Yo team — this is one story that needs a full rewrite because it hits all three things I love: vintage tech, modern computing, and some genuine emotion at the end! The project started when David Stein was searching for footage of his dad’s high school football games. Some Super 8 from his grandfather had been scanned, and even though the school donated its 16mm reels to Pittsburgh's Heinz History Center, not everything made it into the archive — and the remaining unarchived film was rotting in a storage room with vinegar syndrome setting in (that’s acetate degradation). At $200 per reel for professional digitizing, David couldn't afford to save every decaying spool, so he built his own scanner. The core is actually a genuine film projector from 1928 — which moves the brittle film through a gate gently instead of tearing it — modified to work with modern electronics.
The brain behind the build is a Raspberry Pi 5 paired with an RPi High Quality Camera and a microscope lens focused on the film gate, and here’s where the tech story gets really cool: David's first version (on a Pi 4) needed over 18 hours to scan one 400-foot reel. By upgrading to the Pi 5 he could "overcrank" — running the transport continuously at eight frames per second with an Arduino, two TB6600 drivers, and a ten-second soft ramp so the film never jerks. The RPi camera records continuous video at 30fps in 60-second chunks with five-millisecond exposures to freeze each frame mid-pull down, then FFmpeg extracts the sharpest one per group via Python. That dropped capture time for a full reel from eighteen hours down to just four — and when David showed his dad those games, it was like he'd watched them at seventeen again. His dad actually made a new friend from one of the older reels who calls him periodically now! You can follow David’s work as founder of Eight by Two Films online too if you want to see more film preservation builds.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/saving-family-football-footage-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-1928-projector/
The brain behind the build is a Raspberry Pi 5 paired with an RPi High Quality Camera and a microscope lens focused on the film gate, and here’s where the tech story gets really cool: David's first version (on a Pi 4) needed over 18 hours to scan one 400-foot reel. By upgrading to the Pi 5 he could "overcrank" — running the transport continuously at eight frames per second with an Arduino, two TB6600 drivers, and a ten-second soft ramp so the film never jerks. The RPi camera records continuous video at 30fps in 60-second chunks with five-millisecond exposures to freeze each frame mid-pull down, then FFmpeg extracts the sharpest one per group via Python. That dropped capture time for a full reel from eighteen hours down to just four — and when David showed his dad those games, it was like he'd watched them at seventeen again. His dad actually made a new friend from one of the older reels who calls him periodically now! You can follow David’s work as founder of Eight by Two Films online too if you want to see more film preservation builds.
Source: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/saving-family-football-footage-with-a-raspberry-pi-and-a-1928-projector/