color reversal scanning

[Logan Hursh]

Hello

Would anyone recommend a specific place for getting color reversal scanned at a decent price? I talked to Spectra and they said it would be around $140 for my 200 feet. Way more than I'm hoping to spend.

Any leads would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

Logan

[Jay Young]

You could call Cinelab, Rob is pretty regular on this forum. Might not be much different.

 

If it's 8/16mm, you can always take it to Costco - $19.95 special + $0.13/ft after the first 150 feet. I'm sure the results are amazingly terrible. Seriously tho, "Home video scan" of your film should cost you less but the results will be less than awesome. And, while I agree that $0.70 per foot is a bit high, maybe someone else can give you a better rate?

 

You could also try FotoKem, but I don't know if they will even do reversal - I'm sure they do.

[Robert Houllahan]

Our normal transfer minimum is $100 for HD and $150 for 2K

 

We do what we call a 'Test roll' transfer for people testing cameras for $50 which is a 1080P one light if you send a drive (16G or bigger thumb blank) so we could do that for your 200ft.

[David Cunningham]

You can get a "cheap" scan of reversal, but it will not lock anything like the projected image. To get close to that, you need an HDR system. The one at Cinelab should be good as well as the Director at MetroPost in NYC. The ScanStation at Gamma Ray Digital is good and probably the best trade off between "cheap" and still good... best bang for the buck... but if you make full use of the qualities of color reversal and have deep blacks and bright whites all in the same image, you will want an HDR.

[Robert Houllahan]

We have four film scanners:

 

A Cintel CRT HD machine which has excellent Dynamic Range as the PMT's are 14bit A-D and compete well with HDR scans on a CCD or CMOS based scanner. The CRT is lower resolution and has more noise but makes an excellent image and has been used on broadcast TV and in Features.

 

The 4K Xena Dynamic Perf (sprocket-less optical registered) which has a CMOS sensor with up to UHD resolutions at 15fps.

 

The 5K Pin Registered True RGB Xena which is a (now new) 5K 7.4u monochrome Kodak CCD for 16mm and 35mm which has multi flash HDR,

 

The Imagica Imager-XEplus which is a 35mm (up to 6K Vista-Vision) pin registered line scan scanner.

 

The $50 test roll is on the Cintel CRT machine and looks quite good for reversal, I have never had any reversal that the Cintel could not capture the full density of the film.

 

YMMV

[David Cunningham]

We have four film scanners:

 

A Cintel CRT HD machine which has excellent Dynamic Range as the PMT's are 14bit A-D and compete well with HDR scans on a CCD or CMOS based scanner. The CRT is lower resolution and has more noise but makes an excellent image and has been used on broadcast TV and in Features.

 

The 4K Xena Dynamic Perf (sprocket-less optical registered) which has a CMOS sensor with up to UHD resolutions at 15fps.

 

The 5K Pin Registered True RGB Xena which is a (now new) 5K 7.4u monochrome Kodak CCD for 16mm and 35mm which has multi flash HDR,

 

The Imagica Imager-XEplus which is a 35mm (up to 6K Vista-Vision) pin registered line scan scanner.

 

The $50 test roll is on the Cintel CRT machine and looks quite good for reversal, I have never had any reversal that the Cintel could not capture the full density of the film.

 

YMMV

Very true that the dynamic range of most CRT systems is fantastic and still superior to single flash ccd systems. But I just find the noise too distracting especially in an already "noisy" format like super 8. I would personally trade off loosing some dynamic range for the image quality and resolution the Cinelab 4K sprocket less system which is very similar in most aspects to the ScanStation. The 5K Xena very comparable to the Director as well.