Transfering from 16mm film to DV

Not sure if this is an appropriate place to post about this, but I'm having problems transferring from 16mm to DV. There's a lot of flicking happening and I'm pretty sure this has to do with the shutter speed, although whether it needs to be changed on the camera or the framerate in FCP needs to be changed I'm not sure. The camera I'm using to transfer over is a GL2, and I'm using the most up-to-date FCP.

Are you doing a home-made transfer?

It's for a school project. A couch came to our TV Production center and asked that we trnasfer his old tapes to digital. I happened to be the only one willing to try, so I got the job.

The process you need is Telecine and there are expensive way and less expensive was of doing this. Essentially, you need to project the film onto a mirror that a video capture device looks at in real time. Capturing onto a video camera is one way. A real Telecine process is more expensive but done the right way.

If I'm going to capture by video camera, how would I go about doing so properly?

You need a five-blade 16mm projector. Try to find it on eBay.

Of course by the time you're done you'd wish you had sent the film to a telecine house :-)

Five blade projector is the tried and true low rent solution.

You might try mucking with your shutter speeds, if the above is a no-go. A higher shutter speed in the camera may help- if the projector puts out enough light to allow it.

Alternatively, shooting at an off speed frame rate in the camera (1/30 or even 1/15 shutter speed) and then adjusting the playback speed in FCP after it's captured to something approximating the true frame rate might work. You could even try using the "silent" (16FPS) rate on the projector and see if that helps (and I'm assuming the 16mm footage is all MOS, because I doubt that you'll ever get back to a true synch rate)

Big wanking, though, and it'll never be pretty.

Well it doesn't need to be super pretty, just not seizure inducing.