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Archival scanning biz...going up, down or steady? (...and film production as well?)


Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

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21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Never thought about a clean room. But makes sense. Exactly what do you do to clean each frame? What sort of wipes and cleaner?

I gotta dig for the chemical name, but it's basically what Kodak film cleaner USE to be made of. It was too toxic so they switched chemicals. But you can still get the base chemical Kodak film cleaner used and it does work well, but ya need a very well vented room, hence the clean room with a vent hood. 

21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Yes, it sounds terrible if you have to clean each frame. I can hardly stand to clean the roll...as fast as I can run it through the rewinds. I hate it. All I want is the scan, not the rest of the hassle. Slow, methodical cleaning is not good if you got ADD. The ADD'er does not like repetitive, slow work.

Yea its pretty bad. Clean table, clean room, anti-static floor, vent hood and usually cotton tipped swabs. You also can't have the cleaner in an open container. So you need to use a little dripper that you tap the cotton swab on and work the frame. It takes a few seconds to get the gunk off per frame. 

Then, once that's done, you need to run the entire film through the same cleaner, back and forward a few times using a cotton cloth. 

Once that's done, we run it through an ultrasonic cleaner over at the lab, which helps remove some more surface stuff. 

I'd love to show a sample of this, but the client who is paying for that particular job, put it on hold. So we haven't scanned it. 

21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Now, I don't mind scanning that much, it is kinda fascinating, especially if you have not previewed the film in the editor. You see it all unfold, which can be very fascinating if you got a 'pig in a poke' film and have no idea what you got. I always run the film through the rewinds to see the condition of the film before scanning. But I don't run through the editor much anymore. Again...time problems. I may loupe the film here or there, but content is 98% blind many times. 

We scan a lot of archival stuff. Most of it, we just clean with the ultrasonic cleaner and then scan with the wet gate. Then we use digital cleanup. However, when there are speckles all over the frame, it's impossible for that method to work. You have to do full photochemical restoration first, which is the most time consuming aspect sadly. We mostly work on short form and not every frame is speckled, so it is a looking through a magnifier and searching for speckles. 

21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

It is mainly the cleaning I don't like, as slow drying cleaner takes many passes to dry up. If I don't have the time, I can wipe it pretty clean and let it sit not perfectly dry for a few hours to evaporate before scanning. But I prefer to dry it properly. I wish I had one of the hypersonic film cleaners.  Slow drying cleaner does a better job that fast-drying cleaner (Edwal) at getting the dirt off, but slow drying cleaner is a pain to actually get dry in a hurry.

Well yea, this is why we clean with an ultrasonic cleaner after doing this work. I think it's important to re-clean because you will leave little marks on the film due to the cleaning job. It helps to get rid of those marks, which are generally very light. 

21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Will the use of film keep dwindling and as well as the demand for archival scans?

There are dozens of warehouses full of film that has not been scanned yet. I've worked with many archives and they only scan what people want/need. The rest of the content is not scanned. So there is a demand, but the problem is monetizing content. Most of the places don't know how to do that, so the film just sits and rots. Much of it has already turned pink with vinegar syndrome due to poor storage. So the cost to scan them goes up tremendously, which means they don't really want to scan them anyway, which means they sit even longer. 

I don't see the demand going away. 

I do think the pricing for scanning will go down tho, because there is so much competition. To me, that's the biggest change that's going to change. 

21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Are major companies going to stop making scanners / go out of biz?

Nope, they can't make them fast enough. 

21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Will they make cheaper scanners to broaden their market of ever decreasing or stagnant customers?

I don't think anyone will make a scanner cheap enough for the lower end people. Our $40k FilmFabriek, is way too much money for most people. Nobody is making a $10k decent scanner currently, but maybe that will happening the future. I think that's the magic number, but I can't imagine it happening because there are just not enough people who want them. 

21 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Are the people that thought they can charge $300 to scan a small roll of film going to be short on biz and start selling their scanners? Things like that. 

That's .25/ft for 1200ft of film, which is a pretty cheap number and pretty typical amount of film for 16mm OCN. I don't think anyone is selling their scanner, it's all about finding the good clients. 

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14 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

I love it.  Our Film Fabriek HDS+ works as advertised.  It's built like some piece of over engineered American industrial equipment from the 1950s.  Sturdy and dependable.

The wet gate feature is nice, but it's not a magic bullet.  It can decrease the effect of vertical lines, but it often does not eliminate them.  (Yes, I know it's not a submersion bath filled with perc and yada yada, but there's a real world trade off between practicality and affordability.)

It transfers 16mm and everything smaller, and it does it to 4K.  The software works well, and tech support from Filmfabriek comes within 24 hours if not sooner.  Honestly, I don't need spare parts, because the thing is so well built and engineered.

My only regret is buying the 16mm optical soundtrack reader.  When we used it (once!), our transfer had a lot of wow and flutter.  We gave up on it immediately and went back to AEO Light, which produces superior results to any hardware I've used.  (Note:  you really have to know and understand AEO Light to get the best results from it, but it's free, and it's outstanding software.)

Having said that, I would consider buying the 16mm mag stripe reader, because there's no software I can use to capture a magnetically recorded soundtrack.

And my partner and I are those people who have a film scanner set up in their spare room.  My partner has it, and he simply walks from his bedroom to the spare room to do transfers and restoration via Diamant on a PC workstation.

But this stuff isn't cheap.  The HDS+ cost me $40K in total and the Diamant license was $10K + a $10K PC workstation to handle it. I work at an Apple Store in Dayton, Ohio.  I saved up for a long time to make the purchase, and I did it by selling my Apple stock.

So while this film scanning equipment is now much cheaper, I would hardly call it "easily achievable," especially if you don't want to take out a loan to buy it all.

Nevertheless, I'm happy with the purchase, and I would do it again.

 

Thanks for the rundown Todd. I guess I mixed you up with Tyler.

Great for you! Glad you did good with your stocks. I got AEO Light, but I would prefer to use an optical reader if possible. There seems to be 2 ways to use AEO Light. You overscan with the optical tract and crop the image later to get rid of the tract. Or you scan the audio only, extract the audio and then marry the audio to the 2nd scan of just the image. 

Does your optical reader have issues with all films you have tried or just a few? I had heard about another person using the Diamant software. Knew nothing about it, but it sounded interesting. Now that I hear the price, I can see it will be way too high for me. 

Here is a guy out West doing cine' scanning. He has some interesting things at his site. Who knows, maybe he is a member here?

Lasergraphics Scanstation Film Scanning and Restoration 2K 4K 6.5K HDR for 8mm Super8 16mm S16 35mm — Nicholas Coyle

On a different note...

After I sent in my previous rant this morning about people pestering me for a commercial license to use my films...what did I have in my inbox?

2/16/22

Hi, Daniel. My name is XX, I am a video producer who has been hired to create a marketing campaign for a client based around the XXX series. I came across some footage you had uploaded to the Internet Archive that would be perfect for the ad campaign we are working on, but it was uploaded with a CC Non-Commercial License. I was wondering if this was the correct license for this footage, and if so, if it would be possible to obtain a commercial license.

Here is the video in question:
 
 
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide, and for all your work in preserving antique media!
--
XX
(xxx) xxx-xxx
xxxxxxxxx@gmail.com

 

The pestering is constant with these people. And even when you refuse them, they still pester you. God forbid you do ever agree to something, they never reply to your emails again like CBS did. The scum.

If any of you deal in stock footage, send me your contact info and I will make a list of stock companies and send it out with my refusals, so they can contact you.

Same as I said before that I don't like cleaning film, I don't like this constant email pestering crap from producers. I like digitizing films and I like putting them up on the net...and that is it. 

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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50 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

I gotta dig for the chemical name, but it's basically what Kodak film cleaner USE to be made of. It was too toxic so they switched chemicals. But you can still get the base chemical Kodak film cleaner used and it does work well, but ya need a very well vented room, hence the clean room with a vent hood. 

Yea its pretty bad. Clean table, clean room, anti-static floor, vent hood and usually cotton tipped swabs. You also can't have the cleaner in an open container. So you need to use a little dripper that you tap the cotton swab on and work the frame. It takes a few seconds to get the gunk off per frame. 

Then, once that's done, you need to run the entire film through the same cleaner, back and forward a few times using a cotton cloth. 

Once that's done, we run it through an ultrasonic cleaner over at the lab, which helps remove some more surface stuff. 

I'd love to show a sample of this, but the client who is paying for that particular job, put it on hold. So we haven't scanned it. 

We scan a lot of archival stuff. Most of it, we just clean with the ultrasonic cleaner and then scan with the wet gate. Then we use digital cleanup. However, when there are speckles all over the frame, it's impossible for that method to work. You have to do full photochemical restoration first, which is the most time consuming aspect sadly. We mostly work on short form and not every frame is speckled, so it is a looking through a magnifier and searching for speckles. 

Well yea, this is why we clean with an ultrasonic cleaner after doing this work. I think it's important to re-clean because you will leave little marks on the film due to the cleaning job. It helps to get rid of those marks, which are generally very light. 

There are dozens of warehouses full of film that has not been scanned yet. I've worked with many archives and they only scan what people want/need. The rest of the content is not scanned. So there is a demand, but the problem is monetizing content. Most of the places don't know how to do that, so the film just sits and rots. Much of it has already turned pink with vinegar syndrome due to poor storage. So the cost to scan them goes up tremendously, which means they don't really want to scan them anyway, which means they sit even longer. 

I don't see the demand going away. 

I do think the pricing for scanning will go down tho, because there is so much competition. To me, that's the biggest change that's going to change. 

Nope, they can't make them fast enough. 

I don't think anyone will make a scanner cheap enough for the lower end people. Our $40k FilmFabriek, is way too much money for most people. Nobody is making a $10k decent scanner currently, but maybe that will happening the future. I think that's the magic number, but I can't imagine it happening because there are just not enough people who want them. 

That's .25/ft for 1200ft of film, which is a pretty cheap number and pretty typical amount of film for 16mm OCN. I don't think anyone is selling their scanner, it's all about finding the good clients. 

 

Thanks for the rundown Tyler!

That would be great if you had photo samples of the cleaning at various stages. Yes, hand cleaning sometimes leaves streaks you can see when viewed in reflected light on the film. Looks like all the ultrasonic film cleaners are from Europe and very $$. Too bad they don't make some cheaper ones in the USA. What type of chemical cleaner does the ultrasonics use?

If the films are too pink...turn them into B&W! B&W is better than nothing. Here was a pig in a poke film that was badly faded Anscochrome. I turned it B&W. 

The Segregated Swimming Hole D. D. Teoli Jr. A. C. : D. D. Teoli Jr. A. C. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Almost all my archival material is too far gone to be perfected with post work, although a wet gate would help. And sure, some post work could clean them up. But many are multi-generational dupes and the shadows and highlights are gone. There is not much there to HDR or contrast grade.

Did you ever find the issue with your FilmFabriek lens? I thought you had said when you first bought it, it was producing subpar scans as far as sharpness.

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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3 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

The pestering is constant with these people. And even when you refuse them, they still pester you

Stock footage can be profitable.  Like I said earlier, Getty Images represents me.  They take 70% of the profits, and I get 30%.  

But there’s a few side benefits.  They do all the marketing so that I don’t have to.  They also deal with people who steal footage or overextend their licensing.  They send out cease and desist notices if necessary.  If I had to do all of that, I’d be exhausted and would have quit a long time ago.

If clients see that you sell your footage on Getty Images, they know that you’re a serious vendor, and they don’t bother you with all of those pestering emails.  When I get messages like that, I direct them to my collection of clips on Getty Images.  I usually never hear from them again.  If they are true professionals,  they will license through Getty, or we will make a private deal.  But me mentioning Getty filters out a lot of people trying to get something for nothing.

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20 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

That is not true. As an open content Archive, I have no business plan other than I buy lotto tickets all the time. 

Yeah but you've got a $6,000 scanner and no way to buy a $40,000 or $100,000 scanner. With no business plan you won't get a lease or a loan to get one either. Don't take that the wrong way!!

5 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Nobody is making a $10k decent scanner currently, but maybe that will happening the future.

That's because the market is saturated by Retorscans being used for home movie transfers, and the companies that use them and other cheaper scanners for that are happy with the quality. I've seen the websites of way too many of these companies in the past few months, it's unfortunate. E.g. Reel Box has two old model Retroscans halfway down on their website, yet they say "We use only the latest in cinefilm scanning technologies to professionally scan your 8mm & 16mm film frame by frame into high definition 1080p MP4 files." Got Memories "At Got Memories, we use the latest, advanced equipment for processing film and completing the digital transfer process. This results in a perfect reproduction." They use Tobins, I'm not sure I'd call those things the "latest" technology given you can't buy them new any more (you get support for those from Urbanski Film now).

The major issue I think is that people have no clue what their old home movie films should look like. Your average customer doesn't understand the scanning tech, so if a company is telling them "we have the latest tech" they may get the impression that there won't be much difference for their films between a company like the ones linked to above, or a company with more capable equipment and their staff trained to give their customers a consistent service.

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1 hour ago, Dan Baxter said:

Yeah but you've got a $6,000 scanner and no way to buy a $40,000 or $100,000 scanner. With no business plan you won't get a lease or a loan to get one either. Don't take that the wrong way!!

100%!!

There's nothing wrong with trying to monetize a film archive (as long as it's your own content or it's in the public domain).  There's nothing wrong with a profit motive.  Without that desire to make some money from one's films or efforts, there won't be any money to buy a better machine to achieve higher volume and better results.  It's why I left RetroScan behind and moved up to Film Fabriek. I wanted better results, and I knew that would cost money.

And here's one more fact to incentivize you:  I have averaged $680/month from Getty since January 2009.  I know that's not a lot to all of you who make a living with your film scanning businesses (and I applaud you!), but that's a solid $8,160/year of passive income that I simply collect.  My Getty customers still license SD clips that I put up more than 10 years ago.  This is a business where you can create once and sell forever.

So instead of asking if there's any business in archival scanning, what about going vertical by getting yourself a better scanner and monetizing your own archive?  If you don't like the Getty model, how about the Periscope model?

Now back to that 1957 Chevrolet commercial that I'm restoring for eventual upload to Getty...

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I use Nick Coyle for my scanning. He is good, cheap, and usually quick. Price talks as a hobbyist and his overscans are very good for my budget. It is hard to go elsewhere when I am only shooting 200-400 ft at a time and am doing a scan-once...no matter the project size, he is on top to me. I'll be sending him some archival material soon (unsplit 8mm negative footage of The Monkees) to see how that comes out.

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On 2/17/2022 at 1:40 PM, Todd Ruel said:

There's nothing wrong with trying to monetize a film archive (as long as it's your own content or it's in the public domain).  There's nothing wrong with a profit motive.  Without that desire to make some money from one's films or efforts, there won't be any money to buy a better machine to achieve higher volume and better results.  It's why I left RetroScan behind and moved up to Film Fabriek. I wanted better results, and I knew that would cost money.

Yeah, the point I was making is that a Moviestuff, Tobin, or even a Cintel can only really be classed as "entry-level" scanners especially in 2022 (the going price on a used Cintel is $15K I think). They're not suitable or even intended to do serious archival work. If someone is using one of those machines for longer than a couple of years as their only scanner, then it probably means they don't have the skills/motivation/business plan required to get something better - or they're just very happy with what they have and don't see the point in getting something better.

By the way on this question:

On 1/10/2022 at 2:02 PM, Todd Ruel said:

The mod that the Retroscan really needs is a 4K camera.  Do you know of anyone who has modified a MKII with a better camera/sensor?

Take a look at the photo.

That's with a 4K camera, not all the mods are clearly visible though in the picture. The film is running through a 3d-printed prototype gate that is nearly invisible in the photo. Without gates it's useless for anything that isn't brand-new lab developed film.
 

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