Do archives pay to scan film twice? (An aspect ratio scan as well as a full aperture scan.)

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

It is recommended that archives get a full aperture scan of a film to preserve it fully. (A full aperture scan is a full film scan including the sprockets.) If the archive does not have a scanner, do archives pay to scan film twice to get an aspect ratio scan and a full aperture scan? Reason being, the full aperture scan is not as sharp as an aspect ratio scan. 

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography

 

[Tyler Purcell]

You don't need the perforations for any reason, especially if the scanner is perf stabilized like most are. You also would always over-scan anyway, that's why machines like the Scan Station are so popular, because it'll give you a super high res (6.5k) over-scanned image that can be simply cropped in to your final 4k output resolution. Archive the over-scan raw and in post, make the colored/finished version cropped to the proper frame size. 

[Aapo Lettinen]

here the national film archive usually does a full aperture slight overscan to dpx and then forwards it to a post prod company for further processing and grading if there is budget to hire them for the work. Or at least did this way when I worked with them on couple of those restoration projects at post company or production company finding and processing materials like soundtracks and preview versions and such.

Restorations were 4k final format both dcp and tv masters done and dpx scanning with overscan was whatever Scanity could maximally output at full aperture, something between 5k and 6k I think. 

But the process was always to make a full aperture scan with enough edges to know it is everything to get out of the negative, then crop in post production to the original aspect ratio using previous existing versions of the movie as reference. Scans were done of the original negative if in any way possible so cropping to final ratio needed anyway. And manual cropping work is usually moved to the post company to have the scanner running dpx scans uninterrupted, there is only sense to crop in scanning stage if the output resolution is too small for post cropping and handling the scans so that one gets maximum amount of information to the later professional color grading stage. No sense to try to grade anything during the scanning, one just runs a fast but high quality scan to dpx with the scratches and dust removed during scanning if possible, then everything else done in post company afterwards so that the expensive scanner can do what it does best, runs more scans to dpx uninterrupted instead of trying to fix easy things in scanning which are cheaper and faster to fix in post and trying to do that in scanning would just be waste of time if the resolution is enough to get clean 4k output after post cropping

[Perry Paolantonio]

Most archives require some amount of overscan. Some want the full overscan the scanner sees (basically out to the film edge), others just want to see past the frame line. They do that to ensure everything was captured. 

For some projects we will export out a secondary file (usually MP4/H264, HD so 16:9 with the film cropped, pillarboxed and given a basic one-light grade). Lasergraphics scanners do this simultaneously, so you can output a high res uncropped flat scan and a cropped, one-light MP4 access copy side by side. Actually you can do as many as you want, but it can really slow things down if you do more than the basics. 

Otherwise you just crop in post and spit out whatever secondary file you need.

Edited August 4 by Perry Paolantonio