Does anyone have tips for scanning 50+ year old 35mm video to archive quality digital?

Regarding hardware: I have an Epson Perfection V700, which will allow me to scan 35mm if I cut them into strips of 6 cells each, which is not ideal. Isn't there a scanner which could continuously feed in the film, passing it over a fixed lens, to avoid cutting? That would be some great automation!

Regarding scanning resolution: I'm assuming film can produce greater quality than 1080i could support, so I'd like to scan it and save it in a much higher resolution (4000x4000?) so it is "future proof". Is this reasonable?

Regarding storage: Archive quality audio may be 96KHz, 24 bit, stereo WAV; but is there an analogous archive quality video format? If I were to scan at 4kx4k, could I use a format like "The Red" to save at 4x HD? The archive format needs to be universal enough to allow exporting to lower res like DVD or even YouTube (to save it in the cloud).

Thanks for your input.

You want to telecine

You're highly unlikely to achieve satisfactory results yourself. To do 4k HD you'll need to find a TV/film post house that could do it for you. Dependant on the length of the footage, for uncompressed 4k HD you're going to end up with file sizes that range from plain huge to absolutely insane.

Bear in mind the quality of the original film, is it actually going to look any good at 4K res? I got Ghostbusters on Bluray recently and couldn't believe how bad the original film quality was. Otherwise you're going to have to pay someone to restore the footage for you.

When I drive to work and back, I notice there are at least two shops along Aurora avenue that claim to be able to do this for you. (In addition to offering other kinds of video and audio transfer services.)

I know you don't live in Seattle, I'm just saying that there are brick and mortar shops in some cities which can do this job. I'm assuming they have telecine machines.

You don't want to monkey with the frame rate for archival, though. Assuming that your 35mm film is 24fps, you want digital files that are 480p24 or 1080p24. If you also want copies in 480i60 or other p60, i50 or p50 formats, for widest compatibility with televisions as opposed to PCs, then generate those from a 24fps digital master. That Wikipedia article calls that "a scanning system rather than just a telecine system", but I suspect terminology may vary.

One problem you'd have with scanning each frame yourself on a slide scanner (apart from the unbelievable tedium, of course) is getting consistency of registration.

Peter

Which might actually be pretty cool if one was making an artsy short. Especially if the colour also varied between frames.

Given his rather 'exacting' requirements, it's unlikely these guys would be able to achieve the quality he's after. There's places in Manchester that do that sort of thing too, but they're usually cine (8-16mm) to DVD conversions. Even your average TV station isn't going to have a telecine suite nowadays.

All the modern telecine devices I've seen are actually just real time film scanners anyway, I think the days of full frame or line array CCD devices are over.