Removing judder from 8mm transfer

I've been spending some time in Lockdown#3 converting some 8mm film I must have taken seventy years ago.

The device to convert is far from pro quality but so was the price!

Am I imaging that I saw a facility in Resolve that would have a go at stabilising the image that has suffered by my using a cheapo device. The problem is simply that the gadget has not been careful enough as it draws and stops each frame before it photographs it.

If Resolve has no facility do any of the gurus know of a third party one I could use?

Tony
London UK

PS. I have also set my Project up at 16fps - still my mum and dad look as if they are running a marathon. Did we shoot slower than 16 in the fifties?

I recently did the same with 8mm films.

A few things I found after many attempts (I used a Wolverine scanner).

Clean the lens and light plate before scanning. Break film reals up into scans of set length (I did about 15 minutes), reclean, backup several frames to cause overlap and startup again.

Try to break up the scans at cut points in the film. This seemed to help with jitter. If I got severe jitter, I would rescan. Expect some misregistration jitter, but not severe jumping.

The scanner created clips of 20fps. I set the clip attribute to 16 fps but the project at 24 fps in resolve. 8mm was generally shot at 15 or 16 fps.

Finally, in resolve I did the following:

Project:
1920x1080 HD
24 fps timeline
Optical Flow
Enhanced Better
Small

On Edit page:
Stabilize:
Transition
Zoom (checked)
Cropping Ratio: .25
Smooth: .25

Crop as needed to clean edges.

On Color page:

Use the Blur section and set to Sharpen. Use as much as can be tolerated (I generally set to 30) in one node.
Add a second note for Noise Reduction. Again as much as can be tolerated. I heavily used both Temporal (Better, Small) and Spacial (Faster, Small).
In another node I did any color and exposure adjustments.

Last I added film grain as an adjustment clip.

Generally this produced good results. Sometimes the optical flow would give strange effects, but overall the quality is very watchable even on large screen formats.

My films are more in the 50 to 60 year old range. I did notice film stock improved over time. I know during this period there was rapid change in the industry, so I can't say if this will work as well for 70 year old film stock.

Wow Earl,

I never expected to get a reply - let alone one so comprehensive.

I wish I had posted a week ago. My last film finished about ten minutes ago.

I have been cleaning the back plate. It never ocurred to me to look at the lens. Never really thought how it worked. I hope it is not too bad.

In my youth I must have tried stop motion as there is one film with a darkroom timer. I have my project set at 16fps but using the timer I need to drop by another 50%. I hope I can do that with Resolve as I could not face rescanning everything. I did that on a short sequence of people walking and it looked pretty convincing.

Now to read the rest of your suggestions.

Brilliant. The wonders of 'forums'.

Tony