Any news or interesting developments with the film scanning industry for 2024?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Any news or interesting developments with the film scanning industry for 2024?

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[Robin Phillips]

my guess is that if there is, we'd hear either at NAB or IBC. this week is CES, and usually is just consumer stuff along with back end broadcast hardware like mass storage solutions and transcoders. IIRC BMD's scanner updates always showed up at NAB and not CES

[Tyler Purcell]

I mean, has there been in the last decade? Not really. 

Scanners have been scanners for awhile. 

Laser Graphics dominates the mid tier. They make THE BEST machine for the money, period. 

DFT and Arri dominate the upper tier. Outside of resolution, none of their machines have changed much in years. 

The lower tier like BMD and Film Fabriek, nothing new there. BMD will require an entirely new design to use a new imager, so that being the only "negative" about the BMD scanner and unfortunately makes it not a very good machine to boot, means there isn't any real developments on that front. They will not be making something new anytime soon sadly. Film Fabriek may have a prototype of their new machine by NAB, but doubtful it will be ready for production. I also don't think it will be game changing, probably just fixing the issues of the old machine. 

So no, nothing new really. 

I will say for the record, I'm pretty chuffed we were able to scan this destroyed film that was literally tearing itself to pieces as it came off the roll. We took a slab, put it between two blocks to get it flat and measure it, which was 15mm wide and the frame size was down by half a mm. It had shrunk THAT much. Emulsion was flaking off in our hands as we worked with it and it was so brittle, it would tear sneezing on it. However, with low-tension mode, a clever little gate I developed with PTFE clamping material and our wet gate, plus two layers of digital restoration, it's now a watchable product. Mind the audio, we did make a mistake on this demo sample that I haven't fixed yet. 

Before: 

AFTER: 

 

[Robert Hart]

 It is not particularly newsworthy or an innovation but I tried making a dip-tank for surface-wetted scratch reduction when scanning 15mm or 8mm film with a Retroscan Mark 2. I was using isopropyl alcohol of claimed 100% purity. It did work but also tended to destabilise the sprocket hole registration.

At more than about 7FPS with 16mm, the material was not drying off before it entered the take-up wind. It is also not benign when it comes to film emulsion. After something like about ten tests with some old print film, I discovered that the base material was cupping and the glazed surface of the emulsion was becoming opaque to the light pin edge detector.

I guess Film Fabriek experimented with full immersion, discovering the pitfalls before going with wicking pads to coat the film more sparingly. Once the emulsion surface has become dull, the film has to be flipped so that the shiny surface of the film base faces the light pin and edges of tape splices do not set off false triggers. In this instance, I was running the film from right to left on the top of the reels to present the shiny base to the light pin detector.

The small knob under the dip-tank is not related to the dip-tank but a speed controller which is not original manufacturer's equipment. My PC hardware and the USB path does ot cope well with the frame rate when capturing with a 4K FLIR camera.

 

Edited January 9 by Robert Hart
error

[Robert Hart]

Here is a link to a test with surface wetted film which worked better when the shiny base of the film was presented to the light pin sensor. Sprocket hole registration is still not as steady as when film is dry. You will observe some patching and banding from earlier successive dips of the film when the material had not flashed off before the film wound onto the reel. The effect of cupping was reduced when the film went over shiny side up.
 

 

Edited January 9 by Robert Hart
error

[Tyler Purcell]

58 minutes ago, Robert Hart said:

 It is not particularly newsworthy or an innovation but I tried making a dip-tank for surface-wetted scratch reduction when scanning 15mm or 8mm film with a Retroscan Mark 2. I was using isopropyl alcohol of claimed 100% purity. It did work but also tended to destabilise the sprocket hole registration.

That's a cool idea. 

Yea the only way for a wet gate to actually work, is if the film is suspended in liquid during the capturing process. 

So the FF system does work ok. Is it perfect? No. 

Our process is to physically examine the film on our rewinds, light box and loupe first. We also thread it up and roll through it by hand to see how bad it is. If it's not horribly dirty, we'll run it with just the wet gate. If it's really dirty, then we clean it with alcohol, running through the PTR's at slow speed, under tension. It works pretty good. We've tried our friends pert machine, it doesn't work that good, for sure not worth the effort. I'd rather just scan and if we see major issues, we can address those issues during the scanning process by hand cleaning the tricky sections with 100% alcohol. 

I don't think it's a great process, but we can't have any other chemicals without proper venting. So it's challenging. A vent hood with rewinds and a light table, would help greatly, but we'd need some system to view the film so we can find the issues. Currently, we find them as we scan and we can just assemble the cuts (start stops of scanner) in post. We find it works ok, we've got good results. Then we throw the film through Phoenix first, which cleans up 80% of the small dust and scratches. Then we finish in Resolve with color, stabilization and manual dirt removal. It takes around an hour per minute of finished film, for the entire process (Clean + Wet Gate Scan + phoenix + Resolve + soundtrack + final output). 

Here is a sample: 

 

[Robert Hart]

You did very well to get those greens and blues back. As for stabilisation in Resolve, I have never been able to make it work on sprocket hole edges. I think the horsepower of my PC is the issue. It will analyse about five seconds of footage then gives up.

It would not be impossible to build a proper wetgate for the Retroscan as the geometry of the film path is favourable. However, the lightpin edge detector would have to be moved as it relies on surface reflectance which is not available from the film within the wetgate tank.

The further the light pin is away from the actual film "gate", the more disrupted the sequence of images becomes as splice interference occurs much deeper into the sequence of frames after the splice goes though the gate.

[Tyler Purcell]

8 hours ago, Robert Hart said:

You did very well to get those greens and blues back. As for stabilisation in Resolve, I have never been able to make it work on sprocket hole edges. I think the horsepower of my PC is the issue. It will analyse about five seconds of footage then gives up.

Thanks, yea its not easy. I do a lot of coloring, so I'm kinda use to the issues we have to deal with on a day to day basis like these. 

You need a decent system to run Fusion's tracker, which is what we use most of the time. Our new M3 MacBook Pro is actually the fastest at it. She'll render at 14fps and finish an entire 30 minute roll of 16mm without stopping. It's very nice! Can't wait until the M3 Ultra. 

[Robert Houllahan]

IN scanner GPU stabilization works really well because it is done on the raw camera data before it is demosaiced so basically the machine looks at the monochrome info for contrast edges in a specific known general area where the perfs are supposed to be.

The LaserGraphics GPU stabilization is so good the scanner just has a encoder on the capstan and then the GPU stabilization, if you turn it off the film moves around quite a bit and then is locked amazingly steady when it is on.

I think Nucoda/Phoenix has better stabilization tools for film than Resolve does also.

[Tyler Purcell]

3 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

I think Nucoda/Phoenix has better stabilization tools for film than Resolve does also.

I've not been able to get it to work well. If the frame moves around too much, or has too many jitter issues, I've not been able to get it to lock. Also, Phoenix doesn't use the GPU for stabilization. So it's extremely slow. Mind you, our Phoenix system isn't that fast, we're gonna be building a new one that's a 32 core threadripper shortly, but I don't think it'll matter too much. At least with Fusion in Resolve I can easily and quickly preview stabilization very fast, within a few seconds, make sure it works and then let it render. Once you add cleanup tools in Phoenix, it's all over, damn thing only plays at 5fps at best before rendering. 

But yes, theoretically Phoenix should do better. 

[Robert Houllahan]

I have a Nucoda setup but don;t really do any stabilization, it is rare that any film comes out of the LaserGraphics or Arri scanners that need post stabilization.

[Tyler Purcell]

1 hour ago, Robert Houllahan said:

I have a Nucoda setup but don;t really do any stabilization, it is rare that any film comes out of the LaserGraphics or Arri scanners that need post stabilization.

I've tried both Nucoda and Phoenix, they both seem to be the same thing. Have you found any differences? I just resorted to using Phoenix for everything. I wonder if there are certain plugin packs that don't work on one or the other. 

Yea, I agree, if the perfs are good, the Lasergraphics and Arri scanners will do a good job. I get so many films WITHOUT perf's at all in certain sections, it becomes a lot of post work to fix up. 

[Andrew Wise]

 

On 1/9/2024 at 5:08 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

However, with low-tension mode, a clever little gate I developed with PTFE clamping material

I’m keen to know more about your gate design. I’ve been trying to make one like the Lasergraphics for my HDS  with the hinged chrome plate that comes down. Also extending the gate down to there the laser is to avoid it waving around if it’s warped 

[Perry Paolantonio]

10 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Also, Phoenix doesn't use the GPU for stabilization. So it's extremely slow. 

Not sure what you're talking about here. Phoenix film frame stabilization is effectively instant. It may not use the GPU but it is very good. Not the old stabilization plugin, but Frame Lock. A 1 minute clip renders in about 10 seconds on our machine. They built it to compensate for the crappy stabilization in the GoldenEYE, I think. We have some film here right now from a client and I don't know what they scanned this on but it's a disaster in most respects. the frame floats all over the place but frame lock will completely fix that. 

 

9 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

I've tried both Nucoda and Phoenix, they both seem to be the same thing

The user interface is the same. The feature set is different. Nucoda is geared toward grading and uses the GPU more. Phoenix towards restoration and is primarily CPU based. They look the same because the underlying architecture is the same, it's just about which plugins you have, pretty much. 

Edited January 11 by Perry Paolantonio

[Tyler Purcell]

7 hours ago, Andrew Wise said:

I’m keen to know more about your gate design. I’ve been trying to make one like the Lasergraphics for my HDS  with the hinged chrome plate that comes down. Also extending the gate down to there the laser is to avoid it waving around if it’s warped 

We're working on it. Been trying some unique 3D printed ideas first, stuff that doesn't touch the film directly outside of PTFE material. I'm not sold on the design, but it's close to something that works at least. The pinching gate is tricky to manufacture and it also allows for any dust/dirt on the film to be pushed deeper into the film itself. Sometimes we clean stuff 4 times or more and its still got plenty of grime. So I get worried about a straight metal clamping gate. Our design doesn't clamp that much, just enough and it seems to be ok. I'll send pix once I feel we've got it working well. I used gaf tape to hold it together for our last scan because the hinge doesn't work right. lol ?

[Tyler Purcell]

1 hour ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Not sure what you're talking about here. Phoenix film frame stabilization is effectively instant. It may not use the GPU but it is very good. Not the old stabilization plugin, but Frame Lock. A 1 minute clip renders in about 10 seconds on our machine. They built it to compensate for the crappy stabilization in the GoldenEYE, I think. We have some film here right now from a client and I don't know what they scanned this on but it's a disaster in most respects. the frame floats all over the place but frame lock will completely fix that. 

Yea, what do you have for a system? 

On our mac's, I can nearly real time stabilize in Fusion. 

Edited January 11 by Tyler Purcell

[Todd Ruel]

Diamant also has excellent stabilization tools.  You can stabilize on the perfs.  You can stabilize various items (like overlayed graphics) weaving around in the image.  Their tools are excellent.

I got tired pretty quickly of trying to use Resolve for stabilization.  I even tried Apple Motion, because, like Resolve, it tries to stabilize some tracker points in a high contrast area like the corner of a perforation.  But nothing worked until I got Diamant.

I'm not knocking Phoenix or Nucoda.  I simply think you have to step up to professional software like Diamant or Phoenix if you want to stabilize movie scans from machines like my Filmfabriek HDS+ or lesser hardware.  Resolve requires too much effort for the time spent, IMO.

[Tyler Purcell]

10 minutes ago, Todd Ruel said:

I'm not knocking Phoenix or Nucoda.  I simply think you have to step up to professional software like Diamant or Phoenix if you want to stabilize movie scans from machines like my Filmfabriek HDS+ or lesser hardware.  Resolve requires too much effort for the time spent, IMO.

Yea, I've used Phoenix for years now.

Sadly, most clients can't afford a full scene to scene/shot by shot restoration.

We're doing mostly 16mm, mostly films that just a bit of cleanup, maybe a day of dirt removal and some automated tools. Phoenix is just too slow to preview finished scenes fast enough for me. I want instant results, which I can do in Resolve, right off the 4k DPX files. So most of the time I just use Resolve. I'll run the film through Phoenix's automatic dust/scratch removal overnight and then toss it into Resolve for stabilization and frame by frame dirt removal. Results are ok. Not the best, but they're good enough for 90% of the clients out there. 

Diamant would be nice, but they charge too much money for something (yes I've tested it) that isn't THAT much better for OUR workflow. I guess if all you did all day long was film restoration, if that's your ONLY business and you lived in the software 9hrs a day, 5 days a week, YES! Diamant is the way to go, 100%. But if you're doing basic restoration here and there, want something to throw the film into, hit render and come back later to hand off to the client, then I don't know if it's worth the money. Phoenix full license today is $350/month, which is a STEAL for how much ya get. That's worth the price of admission. Diamant doesn't offer anything like that from my understanding. 

But I agree... with faster hardware, Phoenix maybe ok. We just haven't invested in that yet. It will be something we do, if we get more restoration jobs. 

Also, I appreciate your feedback. 

[Perry Paolantonio]

you need a new computer. Phoenix is anything but slow. Some of the effects are single-threaded, which are slow and are obviously clock speed-dependent. But it's not a slow application by any means. 

Supermicro M12SWA-TF Motherboard
Threadripper Pro 5975WX 32-core 3.6GHz
128GB RAM
GeForce RTX4070
Windows 11

 

we have a very big spinning-drive RAID 0 in the machine, made with old disks we had kicking around. It's just for caching so when a drive dies, which happens, no big deal. Source files are on our SAN. We cache to DPX files and the RAID can handle 30fps 4k playback no problem from DPX so it's not a bottleneck. 

Most 4k effects run slightly slower than realtime, which is faster than any restoration system I've ever used. I think some effects are still single threaded, so those go slower. 

Resolve's restoration tools are skeletal at best and aren't especially sophisticated about how they work. 

 

[Tyler Purcell]

7 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

you need a new computer. Phoenix is anything but slow. Some of the effects are single-threaded, which are slow and are obviously clock speed-dependent. But it's not a slow application by any means. 

Bingo... that's what I felt using it. 

 

7 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Supermicro M12SWA-TF Motherboard
Threadripper Pro 5975WX 32-core 3.6GHz
128GB RAM
GeForce RTX4070
Windows 11

You read my mind. 

Tho probably 7975WX. We'll see. They haven't come out yet, but should be shipping any week now. 

7 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Most 4k effects run slightly slower than realtime, which is faster than any restoration system I've ever used. I think some effects are still single threaded, so those go slower. 

Good to know. 

We already have a PCI gen 4 quad NVME raid card that we use for caching and such. 

Unfortunately our 10G network storage is kinda slow, but not slow enough to hinder Phoenix. 

Thanks for the tips, good to know it's really our system that's slow. 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

On 1/9/2024 at 1:08 AM, Tyler Purcell said:

I mean, has there been in the last decade? Not really. 

Scanners have been scanners for awhile. 

Laser Graphics dominates the mid tier. They make THE BEST machine for the money, period. 

DFT and Arri dominate the upper tier. Outside of resolution, none of their machines have changed much in years. 

The lower tier like BMD and Film Fabriek, nothing new there. BMD will require an entirely new design to use a new imager, so that being the only "negative" about the BMD scanner and unfortunately makes it not a very good machine to boot, means there isn't any real developments on that front. They will not be making something new anytime soon sadly. Film Fabriek may have a prototype of their new machine by NAB, but doubtful it will be ready for production. I also don't think it will be game changing, probably just fixing the issues of the old machine. 

So no, nothing new really. 

I will say for the record, I'm pretty chuffed we were able to scan this destroyed film that was literally tearing itself to pieces as it came off the roll. We took a slab, put it between two blocks to get it flat and measure it, which was 15mm wide and the frame size was down by half a mm. It had shrunk THAT much. Emulsion was flaking off in our hands as we worked with it and it was so brittle, it would tear sneezing on it. However, with low-tension mode, a clever little gate I developed with PTFE clamping material and our wet gate, plus two layers of digital restoration, it's now a watchable product. Mind the audio, we did make a mistake on this demo sample that I haven't fixed yet. 

Before: 

AFTER: 

 

 

Thanks for the rundown Tyler! Did BMD lose interest in their scanners? Their price point is good. Couldn't they just upgrade the imager or is the whole machine a mess?

Impressive work you did to get the scan on that film. Was the sound done with the Film Fabriek optical reader? I remember you said it had problems with sound.

 

 

 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

On 1/9/2024 at 12:46 PM, Robert Hart said:

 It is not particularly newsworthy or an innovation but I tried making a dip-tank for surface-wetted scratch reduction when scanning 15mm or 8mm film with a Retroscan Mark 2. I was using isopropyl alcohol of claimed 100% purity. It did work but also tended to destabilise the sprocket hole registration.

At more than about 7FPS with 16mm, the material was not drying off before it entered the take-up wind. It is also not benign when it comes to film emulsion. After something like about ten tests with some old print film, I discovered that the base material was cupping and the glazed surface of the emulsion was becoming opaque to the light pin edge detector.

I guess Film Fabriek experimented with full immersion, discovering the pitfalls before going with wicking pads to coat the film more sparingly. Once the emulsion surface has become dull, the film has to be flipped so that the shiny surface of the film base faces the light pin and edges of tape splices do not set off false triggers. In this instance, I was running the film from right to left on the top of the reels to present the shiny base to the light pin detector.

The small knob under the dip-tank is not related to the dip-tank but a speed controller which is not original manufacturer's equipment. My PC hardware and the USB path does ot cope well with the frame rate when capturing with a 4K FLIR camera.

 

 

Very interesting work. You are quite an engineer. What liquid do the big boys use for wet gates? Does it have any negative effects on film? (Just getting back to the thread, so it may be answered later on.)

In the old days we used a formalin (formaldehyde) stabilizer as the last dip with color prints. I'd sometimes skip it for test prints. Later on, when looking at some old tests prints, I saw they had faded badly. Looks like the formalin dip made a big difference. I wonder if all this wet gate chemicals will affect film longevity down the road. 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

On 1/9/2024 at 2:03 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

That's a cool idea. 

Yea the only way for a wet gate to actually work, is if the film is suspended in liquid during the capturing process. 

So the FF system does work ok. Is it perfect? No. 

Our process is to physically examine the film on our rewinds, light box and loupe first. We also thread it up and roll through it by hand to see how bad it is. If it's not horribly dirty, we'll run it with just the wet gate. If it's really dirty, then we clean it with alcohol, running through the PTR's at slow speed, under tension. It works pretty good. We've tried our friends pert machine, it doesn't work that good, for sure not worth the effort. I'd rather just scan and if we see major issues, we can address those issues during the scanning process by hand cleaning the tricky sections with 100% alcohol. 

I don't think it's a great process, but we can't have any other chemicals without proper venting. So it's challenging. A vent hood with rewinds and a light table, would help greatly, but we'd need some system to view the film so we can find the issues. Currently, we find them as we scan and we can just assemble the cuts (start stops of scanner) in post. We find it works ok, we've got good results. Then we throw the film through Phoenix first, which cleans up 80% of the small dust and scratches. Then we finish in Resolve with color, stabilization and manual dirt removal. It takes around an hour per minute of finished film, for the entire process (Clean + Wet Gate Scan + phoenix + Resolve + soundtrack + final output). 

Here is a sample: 

 

 

Beautiful!

What did you use for color restoration. That is impressive. Would Lasergraphics auto restore for faded film do as good or has it to be done my hand?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

On 1/10/2024 at 9:29 AM, Robert Hart said:

You did very well to get those greens and blues back. As for stabilisation in Resolve, I have never been able to make it work on sprocket hole edges. I think the horsepower of my PC is the issue. It will analyse about five seconds of footage then gives up.

It would not be impossible to build a proper wetgate for the Retroscan as the geometry of the film path is favourable. However, the lightpin edge detector would have to be moved as it relies on surface reflectance which is not available from the film within the wetgate tank.

The further the light pin is away from the actual film "gate", the more disrupted the sequence of images becomes as splice interference occurs much deeper into the sequence of frames after the splice goes though the gate.

 

Yep, same thing as you. But not using Resolve. I'm using Movavi.  I can do short clips with the stabilizer, but that is about it. And the finished stabilized product does not seem that good anyway with that software. Guess we need higher firepower!

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

On 1/11/2024 at 2:29 AM, Tyler Purcell said:

I've tried both Nucoda and Phoenix, they both seem to be the same thing. Have you found any differences? I just resorted to using Phoenix for everything. I wonder if there are certain plugin packs that don't work on one or the other. 

Yea, I agree, if the perfs are good, the Lasergraphics and Arri scanners will do a good job. I get so many films WITHOUT perf's at all in certain sections, it becomes a lot of post work to fix up. 

The forum put me on a diet and said I am too liberal with the likes. So, no more likes for today!

Are these programs intuitive to use or do they need lots of training? Too bad you have to rent them each month.

Filmworkz Phoenix Brochure D.D.Teoli Jr. A.C. : D.D.Teoli Jr. A.C. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Filmworkz Nucoda Brochure D.D.Teoli Jr. A.C. : D.D.Teoli Jr. A.C. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive