"Does anyone have experience with the Tobin Cinema Systems 8mm video transfer machines that they wouldn't mind sharing? Any feedback about these or other available Regular 8 transfer machines would be appreciated."

Leo Enticknap replies:

In the last archive I worked for we bought the MWA-Nova 'Flashscan' telecines (one model is convertable between standard and super 8, the other does 9.5 only) - see ( In the US/Canada, http://www.flashscan8.us TL) http://www.mwa-nova.de/flashscan8.htm.

For our purpose they were ideal.

The LED array light source with variable colour temperature means no heat damage to films and the ability to offset colour dye fading without the need for digital post-capture processing. The digital frame store enables any speed from 3-25fps to be selected, interlaced or progressive. The continuous motion mechanism is very film-friendly, and it has outputs for composite, component, s-video, SDI 10-bit or IEEE1394 DV (both including embedded digital audio).

My one and only crticism is that the magnetic sound offset is fixed for super 8 and so if you want to transfer standard 8 with sound, you'll need to correct this post-capture to allow for the offset difference; but with that one caveat we found the Flashscan to be a truly superb machine, and ideally suited to our needs. These were, basically, to produce broadcast standard SD transfers of small gauge elements, at the correct speed and with colour correction in come cases.

One other potential issue is that the NTSC and PAL versions of the Flashscan are totally separate: they don't do one model which is switchable between the two systems. For us this wasn't a problem, as the demand was had for NTSC transfers was low enough that we could simply capture in PAL and then convert using Adobe After Effects: but if you're going to need to do a significant volume of work
in both systems, this could be something you'll need to think about.

The Flashscan is priced significantly higher than either the Tobin or the Moviestuff systems. At around 30k euros (the exact price depends what options you add to the basic spec), it occupies a mid-point in the market between budget options like Tobin/Moviestuff and the high end stuff like a small-gauge fitted Cintel or Spirit. I have no experience with Tobin systems.

We did seriously consider Moviestuff. The technical quality of the transfers is great, but because the film transport mechanism is a projector with claw-based intermittent the risk of perf damage exists, especially on older, shrunk elements; and because it'll only capture in stop motion at 6fps, the total throughput per unit is not realistic for an archive needing to transfer significant volumes of material (even after capturing at around a third of real time speed, you then need to render the final file in a PC or Mac, and then output it to tape if needed).

We calculated that we'd need to buy three projector/camera/PC combinations at around $12k each in order to match the throughput of one Flashscan.

Leo

Leo Enticknap
Lecturer in Cinema
Institute of Communications Studies
University of Leeds, UK
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk
www.enticknap.net