This site is not intended as an instruction manual for how to specifically build a telecine machine but does, in one way or another, probably contain sufficient information to do so.

These pages are more of a mixed bag of various designs, tests, experiments and results. Older information doesn't necessarily mean bad information, just that I may have come up with alternative methods to suit a particular scenario. For example, I made an early design for triggering using an optical slotted switch but for a later projector, the mechanics would not easily allow this approach and so I designed a magnetic sensor trigger using a Hall Effect sensor.

The original aim of this project was to be able to transfer around fifty Regular 8mm films taken by my mother-in-law of my wife's childhood days. This is still my first target, but of course since then word has spread around my friends and family (I guess I've talked too much about it!) and now I'm being threatened with the odd shoebox or two of films to transfer.... mostly R8, but some S8.

But it has got worse than that, I started out with the notion of a low cost solution, but then I got hooked on the challenge of getting the best from 8mm at a relatively low cost. By relatively, I mean quality which matches as close as possible to professional transfer machines in the £10~£100K for a mere fraction of that. Clearly much of the cost of professional machines goes into fast, robust and repeatable machinery which is suitable for business users. I'm just using secondhand old projectors! Most of my money has gone into a decent machine vision camera, reasonable lens, controllable LED lighting and a powerful DC motor.

Of course, please feel free to browse around and I hope you find something of interest. If you do, don't be afraid to get in touch with comments, suggestions or questions - or just to say hello!

This site will be updated from time to time as my project progresses and I'll add to the Page Updates section below accordingly so you may see easily what may have changed since your last visit.

Finally, I should make it clear that not everything here has come from my own mind of course...far from it in fact! As such, I'm indebted to the many friends I've made over the internet during the project and to the volumes of telecine information already published on many sites. The LED lighting system, motor control and the front-end of the capture software are my own designs. The idea for using a machine vision camera, I got from VideoFred ;)
I do owe Fred and also Christoph Manz in Berlin a big thanks for their ongoing support, advice and expertise. I hope my lighting and capture contributions to their similar projects will make it even!

Page Updates

3rd May 2010 - Made changes to the uploaded video clips on the Results page to hopefully work on more browsers.

2nd May 2010 later the same day ;)- Added a video capture clip and link to larger version on the Results page.
Fixed the menu section to work better in non-IE browsers (still not quite as intended yet!)

2nd May 2010 - Added a picture to the Lighting section of some of the board sets I've made for friends

23rd April 2010 - Added back into the Archive page the content from my original Eumig 610D page

11th April 2010 - Added a few words and a picture of the hardware LED control panel to the Control & Capture page,

29th March 2010 - The switch to BST and Spring in the air brings a complete makeover for the site! A new colour scheme and rearrangement of information to better reflect the current state of the project. For reference, old stuff has been moved to an Archive section and there is now a Tech section of various bits of circuits and timing explanations.

A possible result of the makeover could be broken external links into this site. Sorry about that, but I would prefer all links to be to the home page anyway.