Spirit 2k log scan or HDR Scanity 2k log scan of 16mm footage

[Stephen Perera]

ORIGINAL POST IN GENERAL DISCUSSION FORUM - i could not delete it...should have been here

Hi all....finally sending out the Gibraltar Crystal project some of you are aware I've been shooting (some of you have been advising me all along) and the final footage is 700ft of Kodak Vision3 500T shot at standard 16mm

Cinelab London are processing and scanning it for me at 2k - they have been most welcoming and friendly to me plus logistically they were a great option as neighbour country Spain doesn't offer the services I need....not to mention no problems with currency.

Apart from the ECN-2 processing, I have two narrowed it down to TWO machines for the scanning:

1. SPIRIT log scan at 2k standard 16mm format

2. HDR Scanity log scan at 2k standard 16mm format

Things to consider:

a) The Spirit is £0.42 per foot and the HDR Scanity is £0.86 per foot

The largest the final, edited 'piece' will be viewed is on a TV screen at the factory where they blow glass for tourists to watch.....then of course online/social media etc for marketing purposes.

As a seasoned scanner of photographic film (I have a Scanmate 5000 drum scanner and now a Hasselblad/Imacon Flextight 646) and knowing what a good scan looks like and exactly when so operator has decided to bake in stuff like noise reduction etc......which option should I go for all things considered......

......my top priority is getting the dynamic range of the Vision3 500T as the footage shot is mostly high contrast scenes at the limits of exposures

Thanks for your advice and sorry for posting this in the general discussion as I really need good advice!!!!!

 

[Stephen Perera]

I've come to the point aside from the top decision to describe the transfer aspect ratio......

 

I want my standard 16mm film IMAGE area to be scanned to 2048 x 1556 pixels to take advantage of the 2K scan - not a scan at 2049 x 1080pixels giving me a pillar box and the sprockets on the sides

 

How do I tell them this tecnically>

[Samuel Berger]

I've come to the point aside from the top decision to describe the transfer aspect ratio......

 

I want my standard 16mm film IMAGE area to be scanned to 2048 x 1556 pixels to take advantage of the 2K scan - not a scan at 2049 x 1080pixels giving me a pillar box and the sprockets on the sides

 

How do I tell them this tecnically>

 

Exactly the way you did here, ask for a gate area scan not an overscan.

[Stephen Perera]

thanks Samuel!

[Perry Paolantonio]

If your film is color, you're not getting HDR from the scanity.

 

The way that machine works you can only do HDR on B/W footage.

[Stephen Perera]

sorry I think I just named their machine wrong...its the Scanity...thats it....they had it as HDR Scanity on their price list

[Robert Houllahan]

Well to be clear the new CCD line arrays in the Scannity have vastly more DR and better S/N than a off the shelf cmos sensor made for traffic monitoring and probably better DR and S/R than a two flash "HDR" on a cmos sensor based scanner.

 

The Scannity arrays were build by Kodak or Dalsa specifically for scanning film not for telling when you ran a stop light, they have bigger pixels and more well capacity and little or no fixed pattern noise.

[Perry Paolantonio]

Well to be clear the new CCD line arrays in the Scannity have vastly more DR and better S/N than a off the shelf cmos sensor made for traffic monitoring and probably better DR and S/R than a two flash "HDR" on a cmos sensor based scanner.

 

One of the applications of that camera is traffic cameras, yes. The main commodity use for this type of high speed/high res camera is circuit board inspection - high speed, high resolution trace inspection. Either way, who cares? I've got to be honest, Rob, I don't get why you're so down on the sensor in a scanner you own!

 

Lasergraphics has eliminated the noise issues and we're consistently complimented on the scans we do, particularly that they're free of noise in the extreme ends, and that there's great dynamic range.

 

Yes, it's a CMOS sensor. Yes, it's a bayer sensor. In 90% of real-world use cases, the academic argument that both of these things are liabilities doesn't really apply. Lasergraphics has done a lot to ensure that this sensor makes great images, including working with JAI to make custom firmware to deal with some specific issues that you'd see with the camera out of the box. We worked with Lasergraphics on some of these issues for several months until we were happy with the results. And the scans on our 5k ScanStation look great. In HDR, they rival scans made by most other scanners I've seen.

 

The Scannity arrays were build by Kodak or Dalsa specifically for scanning film not for telling when you ran a stop light, they have bigger pixels and more well capacity and little or no fixed pattern noise.

 

And the Scanity has issues with splice bumps and warping, just like any other line sensor scanner with a continuous motion transport. To my mind, this is one of the biggest reasons not to use any scanner like that, Spirit included, unless you're dealing exclusively with unspliced film. We're scanning 4x 1-hour docs per month for a client right now, all A/B roll. that's a nightmarish scenario on a Spirit, Scanity, GoldenEye, because we'd be doing restoration work at every single splice to fix all the warping.

There are always trade-offs.

[Stephen Perera]

I went with the Arriscan in the end and Im really happy with the results....what Cinelab London have done for me completely blows away the Telecine they did with the Tobin in another place and they DID **(obscenity removed)** up the processing of my first roll of 100ft in comparison just like people here told me they had.....

[Robert Houllahan]

 

 

One of the applications of that camera is traffic cameras, yes. The main commodity use for this type of high speed/high res camera is circuit board inspection - high speed, high resolution trace inspection. Either way, who cares? I've got to be honest, Rob, I don't get why you're so down on the sensor in a scanner you own!

 

I like our Scan Station it makes good pictures but I frankly do not believe you when you say your Scan Station is one magic unicorn machine without the fixed pattern noise issues and limited DR from the CMOSIS CMV20000 based JAI and I also doubt that a firmware can change the fundamental physics of that sensor.

 

Other Scan Station owners do not make these claims and if this is true then LaserGrpahics should be rolling out updates for all machine owners but when I asked I got no response from them.

 

I can tell you that the Xena with the Kodak 16070 at 82Db of DR really blows the Spark away in terms of dynamic range.

[Perry Paolantonio]

Other Scan Station owners do not make these claims and if this is true then LaserGrpahics should be rolling out updates for all machine owners but when I asked I got no response from them.

 

Send me some film you're having trouble with on it and let's see. We went through a full camera swap, and quite a bit of testing and calibrating to get it right. And I can say definitively that we've rescanned film that was scanned on other ScanStations that didn't look as good, multiple times.

 

I know what others have seen - tap lines, pattern noise, etc. What I'm saying is that the combination of the camera swap and calibration tweaks they did for us about 2 years ago, along with the HDR upgrade, effectively eliminates all that.

[Robert Houllahan]

I am not having problems with scanning film I just scan film on the appropriate machine as I am not limited to one scanner.

 

The Scan Station is a great machine for many scan tasks and many customers are extremely pleased with the look of the scans we make from it.

 

That said is it a sustainable business model for LaserGraphics to sort through dozens of JAI cameras to select between D, C and B grade CMOISIS sensors for each customer? Did you pay them for that? If you got that for free I think it was a poor business decision on Stefan's part which frankly reflects negatively on the company. If you did pay for this service it should be on the price list for the machine.

 

Remember that JAI sells thousands of this model of machine vision camera to Traffic companies and the Military and film scanning is hardly a high volume customer, what is the business model for laserGraphics there, how much tolerance for low volume BS will JAI put up with?

 

So I buy a machine and the guy down the street buys a machine and you buy a machine and we all pay the same price but the three machines all make different results? So me and the other guy see you got a better machine and complain to Stefan and then he has to spend tens of thousands of dollars in material and time to redress this, how does he stay in business?

 

I can see that the inconsistent CMOS chip manufacturing at CMOSIS (don't they make red sensors? speaking of inconsistent) will make sensors with degrees of FPN issues but the sensor is inherently flawed in several aspects and I know when we bought our machine Steve was asking about other sensors with similar pixel count and better performance, I think this is a well known thorn in the side of LaserGraphics.

 

I also remember you saying on FaceBook that the 2-flash HDR on Scan Station almost eliminates the cmos noise issues, which is what I have heard generally.

 

I think the machine is great and that the engineering team has done a amazing job turning a very inherently flawed sensor into a machine which performs beyond expectations but IMO it is not perfect for everything.

 

YMMV

[Perry Paolantonio]

Our camera swap came at the same time we did another upgrade, and our older camera was giving us trouble related to that. I agree that if people are having problems, Lasergraphics should address them. I'd also like to see release notes with new software, and a consistent release cycle rather than having to ask for new versions one at a time. Believe me, I have my issues with Lasergraphics too.

 

But I think that dismissing the scanner outright because of issues that only some people are having, doesn't make sense. The fact is, we're doing tons of work on this machine and haven't had any complaints about the dynamic range, noise, tap lines, etc. When it comes down to it, what matters is the final scan, and the results the client gets. Our clients are happy with the results and so am I.

 

I think the machine is great and that the engineering team has done a amazing job turning a very inherently flawed sensor into a machine which performs beyond expectations but IMO it is not perfect for everything.

I'm certainly not saying it's perfect for everything. I am saying that we've only had a small handful of situations in which the scanner had issues (and mostly that was related to severely damaged film, since we don't have the damaged film handling upgrade. We've put some pretty messed up film through it though without that, so those cases are rare.

Edited May 3, 2018 by Perry Paolantonio

[Robert Houllahan]

 

But I think that dismissing the scanner outright because of issues that only some people are having, doesn't make sense. The fact is, we're doing tons of work on this machine and haven't had any complaints about the dynamic range, noise, tap lines, etc. When it comes down to it, what matters is the final scan, and the results the client gets. Our clients are happy with the results and so am I.

I am not dismissing the scanner at all I bought one and I am buying more from LaserGraphics.