Here's a Super 8 movie film which I featured in my video about Legacybox
showing what a poor job of a conversion they did of it.
It was basically unwatchable, the footage they gave me -- I'll show you some of that on the
screen right now so you can see just how poor of a job they did at converting this film.
After that video was uploaded I got contacted by Brad Miller of FilmTech Cinema Systems in
Richardson, Texas and he offered to convert this film for me for free using his much higher
quality equipment than what Legacybox uses. He actually has equipment that can scan film
at up to 6.5K, although that would be total overkill for Super 8 film -- that will be
more for 16 or 35 millimeter movie film. This video is not necessarily meant to be just
an ad for Brad's company, even though he did scan this film for me for free, which I'm thankful for.
I'm sure there are many people and companies who can do an equally good job
of scanning and color-correcting movie film. Unfortunately, Legacybox is not one of them, even
though they've licensed the Kodak name and are now also doing business as Kodak Digitizing.
So, I sent him the film and also the same 8 gigabyte USB stick that Legacybox gave me,
and he scanned it at 1080p and 4K 2160p. And just for a comparison the 640x480 video
file that Legacybox gave me of this film was 27 megabytes. The 1080p scan that Brad Miller gave me
is 1 gigabyte, and the 4K scan is 3 gigabytes. So that just gives you a
sample of the massive difference in quality between these scans.
And he wrote a detailed write-up about the process of scanning this film and some of the anomalies
of this film, because it's not a very good quality film -- it's basically a copy of a copy,
so there's some artifacts in this film that are not because of how it was scanned; it's just
because how this film was made. So any visible artifacts you can be sure are on the film itself,
not because of how it was scanned. And he also did some color correction,
which i'm really surprised at how good it turned out because I didn't think it would
be possible to restore proper colors to a film that has faded to mostly red, like a lot of color
film from the mid-20th century has become. Brad runs a YouTube channel called FT Depot,
which I'll include a link to if you want to look at some of his videos. But here is
his scan of "Golden California", a 1960s film sold by Universal Studios,
so even if you're not interested in the technical aspects of Super 8 movie film,
you can certainly enjoy this as a look back at California from the 1960s.