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True Resolution


Landon D. Parks

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spectra film and video will have there spirit, which will have much better optics allowing it to scan the entire frame at full 2k resolution, online this month. Until the next thing comes along, it will

probably be the best for Super 8

 

Could you explain what you mean by scan the entire frame and explain why Cinelicious' set-up has lesser resolution. In stil photography, when you use a lens with wider coverage to shoot a smaller format film, you benefit because only the center of the lens is used and the center has the highest resolution. So what you are saying about this confuses me a bit.

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Could you explain what you mean by scan the entire frame and explain why Cinelicious' set-up has lesser resolution. In stil photography, when you use a lens with wider coverage to shoot a smaller format film, you benefit because only the center of the lens is used and the center has the highest resolution. So what you are saying about this confuses me a bit.

A Spirit film scanner/telecine is setup with exchangeable gates, usually one for 35mm and one for 16mm so they can scan both types of film but it takes a couple minutes to change out the hardware. There were a few Super 8 gates made by one of the companies that owned the Spirit patents. (Started with Philips-BTS, then Thomson's Grass Valley, now Digital Film Technology and probably some other companies in there). Those Super 8 gates were fine but another company is making them now and say they have a better design. That is what Spectra is getting I believe.

 

A properly tuned Spirit, Super 8 gate with DaVinci color correction would be about the top of the line for equipment, then it comes down to the colorist/operator to make it look good. Used Spirits have come down DRAMATICALLY in price recently, so there may be more of a call for these gates.

 

Cinelicous' machine isn't less resolution and based on the time they've spent tweaking their system for Super 8 it would be hard to beat the quality you'd get from them... there's more to getting a good picture than the gate equipment-wise and they have great colorists.

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the Putte script for avisynth is truly amazing!

You can do a lot of fine tuning depending on the material you have to work on each time but even with the ready-made script the results are stunning. I am sure better results can be achieved if there is time to test different settings of the script.

 

its amazing how much information is revived!

avisynth2.jpg

 

this one looks less grainy when it is actually playing, but still could be denoised a bit with some tweaking.

avisynth1.jpg

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  • 1 month later...

Cinelicous' machine isn't less resolution and based on the time they've spent tweaking their system for Super 8 it would be hard to beat the quality you'd get from them... there's more to getting a good picture than the gate equipment-wise and they have great colorists.

 

Actually, Cinelicous provides less than 1/2 the resolution of the dedicated gate Spectra is building. Since a Spirit 16 gate at Cinelicous is used to focus 8mm down to a much smaller size on the capture chip they can only get 860 pixels (a far cry from 1920 pixels in HD). You dont get the true HD resolution if you are not using the entire chip surface. The dedicated Spectra gate focuses super 8 down with proper optics onto the chip to use maximum chip surface area for a full 1920 pixels. Explanation on Spectras site: http://spectrafilmandvideo.com/Telecine.html

 

With Spectra's new Spirit and gate the game will change. The colorist I have worked with at Spectra does excellent work - as good as any hi-end facility that I have tried for super 8 or 16. So they should be on par from that stand point. But, my real hope is that we will see more competition and lower rates as companies like Spectra upgrade to HD.

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Actually, Cinelicous provides less than 1/2 the resolution of the dedicated gate Spectra is building. Since a Spirit 16 gate at Cinelicous is used to focus 8mm down to a much smaller size on the capture chip they can only get 860 pixels (a far cry from 1920 pixels in HD). You dont get the true HD resolution if you are not using the entire chip surface. The dedicated Spectra gate focuses super 8 down with proper optics onto the chip to use maximum chip surface area for a full 1920 pixels. Explanation on Spectras site: http://spectrafilmandvideo.com/Telecine.html

That may be technically true but there are alot of other factors that go into the picture quality out of that machine.

 

I spoke with the developer of that gate last month. I wanted to make a business case for a local telecine house with two Spirits to buy this Super 8 gate since the factory ones are non-existent now. While I didn't get a hard number, it seemed like that gate was going for $80-100k installed. In the post world a few years ago that would be small money, but these days with Spirits going for less than $100k it's hard to make a business decision to buy that gate unless you already have a big Super 8 customer base like Spectra or Cinelicious.

 

I'm sure it will be great and I look forward to seeing the difference because I really don't see how the results can get any better than what I see with Cinelicious's gate (I just sent off 300 ft to them today). After working with about 10 different telecine houses I've found that it simply comes down to the colorist doing the work. Companies with a less-than-true-HD Shadow & Super 8 gate like Lightpress make their equipment sing where some companies (who shall remain nameless but have a Millennium II) provide hit and miss quality.

 

Spectra is a great company dedicated to the format so I'm very excited to what they do with their new equipment. I hope that gate can do Regular 8mm too, that would be fun.

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  • 4 months later...

Love it.

 

How long does the script take to clean one roll of Super 8?

 

Have you tried it with any 16mm footage?

 

I'd say that the scripts takes around 3-4fps to process on an iMac, which means roughly 15 minutes per roll. I have only tried this script with 8mm material but I am planning to do some experimenting with random footage that I get from youtube. its surprising how much better some clips can be

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