I finally managed to get my home telecine software into a state that might make sense to others. So I am placing Freecine under GPLv3.

Freecine contains both the PC software for controlling the scanning process and postprocessing scans as well as the software running inside NXT. It is written in Java, but as it uses some native services it most probably does not fully work in other environments than Linux. That said, porting it to WIndows or Mac should not be too difficult.

Currently Freecine is still very tightly dependent on my environment, so it will certainly need some tweaking to get it work. I intend to do a proper release shortly (next weekend?), so until then consider this as a sneak preview ;-) But for those who are interested, the source code is available from Git repository at https://github.com/hkaimio/freecine.

The software has a simple UI for scanning the film and doing some pretty basic color corrections. I have developed much more sophisticated color correction features for Photovault, my photo archiving application and I plan to copy those to Freecine as well.

My frame/perforation detection algorithm starts to be reasonable robust, but sometimes it gets fooled by dust inside the perforations or image details that look too much like perforation. Therefore it is also possible to manually adjust the location of perforations.

For now it is possible to save the images as PNG files which can be then converted into a movie by tools like ffmpeg. I am looking at integrating gstreamer into Freecine, so that it would be possible to export directly in movie file format.

Contributions Welcome

I believe that Freecine provides a good starting point for others who want to build a home telecine but it definitely needs further development. I will continue to enhance it for my own purposes but I really hope that you will also contribute your improvements if you find it useful.

About the Name

I choose the name “Freecine” because it rhymes nicely with “telecine” and I would like this to become a free project (in the sense of freedom) After selecting the name I found out that a while back the Cinerella community version considered independently exactly the same name. However, as they have now decided to use the name “Lumiera” I hope that I don’t stump on their toes with my choice of name.