DIY 16mm Telecine

After having shot a few rolls of 16mm, for my film, “A Forest Incantation” I needed a flexible, and very manual method of digitizing the footage.

My goal was to make manually manipluating the footage as easy as possible. I sourced a local hand cranked Kinescope projector, and built this one off device to do frame at a time capture. The kinescope was stripped down to the transport, and initially put on a makeshift rail system from a tile cutter.

The capture side was an old Canon Rebel Xs, tethered to my linux workstation, running Entangle . The lens was mounted backwards using an adapter, allowing for decent looking macro shots. The rail allowed the setup to act like an optical printer, so I could control the amount, shape / size of the film frame to capture. It wasn’t the most stable though, so after a few scenes captured, the rails were removed, and it was clamped to the desk.