DIGITIZING LOMOKINO FOOTAGE The Lomokino is a fun & unique film camera that allows you to shoot short movies with typical photo 35mm film. This guide will show you how to scan the processed film and produce Quicktime files or Image Sequences using Adobe Photoshop. In this guide, we used processed negative film, cut into series of shots, and scanned using Epson Photo scanners available in FVNMA and CRIT Labs. It s not a complicated process and it allows you to export Quicktime movies or Image Sequences. Page 1 of 7
Scan Film w/ Epson scan Scan settings Original Use these settings as you see them on the right. Document Type: Film (with Film Holder) Film Type: Color Negative Film Destination Image Type: 24bit Color Resolution: 1200 DPI Do not set document size, this will change on its own. Target Size: Original Once your scan settings are set, select Preview in the lower left hand corner. Scan Preview Once the Preview window opens, the scanner will do a preliminary scan of the scanning bed. This can take several minutes, so be patient. create scan areas Once your preliminary scan is completed, you will see a preview of the bed. Use the Marquee tool to scan each full strip. Do not scan individual frames. On the left you can see we have only two scanning areas set. Note: it is okay to have some space around the edges of the film, they will be cropped out later once we are in Adobe Photoshop. Page 2 of 7
process scans using photoshop Create a new Photoshop Document We suggest these settings for LomoKino scans. Note that the camera shoots in a very wide frame. The ones noted below are the ones most important to pay attention to. Once these settings are correct, hit Create. Document Settings: Width: 2250 pixels Height: 820 pixels Resolution: 72 pixels/inch Color Mode: RGB Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square use the Motion Workspace Once in a photoshop document, I found it easiest to work in the Motion Workspace. This is found in the menu bar: Menu bar > Window > Workspace > Motion Note that you may have to select Reset Motion if it has been altered by a previous user. Most importantly, the Timeline Panel should be visible. Page 3 of 7
Place scan file into Photoshop Import In the Menu, select: File > Place Embedded.. DIGITIZING LOMOKINO FOOTAGE a popup dialogue will appear, and select one of your LomoKino scans. This will place the scan into the frame, and put it onto its own layer. Scale and Fit to Frame Now that your scan is in the document, you will need to scale your scan, and move it so that the first frame completely fills the Photoshop Canvas. We found that with the settings used; scaling up 3350% and recentering worked very well. In this example we also found it useful to rotate the frame half a degree, however this will differ wildly depending on your scan. Once complete, hit the checkmark on the right hand side of the transform panel and your frame should fill the canvas like our example here: Setup Timeline & keyframing Before we start keyframing and adding motion you will need to keep a number of things in mind before you get started. Timeline Frame Rate & Number of Frames Framerate is the number of frames the footage will be played back per second. So if your Kino scans are in 20 strip lengths, and you play it back at 20 frames per second(fps) you will have 1 second of footage. This is an important thing to consider as the LomoKino does not shoot in a specific frame rate. This will require some tweaking depending on your footage, but in this example we have 18 frames and chose to play it back at 10 FPS. This will export a video of a little less than 2 seconds. Photoshop defaults to 30 fps, so we will need to set the framerate. Page 4 of 7
Setup Timeline Create Video Timeline This is fairly straightforward, all you need to do is select Create Video Timeline in the Timeline panel and you should see something along the lines of this. You can delete the unused Layer 1, but it can come in handy, particulary if your frame needs a matte to fill gaps from resizing or rotating. Set Timeline Frame Rate To set your timeline frame rate, Go to the Timeline Panel and select the Timeline Options in the upper right hand corner. It is a button with three horizontal lines. Select Set Timeline Frame Rate and set the timeline to any rate you would like. In this example we are using 10 fps. create keyframes Start with Frame 1 (00;00;00) Make sure your playhead is at the beginning of the timeline; it is the Red Line with a Blue Triangle above it. In the Timeline, Select the > to expose the keyframe options for your scan(img001). Now Select the stopwatch next to Transform. This will automatically create a keyframe on the first frame. The keyframe is a recording of the position, rotation, and scale of the layer at this frame(00;00;00). You should have something that closely resembles this: (continued on pg.7) Page 5 of 7
DIGITIZING LOMOKINO FOOTAGE Keyframe your Last Frame (00m;01s;07f) The strip scanned in this example had 18 frames in it, thus I will move the playhead to frame 18(01;07) Now that the playhead is on the last frame needed, use the Move Tool to move the scan to the last frame of the shot. Our example now looks like this: playback If done correctly, you should be able to playback your film and it will playback normally. If your film plays back with a moving black bar across the frame like here. You will only need to move the keyframe one frame. Keyframe correction: If the black bar is moving down(from the top of the frame to the bottom): Your keyframe is late and will need to be moved one frame left(earlier in the sequence) If the black bar is moving up(from the bottom of the frame to the top): Your keyframe is early and will need to be moved one frame right(later in the sequence) Page 6 of 7
Exporting Once your video plays back normally you are ready to export your frames to a Quicktime video. Isolate Frames Isolate your work area to just your animated frames, by dragging the end slider to the last frame. Note, that it will look like it is one frame behind the last key frame. It should look like this: Workspace sliders Render Video Next, go to File > Export > Render Video We used the Quicktime H.264 settings below. Note that your framerate and frame range will differ depending on the scan you are converting to video. Page 7 of 7