Clean over my heads...

Among my many camcorders are a couple of Sony V90e models, these were one of the early Video8 camcorders when they were still fairly large and bulky machines, before the smaller tape formats and palmcorders became available.

The V90e is the same type of camera used in the Steven Soderburgh movie ‘Sex, Lies & Videotape’ and famously pictured in the promotional materials for the movie.

Neither of mine has worked in decades, but on a whim I decided to see if I could resurrect them.  One of them was in good shape cosmetically but tape playback was really choppy with lines all over the screen.

I had assumed the problem was a tracking issue, which would need some specialist equipment to fix, but I thought I might try clearing the heads to see if that helped.

I bought some chamois cleaning swabs with bendable plastic handles (these are much better than cotton swabs as the cotton ones will tend to leave fibres on the recording heads) and set up a clean space to open up the camera.

In order to reach the heads for cleaning I had to remove the tape door cover, which is held in place by a couple of tiny screws.  Removing the screws allows the cover to slide up and off the frame, leaving the tape transport and heads exposed.

I coated a swab in isopropyl (from a vhs head cleaning kit) and then held it gently against the head drum while slowly rotating the heads in an anti-clockwise direction.  I used latex gloves to avoid adding grease or fingerprints to the heads.

After doing this a couple of times I reassembled the camera, hooked up the power and inserted a tape.

Incredibly the cleaning did the trick.  The picture playback was now almost totally clear, with only an occasional flicker in the playback.  The camera still has a few visible bits of dust and lint inside so I expect I will need to repeat this process at some point, but I’m really pleased with the results of my first ever attempt to clean heads without a cleaning tape.

If you have an old camcorder that won’t playback cleanly then it might be worth trying this method to see if it fixes the problem.

The thin black line

 

They don’t make ‘em like they used to.  I’ve acquired a lot of different cameras over the years and most of them end up sitting in storage once they’ve been replaced.  I used to spend hours editing tape-to-tape back in the days before capture cards, stacks of S-VHS and M2 tapes, then once non-linear editing arrived I’d spend hours digitising tapes onto the hard drive, and then finally I moved to digital card-based DSLR cameras and I thought I was finished with tapes.

But it’s funny how time changes things, and here I am wading into the old-school tech once again to resurrect some old projects and maybe even give some old cameras one last outing before they finally succumb to the ravages of time.  Nothing lasts for ever and an analogue video camera is no exception.

I’ve got a bunch of different examples stacked in boxes and camera bags, with at least one model from each of the main consumer formats and some of them are still surprisingly capable despite their low resolution capture.

The challenges of shooting with these old cameras are mostly caused by a lack of modern niceties.  You don’t get things like histograms, focus peaking or crisp lcd monitors on these old cameras, in fact for something like this Canonvision VM-E2 you don’t even get a colour viewfinder let alone a useable focus screen.  Flick it into ‘auto focus’ and hope for the best.

I’m very curious to see how the footage holds up against more modern cameras, even a cheap mobile phone will probably have a better sensor than one of these old machines, but there is still something to be said for taking a stroll down memory lane and in this age of Terrabyte micro-sd cards and 128,000iso sensors running 8k resolution it’s weirdly refreshing to have nothing but an old analogue camera with a ccd and a spool of magnetic tape in the camera bag.  I wonder how long it will be before I remember why I upgraded in the first place? :)

Blackmagic... Intensifies

So the plus-side and the downside of clearing out storage boxes is you find all sorts of filmmaking projects and things that you forgot existed or thought were lost. I’ve unearthed a bunch of old old projects from the 90’s including the master tapes for a short film I made in college.  

Naturally I started thinking about what to do with them, and I had the idea that maybe, just maybe it would be possible to convert these old analogue formats over to digital and try doing a ‘directors cut’ with better grading etc.

So that led me down a rabbit hole of jerry rigging old VCRs and DV cameras to try and get the footage in via FireWire, and it worked, I can get these old analog tapes copied to MiniDV and then do a standard EEE 1394 cable transfer.  So far so good.

But then I started thinking what if there is a better way to do it?  One without the intermediate DV compression step?

So it turns out that Blackmagic make this Intensity Pro capture card which accepts analog inputs including S-Video which should (should) be cleaner than converting to DV using the cameras internal hardware.

My shiny new Intensity Pro 4k card arrived this morning.  Time to get out the toolkit and get it installed.

Mystery Film

 

This weekend was spent organising storage boxes and locating misplaced film equipment.  Old cameras and lenses.  I found this forgotten old Super 8mm cartridge in a box, no idea what’s on it, how old it is or even if it’s one that I shot.  Mysterious.  I don’t have a Kodak envelope for it, and I think there aren’t any Kodak labs honouring the old prepaid envelopes these days anyway.  It’s been at least 20 years since I shot anything on my super 8 cameras!

After googling around I found a company called Gauge Film that advertises processing and telecine for S8 and 16mm films, so I’ve booked this mystery cart in for development.  We shall see what happens.  Maybe nothing, maybe an old film of mine or maybe some random film from someone else.  

Over to you Gauge Film. https://www.gaugefilm.co.uk/

Back out of the darkness.  Radio silence.  It’s been nearly ten years since I last updated this blog.  A major move of location, change of job and plenty of procrastination.  Ten years... wow.

A lot of water under the bridge in that time, a whole generation of camera tech, the DSLR fad has come and gone, 35mm adaptors are history, there have been huge changes in tv and film production, streaming services like YouTube and Netflix have come of age... things have really moved on.

Ok so my first order of business is to get back into the swing of things, a quick update... the plane crash short film is finished, I went with the title ‘Tacoma’ in the end, that was the working title (loosely based on the idea of structural failure) and I fully intended to come up with a new title but somehow the working title just felt right.

Tacoma was submitted to various festivals but not a lot of interest, it’s not really a festival film, not art house enough and so I’ve decided to move on from short films.

I’ve got ten years worth of experience, and plenty of new filmmaking gear.  Next project will be the big one.  My first feature length film.  I’ve got a script in development and plenty of ideas.

Onwards!

Filming the plane interior.

We began shooting in earnest today with the aircraft cabin sequence.  This should have been one of the easiest parts of the shoot as I had found several companies advertising cabin sets (most of them are simulators used by airlines to train cabin crews) but when I started trying to make a booking I found that all of them were either out of business or simply not interested in helping a low-budget short film.

Luckily I was able to track down a suitable location at an aircraft museum which was available at the right price.  :)

We shot very light, with minimal lighting (just a couple of LED panels) and relied on the natural lighting in the plane itself.  The shots turned out great and will really help to add some production value to the project.

Next shoot is in a couple of weeks, when we shoot interiors for the main scene that comprises the majority of the film.

Suitcase full of money...

I've been busy assembling the various props I need for the shoot, including a number of plastic aircraft kits that will decorate the boardroom table, and the metal suitcase for the corporate fixer character to carry.

The suitcase is a classic Halliburton I picked up cheaply on ebay, it's a bit rough around the edges, but should be fine for our purposes.  The script calls for the case to be full of money, so I bought some bank training notes from ebay. 

These notes are marked with chinese writing, but I am planning to cover that with a paper 'strap' over the centre of each bundle.

I've mocked up how the case will look by laying the notes out flat, I will glue each one to a section of foamboard, with extra side pieces to create fake bundles of cash for the close up shot.