Super 8 Final Cut Tricks to Restore Film Footage 

Normal 8 had the advantage, that it could be developed on 16 mm equipment, you got a spool with 16 mm film what has the double number of perforations on each side and you use two times the half of it. Initially Super 8 was in a cassette, but in East Europe they also mixed the initial concept of normal 8, so you had a 16 mm stripe with Super 8 perforations at each side. Don't mess it with Super 16 mm. Super 16 mm uses 16 mm film with single perforations, as the standard is for 16 mm film with optical and later magnetic sound track, but the area that contains usually the sound is used for the picture, so it's a bit wider. There is optical printing needed, to be compatible with the usual projectors, it's a production only format, as it was 65 mm film for Todd AO, 55 mm Cinemascope film or Vistavision, all these processes could produce 70 mm, non anamorphic 35 mm film and Cinemascope or Panavision.

This is fantastic and very well presented. I am about to restore a load of films my dad made in the 70’s, when he was in the army. Great work, well done!

Thank you, The Drunk Bridesmaid! That is an amazing FCP instruction. I am restoring 60 minutes of Super8 film I shot while serving in Vietnam. Your tutorial is just what I was looking for. Thank you!

I love the way you explain everything. Thank you so much for this content. Exactly what I needed :)

This video was super helpful, thank so much!

Excellent tutorial. Especially the Gaussian mask and video scopes functions. Really helpful. Thanks.

Thank you for making such a good tutorial!

This is a very very cool and accurate tutorial. Thx

You have helped us immensely Thank You We have 3 Elmo transfer systems so our start is good we just need to clean up the footage and this video helped

your tips truly helped me restore my old film. you are a genius girl. thanls

Wow! Not only was your video so very helpful, I was actually at that same event at the Minnesota Dragways. I literally lived at that dragstrip on weekends. Thank you not only for information, but a huge shot of nostalgia too! I have some still photos of the event, but not sure about my 8mm movies. Thanks again

Very helpful tutorial. Thank you.

Excellent.

You are so PRO. This is an important subject, but I have not seen anyone tackle it as well. Especially in bringing it to the reach of those who are at a basic level of fcpx. your communication skills are tops. your knowledge tops. My only suggestion is that you SHOOT that organ player at the back of your room :) Please do more videos.

Thanks a lot!

Just for fun, would you like to see what this film looks like in 2k?

Amazing

The fact that even a few years ago you could still give your money to a company and receive 480p scans is, to be completely honest, very sad. Of course the result of a scan depends on the lens used for filming and the quality and degradation of the film, but even Super 8 has A LOT more potential than 480p. I usually have to go over 1080p for my scans to even get the whole grain structure. Anyway, great job with the post processing, that did wonders with the original files :D

Hello, thanks for the great tutorial. I do have a question. Can I convert digitised super 8 negative film to positive in Final Cut Pro?

This is great thanks very much. Another important thing I learned was to clean the film first. I didn't use any chemicals just a microfibre cloth. It was slow but worth it.

The Drunk Bridesmaid, I appreciate your tutorial of digital restoration of super 8mm film. Over the course of about fifteen years of restoring/ remastering standard 8mm, super 8mm and 16mm, I have found the first challenge is to find a scanning company who can scan at the native fps of the film. This is not as simple as it sounds. You are correct in saying super 8mm has a native speed at 18fps (with standard 8 mm running at 16 fps, and 16mm at 24 fps). In any event I have found the best restoration results come from scanning at the native running speed of a film (any film); restoring at that speed, and then utilising Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro to interpolate the film’s frame rate to a chosen video frame rate (i.e NTSC or Pal).

IMO the scanning company could have pulled something higher than SD 640x480.

I like your video and next is that did you purchase noise reduction plugins or us inbuilt effect in FCP X because my FCP X no noise reduction effect.

Nice vid. I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid double frames with my Super 8 footage imported into FCP. It's 18fps, scanned at 30fps in my particular scanning machine. A Final Cut project set at 30fps to match my machine's 30fps output doesn't seem to solve the problem.

Thanks so much for this. What a great tutorial. I just purchased a Wolverine film digitizer in hopes of tackling my parent's Super 8 home movies. This was very helpful. Do you know how well the scans turn out with these type of machines?

Interesting to see how you would do this in FCP. Thanks for sharing but 2 things puzzle me. Why would you only scan at 640x480? And why work in a 24FPS project when the film is 18FPS? IMHO it should be in at least HD 4/3 (ie: about 1440x1080) and closer to 18FPS, wouldn't you agree?

👍👍👍

Footage I’m reviewing is so so overblown! My fossils knew nothing about white balance and ISO 😢

I tried to watch this, but the creator is so stunning i cannot focus.

I think an AI version of this would do wonders.

Nice job, but it could be better