Two tracks recorded in late may or early June 2007, in a backroom of a house close to the station of Ezemael, near Tienen, as part of a jam-session. Have you ever been in Ezemael? You should go there on your next visit to Belgium. When coming out of the station, turn right, go down the hill, then turn right again to go underneath the railroad-bridge. There you’ll find the town’s pub. The house where these tracks were recorded is facing the station.
Line-up on these tracks: Diskoster, Cybele Collins, me. I’m running out of soundcloud-space, so these will probably only be up untill I need space for something else.
In my previous post I mentioned an alternative way of digitalising Super8-movies, a method that i.e. boils down to scanning the frames with a flatbed scanner. When that’s done the movie can be recreated by placing all the individual frames in a sequence.
That works – in theory. The downside is that the process is very time consuming, and unless you automate the process of scanning with some DIY-construction also very labor intensive.
In my post I mentioned a piece of software – 8mm2avi – that extracts the frames from a scanned strip of film for you, but – as the site mentions – the program was initially developed for Windows 98 and to get it working under Windows XP (= the version I’m using) you need to manually register a couple dll’s. I’m not a big fan of manually doing all sorts of things in the registry of Windows, so I decided to just try to program as such. My findings: the program actually works “out of the box” under Windows XP – it exhibited some problems with scanning a full strip, but this might be due to my computer not being powerful enough – I successfully scanned a strip of 11 frames, and the program indeed managed to extract the frames from the strip – it’s not totally error-proof though, and you have to fiddle a bit with the height and width of the frames under properties. what didn’t work was rendering the movie from within the program – I didn’t bother trying to get it running, but used Monkey Jam (a simple stop-motion-animation program) to sequence all the frames.
To get things complete: I used a CanoScan F8400, and used the scanning software that came with it.
Conclusion: I’m not impressed with the results I got. My guess is that I would get better results if I would use a more decent piece of scanning software, like Avuescan, which gives you more control over the scanning process – but for the time consuming process it is, the results aren’t any better than using a DIY Telecine Box.
The entries I posted in this blog on DIY Telecine (the process of transferring pellicule – i.e. super8 – to a digital format) are by far the most popular entries I wrote (dixit Google Analytics). I didn’t do much with the installation I build, except for showing it to a friend who cloned it and put it to good use. One of the reasons I eventually don’t use it that much is that setting up the construction is quite time-consuming (camera and all that need to be perfecty aligned). Once you have aligned everything the results are quite satisfying (see below).
Shortly I have been pondering on another way to transfer Super8-films, using a flatbed scanner – I actually tried this once, before building a DIY Telecine box, and that experiment resulted in two small animated gifs. The manual process of cropping the individual frames is what killed my motivation of experimenting further.
I have been Googling a bit just now – Turns out there’s a certain amount of people who build all sorts of constructions to pull super8-film through their scanners. Some even offer Linux-based code on their sites. So far it seems this site offers the only software program that comes with an actual installer for windows (for all us dummies).
I haven’t tried it out yet, so don’t blame me if your computer explodes. If I ever get results that are worth showing I’ll post them here. Promise.
Update: See my next post for the conclusions of my test.
Two friends from Estonia camped in David’s living room for two weeks. A favourite pass-time was surfing youTube, exchanging Belgian for Estonian music, and vice-versa. Telex, The Kids, De Brassers, T.C. Matic in exchange for – err – bands with difficult names. The two bands below were presented as the first Estonian Metal-band (under Soviet regime) and the first Estonian Punk-band.
Gunnar Graps ja GGG – Valgus
J.M.K.E. – Tere Perestroika
The above J.M.K.E.-clip should be of around 1991, if I’m correct. The below one dates from 1988 though – filmed during a clearly more obscure event in what looks like a sporthall, or the backroom of a pub.
The Estonians call themselves The Singing Nation – and they reffer to the events of 1991, when they cut their ties with the Soviet Union, as The Singing Revolution. The two clips below may puzzle you a bit. Especially the second one.
Update: Quoting from the comment Hando made on facebook: “(…) by the way look at the minute 0:54 and afterwards as well…this is our President!! (…)”
This is from – well not so – long ago, some 5 months, to be exact. 27 March 2010 to be absolutely precise. Party + fleamarket at Bolle’s place. Were playing: Weird Dust, Gura and Manory + Manu (I’m not quite sure of the bandsname). The set of Weird Dust was posted a couple entries ago. Here’s the rest. Enjoy!
Tomorrow, saturday 17th, in Nerm: finissage of the expo of 8tal. Expo in ‘t Schip open from 14:00 on. Finissage starts at 19:00. At 20:00: start performance at ‘t Schip (“Liefde en Leed”). Around 21:00 we’ll be heading to The Barn for a performance by Joris.
Here’re some clips of the last edition of “Don’t cum if you don’t like noize” – from top to bottom: Jerking off Coma Patients, Glasberg and Massive Ejaculation, aka Monopolka (I just realise that this post will generate quite a tit bit of visits).
During Jerking Off Coma Patients the cops showed up after a complaint of the neighbours. The cops patiently waited till the set was over, watching things with a bit of amusement. Their intervention explains why the soundvolume in the following clips is less than in the one of Jerking Off Coma Patients.
Glasberg, featuring the same friendly local who you can see swimming in the direction of Jerking Off Coma Patients. He accidently jocked out Glasberg’s power plug, putting an end to his set in a graceful manner.
Monopolka in his latest incarnation, as Massive Ejaculation – an obscure grindcore band from Blackpool, UK,that did a couple of split 7″ releases with bands like Napalm Death and Agathocles, vinyl that nowadays is extremely hard to find, but ought to be in the collection of every self-respecting collectionneur.
Yes, that’s the same friendly local in this clip too.
