Anyone try the Lasergraphics Archivist scanner?

[Tyler Purcell]

On 9/11/2023 at 7:46 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

That is something! You work I like I do or I work like you do...whatever! Space, $ and time are always an issue. Although with $ you can buy space and time. 

You can't buy time, you can buy space! If ya wanna work in Hollywood, ya gotta kinda pay to play. What we got working now, is really good. The benefit of a better scanner, gets us nowhere financially sadly. The work would not change. 

On 9/11/2023 at 7:46 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

What is a pressurized vessel? Send in photos.

A lot of scanners like the DFT machines, have an enclosure which is pressurized with compressed air. This way, it's anti-static controlled air BUT ALSO, there is much less chance of air from the outside getting into the scan and the image. We built a sealed box for the FF scanner, but we're still working on it! When we're happy, I will post! 

On 9/11/2023 at 7:46 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

What do you use 3D printing for?

We make camera parts. Mostly accessories for Aaton and Eclair cameras. We plan on expanding that business before we expand the scanning business. Currently we have 5 Aaton parts in the works, 3 available to purchase. We have 1 eclair part and we have a bunch of new ones that are going to be finished when we get back from our trip this fall. Ya know, loop formers, magazine caps, replacement knobs and such. We are also making our own seals for magazines as well. Basic things that people damage that need to be replaced. 

On 9/11/2023 at 7:46 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

I don't care how you slice it, living in L.A. is $$. 

Gotta live where the work is. Sadly, I'd say MOST of our business is word of mouth from locals. If we moved, even outside of LA county, we'd be dead in the water. It's why we're trying to expand the engineering aspects of the company. I think that's the future, building parts (machined metal) for film cameras. That unfortunately is the future. Starting on the ground level, will help us grow and then we can eventually move out of LA. 

On 9/11/2023 at 7:46 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

What is the scoop on the new FilmFabriek model? Will it do sound?

I can't say anything sadly. Been sworn to secrecy! 

[Dan Baxter]

1 hour ago, Tyler Purcell said:

I can't say anything sadly. Been sworn to secrecy! 

Oh, I might have to ask FF then myself, I'm happy to sign an NDA. The Archivist was definitely squarely designed to compete against it, that's why it landed at the same price-point (although now it's gone up by about $10K). Anyway whatever it is they will produce a good scanner, and hopefully it does provide the competition LG needs there.

[Perry Paolantonio]

16 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

We can agree to disagree instead of you always fighting over everything. You think it's perfect, and I think it isn't and it's hissy - end of story.

I can't find the post now, but I did post something here a year or two ago about this, and I hope to get a version of it onto our site soon to try to put to bed this nonsense you keep posting. But the gist of it is this: 

The hardware optical audio module for the ScanStation is a line array camera (not the same camera that takes the image of the picture). It images the optical track as the film passes its gate. Each line (row of pixels) of that image corresponds to an audio sample. The camera takes about 80k lines per second. The slower you run the film past it, the better the sound quality will be, because the audio sampling rate is higher. Any slower than 24fps and the differences are largely academic. Lasergraphics themselves will tell you that scanning the film too fast will result in lower quality sound and they recommend scanning at 24 or slower for best results. And this is easy to test - scan the same film twice, once at 60fps and once at 12fps, then load the files into an audio application that shows a spectrograph. You'll see a lot of noise in the faster scan but not in the slower one.

But let's say you ran the film through at slower than 24fps and it's still hissy. That's because you don't have the (unfortunately named) noise reduction feature turned on. I say unfortunate, because in most of the audio world, noise reduction is a step done *after* capturing the sound and is inherently destructive. In the case of the hardware optical reader in the ScanStation, it's done before the audio sample is even an audio sample. It works like this: The optical track camera takes an image of the track. It then looks at that image and eliminates the random noise of the film grain as well as transient gunk like dirt. The waveforms of the audio are smoothed, and the end result is a virtually noise-free track. 

But then you might say "but that's altering the sound!" -- it's not. If you capture the same audio with and without the noise reduction, look at the spectrographs of the two and overlay them, you'll see that the *only* difference between the two is that the noise reduced version has no noise. The actual soundtrack is unaffected by this step. 

 

16 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

I seem to remember you saying that ScanStations don't have software audio extraction - they definitely do and they recently added that "SoundView" feature to select the tracks precisely.

You remember incorrectly - I never said that. The ScanStation has two options: the far superior hardware track reader, or the ability to read the track from the scanned image. It does not offer both at the same time, it's one or the other. The SSP was the first to offer the software track decoding feature because they didn't have a hardware optical reader option for that (one or two of the very first SSPs did, I believe, but it was removed from the feature set of that model). The Archivist has the software option as well. 

The difference between the two is that the resolution you scan the picture at, as well as the file format you scan to, can affect the optical track reading. If you're capturing to low bit depth files, or at lower resolutions, like 2k or HD, you're going to get fewer audio samples, because your starting point has fewer lines than the hardware reader does. 

If you're capturing to a compressed file format, you're potentially introducing compression artifacts to the image of the track that could affect the sound quality. Probably not an issue with ProRes 4444, definitely an issue with ProRes 422 (non-HQ), or ProRes LT/Proxy, etc, where there's more compression. 

The purpose of SoundView is to handle certain edge cases where the track is misaligned on the film. Sometimes when the track was printed to the film, it was slightly off. The hardware track reader does a good job of detecting and automatically centering the track but there are some cases where the track is misaligned enough that you need to manually set some boundaries. This is so the track reader is only picking up the track itself, and not noise outside the track area. 

This feature is for the hardware track reader. I don't think it's available for the software reader (might be, but I can't test that as you can't have both running at the same time on the same machine). Perhaps @Robert Houllahan can test it on one of his machines with the latest version of the software and let us know. 

 

16 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

You can plug a dubber into a Blackmagic Cintel - are you not able to do it with a LaserGraphics as well? You're probably right that it doesn't matter much.

Well that's certainly a throwback. I knew they had some hardware ports but didn't realize they made it work. I guess it makes sense since the Cintel engineers still treat that machine like a telecine in many respects. Nobody really works like that anymore though. 

[Dan Baxter]

I'm really not interested in arguing Perry.

On 9/20/2023 at 3:31 AM, Perry Paolantonio said:

The hardware optical audio module for the ScanStation is a line array camera (not the same camera that takes the image of the picture). It images the optical track as the film passes its gate.

Right this is the same argument you made before. You can also put the same optical module that the ScanStation uses in a XENA or in a Kinetta or even in a Retroscan if you really want to, that doesn't mean they're all equal as there's more to it than that and audio is entirely different as well. A slight slant on the film and you're not capturing an accurate sample of the audio.

On 9/20/2023 at 3:31 AM, Perry Paolantonio said:

You remember incorrectly - I never said that. The ScanStation has two options: the far superior hardware track reader, or the ability to read the track from the scanned image. It does not offer both at the same time, it's one or the other.

Honestly, just ask LG to enable the optical sound extraction if it isn't enabled on yours then you can at least test it and come to an informed opinion on it and if you still don't like it and think its inferior to the hardware reader that's fine. I don't think that they disable it on new ones if you buy the hardware reader - why would they? You're obviously only going to use the one you think is better anyway and you already have the hardware reader...

On 9/20/2023 at 3:31 AM, Perry Paolantonio said:

This feature is for the hardware track reader. I don't think it's available for the software reader (might be, but I can't test that as you can't have both running at the same time on the same machine).

Yes it works with the software extraction, and it's listed on the Archivist page FWIW.

[Perry Paolantonio]

On 9/23/2023 at 2:45 AM, Dan Baxter said:

You can also put the same optical module that the ScanStation uses in a XENA or in a Kinetta or even in a Retroscan if you really want to, that doesn't mean they're all equal as there's more to it than that and audio is entirely different as well. A slight slant on the film and you're not capturing an accurate sample of the audio.

Of course they're all different. Each company is going to process the sound in a different way depending on how they implement it. My point in specifying that it's a line array camera was to differentiate from the main sensor in the imaging camera (used for software track extraction as well), and from the more traditional optical photosensor track readers like the one in the BMD Cintel. 

As for curling, that's a red herring - that's going to be an issue no matter what kind of soundtrack reader you're using. 

 

On 9/23/2023 at 2:45 AM, Dan Baxter said:

Honestly, just ask LG to enable the optical sound extraction if it isn't enabled on yours then you can at least test it and come to an informed opinion on it and if you still don't like it and think its inferior to the hardware reader that's fine. I don't think that they disable it on new ones if you buy the hardware reader - why would they? You're obviously only going to use the one you think is better anyway and you already have the hardware reader...

It is possible to enable the software reader on our system. It requires physically disconnecting the hardware optical track reader. The scanner's software only allows one type of soundtrack reader to be active at any given time. You cannot soft-switch between them. We don't usually muck around with the insides of the scanner unless necessary, but I will be doing this when I do some test scans for the blog post I mentioned. 

[Dan Baxter]

15 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

It is possible to enable the software reader on our system. It requires physically disconnecting the hardware optical track reader. The scanner's software only allows one type of soundtrack reader to be active at any given time. You cannot soft-switch between them. We don't usually muck around with the insides of the scanner unless necessary, but I will be doing this when I do some test scans for the blog post I mentioned. 

Right, that's fine. You should test them both at 60fps as well if you're doing a comparison and see what difference you get.

[Perry Paolantonio]

11 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

Right, that's fine. You should test them both at 60fps as well if you're doing a comparison and see what difference you get.

You will get better results with the software version, probably, for the reasons I outlined above. It's outside the scope of the article, because you shouldn't be working at those speeds, but sure. I can do that just to see.  

The picture quality at 60fps is not as good as the picture quality at lower speeds and if you're scanning film at that speed expecting good picture quality then you're using the machine wrong. And the sound will not be great at 60 fps from the hardware reader. Both of these caveats, Lasergraphics makes very clear up front.

That being said, 60fps only works with lower resolution scans (2.5k or lower), and that means you're starting with way fewer pixels in the scanned image of the soundtrack. Half as many, in fact, compared to a 4k scan of the same film. That should have a negative effect on the sound quality. 

FWIW, High speed capture should only be done in specific, limited circumstances: We only do 60fps capture when we're making low resolution access copies (and only that) of a large collection of film. Or if we're making a reference scan of a print that we're conforming high res A/B roll scans to - in that case the scan of the print is for our internal visual reference only, not a client deliverable. We don't capture customer work at those speeds because it doesn't look as good. 

[Dan Baxter]

10 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

The picture quality at 60fps is not as good as the picture quality at lower speeds and if you're scanning film at that speed expecting good picture quality then you're using the machine wrong. And the sound will not be great at 60 fps from the hardware reader. Both of these caveats, Lasergraphics makes very clear up front.

That being said, 60fps only works with lower resolution scans (2.5k or lower), and that means you're starting with way fewer pixels in the scanned image of the soundtrack. Half as many, in fact, compared to a 4k scan of the same film. That should have a negative effect on the sound quality. 

FWIW, High speed capture should only be done in specific, limited circumstances: We only do 60fps capture when we're making low resolution access copies (and only that) of a large collection of film. Or if we're making a reference scan of a print that we're conforming high res A/B roll scans to - in that case the scan of the print is for our internal visual reference only, not a client deliverable. We don't capture customer work at those speeds because it doesn't look as good. 

Of course, you'll likely get motion-blur and it's lower optical resolution as you say as well. But in situations where the video quality isn't essential 60fps is fine like making some quick proxies to check condition or to check what's on it for example.

It's the situation that's been the case ever since the original 2013 ScanStation as you know as you had one. A few years ago someone I talked to sent their home movies to be transferred on an original ScanStation, and they came back looking awful and they complained so the scanning company did it again, this time properly (or at least to their satisfaction). Setting the scanning speed artificially slow on a 2K ScanStation probably wasn't very intuitive to a lot of operators, whereas the higher optical resolution forces slower speeds now and especially if the HDR module is engaged. I'm not going to mention that company on a public forum, but they clearly knew how to make their scanner do better work but it seems they'd give their clients low-effort work and if they complained only then would dial-in the settings properly and re-scan. That being said looking at their prices, they were clearly priced for low-end work so the fact they'd re-scan properly at the rates they were charging was actually a very good deal.

Also people bring their attitudes towards photography with them, I had a discussion just last week with a family member regarding wedding photos and someone had brought up the fact that at a particular weeding the photographer used the flash in every photo and washed-out the skin tones. "Oh you can fix that in photoshop" one person said, and I tried to explain that's not the correct way to go about it because the dynamic range is finite: you need to get the best photo you can to begin with, not put in a poor effort and expect to "fix" it in post as that's just putting lipstick on a pig. Let's just say we fundamentally disagreed about what an acceptable photography service for a wedding is! So it may be that a lot of the companies that have these scanners are used to that kind of process where they don't work on getting the raw capture itself as good as it can be because they expect to do post-work on it and expect that they will "fix" deficiencies then and they may not even understand dynamic range properly.

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

On 9/19/2023 at 2:27 AM, Tyler Purcell said:

You can't buy time, you can buy space! If ya wanna work in Hollywood, ya gotta kinda pay to play. What we got working now, is really good. The benefit of a better scanner, gets us nowhere financially sadly. The work would not change. 

A lot of scanners like the DFT machines, have an enclosure which is pressurized with compressed air. This way, it's anti-static controlled air BUT ALSO, there is much less chance of air from the outside getting into the scan and the image. We built a sealed box for the FF scanner, but we're still working on it! When we're happy, I will post! 

We make camera parts. Mostly accessories for Aaton and Eclair cameras. We plan on expanding that business before we expand the scanning business. Currently we have 5 Aaton parts in the works, 3 available to purchase. We have 1 eclair part and we have a bunch of new ones that are going to be finished when we get back from our trip this fall. Ya know, loop formers, magazine caps, replacement knobs and such. We are also making our own seals for magazines as well. Basic things that people damage that need to be replaced. 

Gotta live where the work is. Sadly, I'd say MOST of our business is word of mouth from locals. If we moved, even outside of LA county, we'd be dead in the water. It's why we're trying to expand the engineering aspects of the company. I think that's the future, building parts (machined metal) for film cameras. That unfortunately is the future. Starting on the ground level, will help us grow and then we can eventually move out of LA. 

I can't say anything sadly. Been sworn to secrecy! 

Yes, you can buy time...by hiring hands, so to speak. Unless, hiring people won't help in what you are doing.

You got lots of irons in the fire. Very impressive. Is all your parts biz for film cameras? Is it holding steady? i was thinking film camera biz would be declining. 

[Tyler Purcell]

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

You got lots of irons in the fire. Very impressive. Is all your parts biz for film cameras? Is it holding steady? i was thinking film camera biz would be declining. 

Na, I think the business is pretty good right now. What I've been seeing is a steady flow of cameras coming in. Even though my focus is on French cameras (Aaton/Eclair), I'm absolutely willing to take SR's and Moviecams for basic stuff. I don't have the parts inventory to replace things, but most of the time they're just gummed up and need disassembly/re-assembly, pretty easy to do. 

I haven't been advertising our service business because up until now, I've been mainly working for someone else doing service. I literally just moved that whole business to our workshop with a brand new workbench and now I have all of the service tools for every Aaton camera made. I also have the largest parts inventory for LTR/XTR cameras in the US. We are also manufacturing new parts, mostly gaskets and seals, but we will be moving to metal in December with a lathe. I think that'll open up a few more doors for us and hopefully we can start manufacturing spares for wear parts we don't have access to. 

So maybe next year we'll start advertising and see how it goes. I'm ready to make this a real business, but it's going to take time and money, something we are finally starting to put in. 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

1 hour ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Na, I think the business is pretty good right now. What I've been seeing is a steady flow of cameras coming in. Even though my focus is on French cameras (Aaton/Eclair), I'm absolutely willing to take SR's and Moviecams for basic stuff. I don't have the parts inventory to replace things, but most of the time they're just gummed up and need disassembly/re-assembly, pretty easy to do. 

I haven't been advertising our service business because up until now, I've been mainly working for someone else doing service. I literally just moved that whole business to our workshop with a brand new workbench and now I have all of the service tools for every Aaton camera made. I also have the largest parts inventory for LTR/XTR cameras in the US. We are also manufacturing new parts, mostly gaskets and seals, but we will be moving to metal in December with a lathe. I think that'll open up a few more doors for us and hopefully we can start manufacturing spares for wear parts we don't have access to. 

So maybe next year we'll start advertising and see how it goes. I'm ready to make this a real business, but it's going to take time and money, something we are finally starting to put in. 

Good luck with it all!