digitized film. Things like removing dust and scratches, correcting contrast, frame interpolation, and upscaling.

Several years ago I researched this I ended up having to install a bunch of old Windows software that barely worked with modern versions of Windows. I tried again more recently with some of the ML-based enhancements, but it was still far from simple.

Is this Russian? Because the world "kino" is used. :)

I wonder why the YouTube channel is banned to hell.