Blackmagic Cintel Film Scanner....

Robert Houllahan · November 5, 2015

I would suggest rescanning the 35mm that you had an issue with on another machine, one with known good registration, as a comparison. I have recently scanned 35mm ECN to 4K on our Pin Registered Xena and didn't see movement. It is possible that the BMD scanner software is not a sophisticated as the registration software in other machines which have had more time and experience figuring this issue out.

Robert Houllahan · November 13, 2015

I think what might be happening with the Cintel is that to get enough light to scan at 24 or 30fps the sensor will have problems with seeing contrast on the perforation. Does the machine have a ND filter strip in the gate where the perfs are? That's a "solution" other scanner manufacturers have tried and it is also fraught with issues. Assuming a 12bit cmos sensor (which are usually noisier than CCD) BMD probably has to push the exposure up to avoid having noise in the hilites and at the higher frame rates the perf hole will clip the sensor and make edge detection difficult.

I suspect that they are going to have ongoing issues with this considering the speed of the scan and the sensor they are using.

Will Montgomery · November 13, 2015

The Blackmagic folks love film; that's a big part of why they bought and love Resolve and well as Cintel. I know they've been working on that scanner for a long time and I'm sure they wanted it to be awesome. The lack of fanfare with the release makes me wonder if they aren't particularly happy with it either.

An Arri III is pin registered and in my experience fairly consistent and solid so I would have Perry or Robert scan the same film and see if they have the same registration issues.

As long as they can get 2K out of 16mm I'd be fine, but if they aren't, they need to go back to the drawing board on that.

Perry Paolantonio · November 13, 2015

According to the manual for the Cintel scanner, the resolutions for 16mm are ...odd.

1903x1143 for Super16

1581x1154 for Standard 16

These resolutions betray an old school way of looking at scanning, and it make sense since the basic design is based on an older Cintel model. This is something that's baked into the hardware - I think they'd need to do some major work to be able to do 4k scanning of 16mm on this machine, or even 2k. Not saying they can't, but it'd require significant mechanical changes to the scanner, and that's a bigger deal than tweaking some software.

To my mind, the Cintel is a non-starter for 16mm. Lately we've been doing a ton of 4k 16mm scanning of freshly shot film on the ScanStation and it looks amazing.

Edited November 13, 2015 by Perry Paolantonio

Robert Houllahan · November 14, 2015

I think part of the cost saving on the BMD Cintel is that the lens and sensor are fixed in place so no practical way to set the sensor and lens to fill the sensor area with a 16mm frame. I can only imagine that the under sampled resolution looks pretty bad on this machine.

16mm looks great at 4K to eat that BBC.

;-)

David Cunningham · November 15, 2015

My super16 5k sample to 4K Prores 4444 negative scans from perry in the ScanStation are mind blowing. After basic correction the image looks better than the timed work print I have of the same footage and that pains me to admit.