Film - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 55

9.5 mm

9.5 mm format

Imaging area
9.65 mm x 7.21 mm

Figure 4-9 9.5mm film dimensions.

736, which is
quite good for an amateur film format. The only material I have ever seen in this format is
black and white, and any color footage would be very rare indeed. Very little of this mate-
rial has a sound track associated with it, although it was possible to add a magnetic stripe
to the edge of the film and use the projector with an auxiliary sound unit.
Scanning this material is somewhat problematic because 9.5mm telecine units are
quite rare. There are specialists who will scan this material for you, or you could build a
telecine unit of your own. The center sprocket hole is also the source of a lot of film dam-
age and ghosting artifacts when watching this format. If the shutter and film movement
are not perfectly synchronized in the projector, you will see the sprocket hole projected on
the screen. Figure 4-10 illustrates the effect.
Most formats place the sprocket holes so they are offset from the horizontal position
of the picture.
A 2K scanner has more than sufficient resolving power for film sizes of 16mm and
below. For example, scanning 8mm film with a 4K scanner just wastes time because the
detail isn't there to begin with.

The imaging rectangle for this format would be approximately 978 ×

4.8.2 Standard 8mm

In the 1950s, home movie enthusiasts embraced the standard 8mm format and it became
very popular. The image rectangle on this film stock is the smallest of all the commonly
used formats. Scanning the projected area at 115 pixels per millimeter will yield an image
size of approximately 529

391. This is somewhat smaller than TV resolution even at stan-
dard definition. Grain size is going to be a significant problem with scanned material from
this format. Figure 4-11 shows the layout of standard 8mm film.

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