It began with the death of a film maker. After the funeral talk turned to his collection of home movies on standard-8mm and how hard it would be to see them now. He used the Eumig tape-link to match sound to picture and the set-up was an ingenious home-made lash-up.

Enter NLE.

We got the best transfer we could to mini-dv tape. For us it was worth the cost of cleaning the film and having that professionally done, though plenty of people have their own film to tape copying arrangements.

Then all I had to do was copy the images into my PC, capture the sound there and marry them up. Easy.

NOT.

I guess that Sound Forge with its ability to stretch and shrink soundtracks without changing the pitch would have done the trick. Lacking that excellent program I had to cut the sound into shortish chunks and match it as best I could to the pictures. Sometimes I could fill in gaps with the ambient sound or music used elsewhere but this proved a nightmare.

The pictures were more straightforward. On close examination it was amazing how much muck was caused by splices - whether cement or tape. The join itself usually intruded on the picture space (no frame-line splices here!) and often as not the frames either side carried extra muck and marks too.

With Premiere set to show individual frames it was easy to snip out the offending ones. In most cases the trims meant no real difference to the scene, in fact some probably benefitted from tightening up like this.

Where the timing is more crucial - in some properly synched films where picture and sound have to match precisely - another approach is needed. This involves exporting both the clean frame before and the marked one. In Photoshop select an appropriate part of the clean frame and paste it over the mess on the splice line. Usually this is straightforward, if tedious. During very fast action, however, you may need to interpret carefully, adjusting the position of the pasted section to maintain the flow of movement. When done, re-import the corrected splice frame and drop it into place.

Sounds painful? Ask Bernard Ashby who used such a technique to clean-up Sidney Mannasseh's Piston Polka for a recent library issue. Hundreds of cuts, all of fast movement and all timed exactly to the music as part of a very short film.

But there is much more possible.

Another great improvement was re-balancing the colour. I used the Vixen program which among its many tools has a simple white balance tool. Click it on something in the image which ought to be clean white and everything else is adjusted to match. Subtler effects are possible with patience - I managed to adjust some slightly dodgy dark scenes - and the impression is one of bright new 8mm rather than faded thirty year-old ones.

The same technique can be used to replace frames where damage such as bad scratching has occurred.

Many early amateur titles were dreadful … remember Pressgrip letter tiles that never managed to stay in line? My late friend did better. He had, for example, a drawing of a schoolchild at a blackboard with the title of a school fete movie "chalked" there. This had suffered lots of scratches and was on the shabby side. It was easy to take one frame of that into Photoshop, "clean" the blackboard by filling it with fresh black and apply beautiful lettering, close to the original style. Import the frame back into Premiere and stretch it to cover the same length as the original, swap them over and Bob's your uncle.

Assembling the cleaned up home movies onto VHS meant they could be presented to the family - video case decorated with suitable frame-captures - in a form they could all watch easily.

The only real pain in it all - some of the early mood music he used. Rumpty-tum-ti-tum-ti-tum. If they were my movies I would change it, but that wasn't the point.

Creative? No. Satisfying and worthwhile? Yes. And it helped teach me some more of the possibilities of my NLE system too.

Page updated on 21 March 2008

Authors' views are not necessarily those of The Institute of Amateur Cinematographers

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