Si2k as telecine

[Bob Hart]

For the curious, I had a go at using the SI2K to scan motion images off an old Steenbeck ST1600 film editing table. I have a bunch of my own 16mm to digitise and the usual old story of the material not justifiying the expense of having it scanned or telecined.

The Steenbeck needed a bit of healing after a 16 year sleep in a dusty shed. If you are needing product support, Steenbeck's own advice is that the machines of this age should be discarded. Interestingly, Steenbeck in its new iteration in Holland has repurposed its new-build editing tables into motion picture film scanning.

However, all is not lost. There is a provider of service and repair for old Steenbecks in the US findable at New England's Steenbeck & Film Editing Equipment Supplier. He can provide you with the now obsolete 6mm pitch timing belts, used parts and new build new design power management board and rebuilt pre-amplifiers. If you contact him, be prepared for a few days wait as he travels the country fixing things.

The Steenbeck can be converted into an electronic viewer/scanner. The best outcomes will be from a slavable camera which does not have rolling shutter, a sync pulse generator, re-engineered and synchronised flashing projection lamp source, a suitable lens working in an extreme macro arrangement and the Steenbeck's shutter prism removed so that imaging directly off the film plane is enabled.

For a slaved rolling shutter camera, the intermittent function of the prism shutter must be retained. A lesser sharpness will be yielded through the prism shutter and artifacts from internal reflections cause this to be unsuited for scanning negative film. The image inversion and colour grading process massively amplifies any colour or patchy light defects in the image that the prism introduces.

A few folk have modded their Steenbecks with this technique known as "flashscan" where the image from passing film is "frozen" by a short timed and synchronised flash from an LED source focused into a machine vision CCD or global shutter CMOS camera.

For the time being until I can make a precision timing disk and adaptor hub for the bottom of the prism drive, I have been running the camera and the Steenbeck wild in a jigged up proving arrangement.

A periodic artifact from the prism shutter's frame transition, cycles through the recovered motion image due to the machine and the camera being slightly out of sync.

This is seen as a vertical stretching and softer focus every three seconds or so. Slaving the camera to a reference will make that go away.

This is a short piece from some Extachrome reversal which was in an old television archive to be discarded that I scavenged. Reversal image is sharper than workprint off a negative.

STEENBECK SHARP REVERSAL TEST - YouTube