David Stein, a software engineer and film preservationist, recently unveiled a homemade film scanner that breathes new life into a trove of decaying reels from his father's high school football days.
The device, cobbled together from a 1928 movie projector, a Raspberry Pi single‑board computer and an Arduino microcontroller, gently feeds fragile film through a custom gate while a Pi camera records each frame at a steady eight frames per second, later interpolated to smooth 30‑frame playback.
A five‑millisecond exposure freezes each image mid‑pulldown, and a Python pipeline fed through FFmpeg selects the sharpest still from each group, turning a century‑old medium into a modern digital archive.
A personal connection
The resulting footage captures players who are now in their seventies, allowing them to revisit their youthful selves and share those moments with younger generations, including a longtime fan who now contacts Stein regularly to discuss the games.
Stein’s work has attracted attention from technology and culture outlets, being featured by The Verge, Popular Mechanics and Nerdist, highlighting the growing role of DIY ingenuity in safeguarding cultural heritage.