We get a lot of cine film to transfer and – mostly – it is silent footage. Even when there is a sound track stripe (the magnetic strip on the sides of the film) it is usually unrecorded. However there are films where there is a recorded sound track and, of course, we want to digitise that along with the movie so how can we do it ?
We scan the movie frame by frame, each frame takes about 2 seconds to scan and save to file Clearly the sound track, which needs to be run smoothly over the players heads like any tape recorder, cannot be recorded by this method. The solution is simple enough, in addition to our frame by frame scanning we play the movie on a standard Norris super 8 sound projector recording both sound and images.
The next bit is the fun bit.
We place the two sets of unedited MP4 digitised movie side by side on the editor – we use Final Cut Pro – we align the movies and match their speeds to ensure that the sound and movie are in sync. Once we have done this we can delete the movie footage from the Norris projector deck and tie the sound to the frame by frame footage.
Easy – but time consuming. Now we edit the movie.
I hope you find these blogs informative and if you ever have any questions please feel free to call us, you are always welcome to drop by to discuss your projects be it slides, negatives, video or cine.
David February 2019 Saturn Films 1969 – celebrating 50 years 1969-2019