Modding the Kodak Reels 8mm Film Digitizer (Firmware Hack)

EDIT - see following comment.

Does anyone know what causes the picture to be taken for each frame? Is it mechanical (linked to the frame advance) or optical (perhaps a sensor on the sprocket hole?).

Only I have one film that scans in *really* juddery. It looks OK on the screen while it's scanning, but the video file produced is very juddery, and often shows the line between the frames and sometimes even a bit of the adjacent frame at the top of the video. Like I said, none of this appears on the mini-screen while scanning.

The reason I asked about optical or mechanical shutter triggering is because if I look at the actual film I can see transparent areas around the sprocket holes.

Shame, because this is an important family film, so I'd really like to be able to scan it.

I'm using the latest @Mac84 firmware BTW. I couldn't get the @0dan0 version to work on my machine.

PaulOckenden said:

Does anyone know what causes the picture to be taken for each frame? Is it mechanical (linked to the frame advance) or optical (perhaps a sensor on the sprocket hole?).

Only I have one film that scans in *really* juddery. It looks OK on the screen while it's scanning, but the video file produced is very juddery, and often shows the line between the frames and sometimes even a bit of the adjacent frame at the top of the video. Like I said, none of this appears on the mini-screen while scanning.

The reason I asked about optical or mechanical shutter triggering is because if I look at the actual film I can see transparent areas around the sprocket holes.

Shame, because this is an important family film, so I'd really like to be able to scan it.

I'm using the latest @Mac84 firmware BTW. I couldn't get the @0dan0 version to work on my machine.

Click to expand...

Scrap that - it's the machine that's broken. Films which scanned perfectly yesterday are now showing this juddering too.

Unless there's an easy fix it'll have to go back for a replacement.

rms337 said:

Here is an example of mine during capture. B model v6.8 with a 32GB card. It did the same with 4GB card (just trying anything at this point). I am still willing to hook up a serial reader if I knew what needed to be captured.

Click to expand...

Thank you the for video. I think there might be an exposure bias in the non-volatile memory. V6.8 using extra memory locations to store green tint and exposure bias. The firmware assumes these location are zero as initial condition, but what if they weren't. I will work on a variation to test this.

With a serial port it is easy to test. I going to display green tint and ev bias with the histogram in V6.9.

PaulOckenden said:

Scrap that - it's the machine that's broken. Films which scanned perfectly yesterday are now showing this juddering too.

Unless there's an easy fix it'll have to go back for a replacement.

Click to expand...

I scanned around 1000 films whit @Mac84 s version and some of these films showed jittering too.
I then scanned this film again. if this was not helping, I replaced the glue point at the film start with a new one. If this was not helping either, I changed the selection of the scan window and put it one or two pictures up or down ... Now I have all films with nearly no jittering. But I wait for the newst version from @0dan0 with no jittering and the correct color grading and the correct brightness.

TheElk said:

I scanned around 1000 films whit @Mac84 s version and some of these films showed jittering too.
I then scanned this film again. if this was not helping, I replaced the glue point at the film start with a new one. If this was not helping either, I changed the selection of the scan window and put it one or two pictures up or down ... Now I have all films with nearly no jittering. But I wait for the newst version from @0dan0 with no jittering and the correct color grading and the correct brightness.

Click to expand...

Mine is definitely a fault. About half way through a film it started juddering, and then subsequently any film I scanned (including those which had previously scanned perfectly) juddered badly too.
Something has obviously come adrift inside the machine. Luckily it’s fairly new so I can just exchange it, if it was a bit older I’d have pulled it apart to see if I could fix it.