Reel to Reel question... Not what you think...

[jcr159]

Capstan addresses pitch plus any wow and flutter. It's been used by legit studios and works on music and that has made the releases of otherwise not possible. Just google capstan software. Its expensive...they only rent out the software. But they give you a chance to try it and you decide if it works. From what I've heard it does.

I’ll look into it, but can’t understand how it would do a good job without any sort of reference signaling to correct to. This is all home movie personal stuff, so quality is all over the place

 

[kemmler3D]

how it would do a good job without any sort of reference signaling to correct to

Wow and flutter will tend to be pitch modulations with a certain frequency and amplitude of their own, within a limited range. If you look at a spectrogram you could probably learn to pick them out by eye, and so maybe Capstan uses a machine learning approach based on that.

For example, with music, if you have modulations of less than one semitone, you can simply compare the same notes across time and extract the pitch modulation, then reverse it.

With voice, the harmonics won't be the same from phrase to phrase, but for a given person speaking on the recording, the formant frequencies will be fixed, so if you can detect those, you can also extract the pitch modulation.

 

[jcr159]

Wow and flutter will tend to be pitch modulations with a certain frequency and amplitude of their own, within a limited range. If you look at a spectrogram you could probably learn to pick them out by eye, and so maybe Capstan uses a machine learning approach based on that.

For example, with music, if you have modulations of less than one semitone, you can simply compare the same notes across time and extract the pitch modulation, then reverse it.

With voice, the harmonics won't be the same from phrase to phrase, but for a given person speaking on the recording, the formant frequencies will be fixed, so if you can detect those, you can also extract the pitch modulation.

Good stuff…. I’m thinking more like the sections with limited or no audio since it’s likely less continuous than music. I’ll check it out to see the price though. More tools in the toolbox are always good

 

[kemmler3D]

the sections with limited or no audio since it’s likely less continuous than music

Good point. It just occurred to me that you could also track the motion of the background noise as it undergoes pitch modulation, so I guess you don't even really need distinct harmonics to look at. Pitch correcting "silence"... what a concept.

 

[jcr159]

Good point. It just occurred to me that you could also track the motion of the background noise as it undergoes pitch modulation, so I guess you don't even really need distinct harmonics to look at. Pitch correcting "silence"... what a concept.

Lol, I thought with digital I was done worrying about wow and flutter…. Now I’m trying to figure out if software can track it in background noise!

2 steps forward, 1 step back!

 

[Cbdb2]

You could 3D print reels with the correct width and lateral alignment for the film, no problem, so physically getting the film from one reel, through the machine, and onto the other reel should be no big deal if you are willing to mess with that, or have someone mess with it for you.

I agree that adjusting the tape heads to correctly pick up the audio on the film might be a challenge... the width of the audio track on the film is going to be much narrower than a typical 1/4" tape, right? So I wonder if it's going to work right at all even if you can physically get everything into the right position. Worth a shot IMO, but I'd be pessimistic about sound quality...

edit, just saw this is an old thread.
How wide is the mag track? An old 8 track cassette has 1/4 inch tape, thats track width of 1/32" , cassette is 1/16"