I have a special interest in this thread because I do a lot of 16mm film and obsolete video restoration for various organizations. The idea of restoring a 35mm print is intriguing. It might be worth considering building your own telecine unit. Now before you say "that's nuts", consider what this guy is doing: www.moviestuff.tv. His 16mm telecine units are selling like hot cakes, and they are very simple mods to existing 16mm projectors. All he has essentially done is replace the motor with a much slower one, and added a line out to plug into the mouse port of a computer. That allows the computer to grab the camera images frame-by-frame using existing stop-motion software. In fact, you could even use the existing cinecap software he recommends. The mod to a 35mm projector can't be much harder (heck, maybe that guy could help). It would have to be MUCH cheaper than buying a telecine unit. Then you could fiddle with different cameras, camera settings, lamps/lenses, etc. to get as clean a transfer as you can. It wouldn't be a rank transfer, but it could work, no?
I have a special interest in this thread because I do a lot of 16mm film and obsolete video restoration for various organizations. The idea of restoring a 35mm print is intriguing. It might be worth considering building your own telecine unit. Now before you say "that's nuts", consider what this guy is doing: www.moviestuff.tv. His 16mm telecine units are selling like hot cakes, and they are very simple mods to existing 16mm projectors. All he has essentially done is replace the motor with a much slower one, and added a line out to plug into the mouse port of a computer. That allows the computer to grab the camera images frame-by-frame using existing stop-motion software. In fact, you could even use the existing cinecap software he recommends. The mod to a 35mm projector can't be much harder (heck, maybe that guy could help). It would have to be MUCH cheaper than buying a telecine unit. Then you could fiddle with different cameras, camera settings, lamps/lenses, etc. to get as clean a transfer as you can. It wouldn't be a rank transfer, but it could work, no?