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Any dealers specialize in used scanning equipment?


Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

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I've got a 35mm 6k Northlight if you want to buy it. It ain't fast but it's pretty. With some clever machining the remaining parts needed to do 16mm could be fabricated (it's set up for both but didn't come with the platters, gate and some other little bits. None of that is especially difficult to create by a capable machinist. 

Otherwise, yeah - ebay is the place to look. Some of the used broadcast equipment resellers also occasionally have film scanners, but they tend to be few and far between. 

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On 2/1/2022 at 1:29 PM, Perry Paolantonio said:

This is ours (Photos taken a while back). make me an offer!

 

 

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Looks good Perry...but I don't know what the hell to do with it.

Does it read optical sound?

Does it have the software?

Does it come with instructions or is it like the Lasergraphics and you are on your own?

Would it be good for an archivist and warped film? Don't know??

Can you buy parts for it?

These types of things are only good for those in the know. I wish I knew more about it. You take good care of your equipment Perry, looks very clean.

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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It works. It does not have an optical track head but a minor widening of the gate would allow for sufficient overscan that you could use AEO-Light software (free) to decode the track. It has the software, runs on Linux with a basic GUI, as well as full control via command line. All of the config files are plain text, and you can easily tweak how it works using those. 

It's not great for warped film, though we have put some pretty shrunken film through this without issues. You don't shuttle fast with shrunken film, and you remove the registration pins, so as not to damage the perfs. (2 screws, takes a few seconds). 

You can't buy parts for you - never could, really you can't with any of these scanners. They're designed to be serviced by the manufacturer. It's possible that you could get a support contract with Filmlight for it, but it'd likely be a fairly hefty chunk of change. There is a manual for it, which you can download with a quick google search (I think the Northlight 2 manual is the same as for the Northlight 1, it just calls out the differences where appropriate).  

For what it's worth, and I don't know how many times I have to say this, you are not "on your own" with a Lasergraphics scanner. No, there is not much documentation for it, and that's a sore spot. But none of the LG scanners are especially difficult to use, either, and they are quite responsive to questions, in my experience.

Someone with a basic knowledge of film handling can operate Lasergraphics machines. Without a basic knowledge of film handling, in my opinion, one has no business operating a piece of equipment like that. 

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On 2/16/2022 at 6:53 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Would it be good for an archivist and warped film? Don't know??

Can you buy parts for it?

No it isn't an archive scanner, you will never be able to afford the parts for that and even if you could it still isn't an archive scanner. It was made for professional use (digital restoration and post-production) and that's really the only use a company would have for it today. Also it's so slow that it's designed to be operated in a dust-free cleanroom. It had limited use when it was made and its use today would be even more limited. There's much less film that's under 40 years old today compared with when it was made that's just a fact of time, and Filmlight hasn't kept up with development.

The NL1 is a 2002 scanner I think, so way way way before CMOS imagers were capable of anything even approaching equal quality for film scanning, and well before LED lighting technology was capable for proper illumination. To use it for commercial scanning today you'd have to charge the commercial rates of the 00's and that's just not going to happen, and archives won't touch it due to the light. You can't buy the 6K CCD imager any more and the software almost certainly doesn't support a choice of replacement. So it probably would be a good scanner for a post-production house that needs an extra RGB scanner for a light load of use over the year.

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6 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

No it isn't an archive scanner, you will never be able to afford the parts for that and even if you could it still isn't an archive scanner. It was made for professional use (digital restoration and post-production) and that's really the only use a company would have for it today. Also it's so slow that it's designed to be operated in a dust-free cleanroom. It had limited use when it was made and its use today would be even more limited. There's much less film that's under 40 years old today compared with when it was made that's just a fact of time, and Filmlight hasn't kept up with development.

The NL1 is a 2002 scanner I think, so way way way before CMOS imagers were capable of anything even approaching equal quality for film scanning, and well before LED lighting technology was capable for proper illumination. To use it for commercial scanning today you'd have to charge the commercial rates of the 00's and that's just not going to happen, and archives won't touch it due to the light. You can't buy the 6K CCD imager any more and the software almost certainly doesn't support a choice of replacement. So it probably would be a good scanner for a post-production house that needs an extra RGB scanner for a light load of use over the year.

 

Thanks! You got to be very careful with scanners. I don't need or have room for a paperweight.

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On 2/15/2022 at 3:05 PM, Perry Paolantonio said:

It works. It does not have an optical track head but a minor widening of the gate would allow for sufficient overscan that you could use AEO-Light software (free) to decode the track. It has the software, runs on Linux with a basic GUI, as well as full control via command line. All of the config files are plain text, and you can easily tweak how it works using those. 

It's not great for warped film, though we have put some pretty shrunken film through this without issues. You don't shuttle fast with shrunken film, and you remove the registration pins, so as not to damage the perfs. (2 screws, takes a few seconds). 

You can't buy parts for you - never could, really you can't with any of these scanners. They're designed to be serviced by the manufacturer. It's possible that you could get a support contract with Filmlight for it, but it'd likely be a fairly hefty chunk of change. There is a manual for it, which you can download with a quick google search (I think the Northlight 2 manual is the same as for the Northlight 1, it just calls out the differences where appropriate).  

For what it's worth, and I don't know how many times I have to say this, you are not "on your own" with a Lasergraphics scanner. No, there is not much documentation for it, and that's a sore spot. But none of the LG scanners are especially difficult to use, either, and they are quite responsive to questions, in my experience.

Someone with a basic knowledge of film handling can operate Lasergraphics machines. Without a basic knowledge of film handling, in my opinion, one has no business operating a piece of equipment like that. 

 

Thanks for the rundown Perry. Was this your first / early scanner you started with?

I know you like Lasergraphics as you are a big promoter of them. I've had lots of experience with them myself, email experience. They never answer emails. After years of writing, I did eventually get a reply from their sales company that pushes the product. He could not answer tech questions, just made sales.

I'd be very worried about giving them a chunk of money and I will never hear from them again unless I give them more money to answer questions. I know you pay them money for support to answer your questions Perry, but I don't have tens of thousands of $$ to spend to get questions answered. The Lasergraphics seems like a beautiful machine. I'd love to have one if I had the money. But the company has very poor support Perry...unless you pay them to answer you. 

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On 2/19/2022 at 10:30 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Thanks! You got to be very careful with scanners. I don't need or have room for a paperweight.

I know I've said this before but you really need to know who you're talking to and taking advice from. Anybody can say whatever they want on the internet and sound authoritative. It doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. Case(s) in point:

On 2/19/2022 at 4:06 AM, Dan Baxter said:

Also it's so slow that it's designed to be operated in a dust-free cleanroom

This keeps coming up here, and it's 100% ridiculous. Yes, you need the room to be clean and relatively dust free. But that's going to be the case wherever you handle film. You do not need a cleanroom (which is a specific thing, typically involving sealed off control of the air, HEPA filtration, people wearing bunny suits, the works. There are ranges of cleanrooms, and they are defined by certain standards). You need to scan film in a clean space, not a dingy basement, but it doesn't need to be a cleanroom. And that's the case for any scanner. That it's slow doesn't mean it's going to pick up a ton of dust. We scanned multiple features on ours, in a normal office environment, and this was never an issue. 

On 2/19/2022 at 4:06 AM, Dan Baxter said:

There's much less film that's under 40 years old today compared with when it was made that's just a fact of time

I think the implication here is that it cannot be used for old film. Again, this is completely incorrect. Not all old film is shrunken. Not all shrunken film is shrunk to the same degree. Would you put severely warped film through it? No. But you'd be ill-advised to put that film through any machine with a sprocket drive transport. That doesn't mean you can't scan archival film on it. The oldest film we scanned on ours was from the early 1950s. It had no issues, because the film was in decent condition. That would be 65 year old film at the time.

(FWIW, the sprockets on the northlight are pretty small, and they're designed so that you can run film that is shrunken, to a point. You slow down the shuttle speed (or better, use rewinds). You do need to remove the registration pins from the gate, an operation that involves a screwdriver and 30 seconds of your time, and you still get pretty stable scans - that could be further stabilized in software if need be). 

On 2/19/2022 at 4:06 AM, Dan Baxter said:

To use it for commercial scanning today you'd have to charge the commercial rates of the 00's and that's just not going to happen

You're batting 1000 here Dan. First, nobody is talking about using this scanner for commercial scanning. Daniel is referring to scanning archival footage and from the context of all his other posts, it seems that cost is the primary factor he's considering with a purchase. Something has to give, man. You cannot scan fast and high quality without spending decent money on the hardware. It cannot be done cheaply. So if quality is paramount, and you're on a limited budget, the tradeoff is speed. The quality of scans from the Northlight is great. The fact that you bring up the CMOS vs CCD argument tells me all I need to know - they both good ways of capturing an image. CMOS is the current way to do it,  but CCD sensors are perfectly good and in some cases better.

On 2/19/2022 at 4:06 AM, Dan Baxter said:

and archives won't touch it due to the light

I'm not even sure what this means? Do you mean because it's a hot light source? It's hot but separated from the film so it poses no danger to the film. 

On 2/19/2022 at 4:06 AM, Dan Baxter said:

You can't buy the 6K CCD imager any more and the software almost certainly doesn't support a choice of replacement

Odds are Filmlight has more in their possession, though this is a bit of a straw man argument. As for the software, it is completely based on the command line, with a GUI wrapper that calls those commands. Almost all of the under the hood stuff is documented, and one could certainly replace a sensor and make it work. It would take more engineering know-how than I think Daniel wants to bother with, but this point is kind of moot anyway: if one is buying an older, high end scanner for a few thousand dollars, one has to set expectations accordingly. This is a machine that will easily pay for itself within a month or two of daily use. 

 

On 2/19/2022 at 10:39 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Thanks for the rundown Perry. Was this your first / early scanner you started with?

 

First? No. We bought this before we upgraded our ScanStation to do 35mm. It more than paid for itself and as I said above we scanned numerous archival elements and feature films from print, negative, IP, IN, Color and B/W, as well as the 35mm CRIs for the Arrow Video release of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes on the Northlight. With the money we made on the Northlight, we upgraded our ScanStation, which matches or exceeds the quality of the scanstation in most cases, and is faster. But it cost us 3x what we paid for the Northlight when we bought it. Again, you get what you pay for.

 

On 2/19/2022 at 10:39 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

I'd be very worried about giving them a chunk of money and I will never hear from them again unless I give them more money to answer questions. I know you pay them money for support to answer your questions Perry, but I don't have tens of thousands of $$ to spend to get questions answered. The Lasergraphics seems like a beautiful machine. I'd love to have one if I had the money. But the company has very poor support Perry...unless you pay them to answer you. 

Lasergraphics does not have poor support. Their support is exceptionally good. We have had issues that were fixed in less than 24 hours, or have suggested features that appeared in the next build of the software they sent us. Galileo Digital handles the pre-sales and sales support for them and defers to Lasergraphics support on technical issues they may not know the answer to. This is typical of all of the resellers that support the post production world. But even then I know customers who have gone to Lasergraphics to spend a day going over their technical requirements and scanning film in person with their support folks to get a feel for the equipment. These machines cost what they do for a reason. They're very well built, they're extremely reliable, and they do what they do with precision and quality. As I said above, you have to pay for that, and I fail to see how that's unreasonable. 

I guess I just don't really understand why you think it's strange that you'd have to pay for support. This is the case with any professional equipment, even things like PC workstations - you pay for an ongoing support contract in order to ensure things get fixed when they break.

I mean, would you expect a car dealer to fix your car at no costs after the warranty is up? How is this any different? 

 

 

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12 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Daniel is referring to scanning archival footage and from the context of all his other posts, it seems that cost is the primary factor he's considering with a purchase. Something has to give, man. You cannot scan fast and high quality without spending decent money on the hardware. It cannot be done cheaply.

He's not talking about scanning 35mm at all, and most of what he has is probably prints. Any old CCD scanner cannot scan prints to the same quality as negs without multiple exposures per frame ("HDR scanning") which most of them do not do.

The reason why the NL1 is not an archive scanner is because it wasn't designed for achieves. Archives need fast, cheap, reliable, and easy.

If you're determined enough you could get the Retroscan Universal Mark II to beat the quality of the ScanStation for special cases. It would take a lot of work though, and would still be more limited, but it should be possible soon it's one of the things a friend of mine is working on. You have to build a circuit to fix the issue with 35mm, but if you don't care about 35mm and just want 16/8 and you're happy with quality that is GOOD but not as good as the 6.5K Scanstation you'd be looking to spend in my estimation around $15K-16K all-up. It's a WIP but here's a photo. Although it's very hard to see because it's a 3d-printed prototype, there is an archive gate that the film is running through that holds it perfectly flat unlike the stock machine that only has the "guides and is useless for keeping film flat or in focus. It'll be some time yet before proper software is developed, so hopefully by the end of the year. The one in the photo is going to be used partly for software development for proper 3rd-party capture software that can run these things without the limitations of the Moviestuff software and that will make them a bit more usable, so that may be available later this year.

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On 2/21/2022 at 8:44 AM, Perry Paolantonio said:

I know I've said this before but you really need to know who you're talking to and taking advice from. Anybody can say whatever they want on the internet and sound authoritative. It doesn't mean they know what they're talking about. Case(s) in point:

This keeps coming up here, and it's 100% ridiculous. Yes, you need the room to be clean and relatively dust free. But that's going to be the case wherever you handle film. You do not need a cleanroom (which is a specific thing, typically involving sealed off control of the air, HEPA filtration, people wearing bunny suits, the works. There are ranges of cleanrooms, and they are defined by certain standards). You need to scan film in a clean space, not a dingy basement, but it doesn't need to be a cleanroom. And that's the case for any scanner. That it's slow doesn't mean it's going to pick up a ton of dust. We scanned multiple features on ours, in a normal office environment, and this was never an issue. 

I think the implication here is that it cannot be used for old film. Again, this is completely incorrect. Not all old film is shrunken. Not all shrunken film is shrunk to the same degree. Would you put severely warped film through it? No. But you'd be ill-advised to put that film through any machine with a sprocket drive transport. That doesn't mean you can't scan archival film on it. The oldest film we scanned on ours was from the early 1950s. It had no issues, because the film was in decent condition. That would be 65 year old film at the time.

(FWIW, the sprockets on the northlight are pretty small, and they're designed so that you can run film that is shrunken, to a point. You slow down the shuttle speed (or better, use rewinds). You do need to remove the registration pins from the gate, an operation that involves a screwdriver and 30 seconds of your time, and you still get pretty stable scans - that could be further stabilized in software if need be). 

You're batting 1000 here Dan. First, nobody is talking about using this scanner for commercial scanning. Daniel is referring to scanning archival footage and from the context of all his other posts, it seems that cost is the primary factor he's considering with a purchase. Something has to give, man. You cannot scan fast and high quality without spending decent money on the hardware. It cannot be done cheaply. So if quality is paramount, and you're on a limited budget, the tradeoff is speed. The quality of scans from the Northlight is great. The fact that you bring up the CMOS vs CCD argument tells me all I need to know - they both good ways of capturing an image. CMOS is the current way to do it,  but CCD sensors are perfectly good and in some cases better.

I'm not even sure what this means? Do you mean because it's a hot light source? It's hot but separated from the film so it poses no danger to the film. 

Odds are Filmlight has more in their possession, though this is a bit of a straw man argument. As for the software, it is completely based on the command line, with a GUI wrapper that calls those commands. Almost all of the under the hood stuff is documented, and one could certainly replace a sensor and make it work. It would take more engineering know-how than I think Daniel wants to bother with, but this point is kind of moot anyway: if one is buying an older, high end scanner for a few thousand dollars, one has to set expectations accordingly. This is a machine that will easily pay for itself within a month or two of daily use. 

 

First? No. We bought this before we upgraded our ScanStation to do 35mm. It more than paid for itself and as I said above we scanned numerous archival elements and feature films from print, negative, IP, IN, Color and B/W, as well as the 35mm CRIs for the Arrow Video release of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes on the Northlight. With the money we made on the Northlight, we upgraded our ScanStation, which matches or exceeds the quality of the scanstation in most cases, and is faster. But it cost us 3x what we paid for the Northlight when we bought it. Again, you get what you pay for.

 

Lasergraphics does not have poor support. Their support is exceptionally good. We have had issues that were fixed in less than 24 hours, or have suggested features that appeared in the next build of the software they sent us. Galileo Digital handles the pre-sales and sales support for them and defers to Lasergraphics support on technical issues they may not know the answer to. This is typical of all of the resellers that support the post production world. But even then I know customers who have gone to Lasergraphics to spend a day going over their technical requirements and scanning film in person with their support folks to get a feel for the equipment. These machines cost what they do for a reason. They're very well built, they're extremely reliable, and they do what they do with precision and quality. As I said above, you have to pay for that, and I fail to see how that's unreasonable. 

I guess I just don't really understand why you think it's strange that you'd have to pay for support. This is the case with any professional equipment, even things like PC workstations - you pay for an ongoing support contract in order to ensure things get fixed when they break.

I mean, would you expect a car dealer to fix your car at no costs after the warranty is up? How is this any different? 

 

 

 

Thanks, Perry, for the info.

Well, from my personal experience, Lasergraphics offers little confidence in a company that will answer questions unless you pay them. That is my experience with them. In another thread I asked you what you have to pay them to talk to you. I haven't got caught up that far, so will see what the verdict is. 

"You're batting 1000 here Dan. First, nobody is talking about using this scanner for commercial scanning. Daniel is referring to scanning archival footage and from the context of all his other posts, it seems that cost is the primary factor he's considering with a purchase. Something has to give, man. You cannot scan fast and high quality without spending decent money on the hardware. It cannot be done cheaply. So if quality is paramount, and you're on a limited budget, the tradeoff is speed. The quality of scans from the Northlight is great. The fact that you bring up the CMOS vs CCD argument tells me all I need to know - they both good ways of capturing an image. CMOS is the current way to do it,  but CCD sensors are perfectly good and in some cases better."

Yes, $$ is a big factor. Speed is not that big a factor, but I can't use a machine that take an hour to scan a 400 foot reel. I am looking for a decent 4K machine that reads 16mm op sound and is affordable and reliable. I'm not looking for top end machines for next to nothing. But, I will have to catch up like I said and see what the support fee they change you to talk to them cost. Yes, it surprises me Perry that you can spend $150,000 for a machine and they charge you to talk to them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Yes, it surprises me Perry that you can spend $150,000 for a machine and they charge you to talk to them. 

I don't have to pay to talk to them. I do have to pay if I want technical support. This is not unusual, not unreasonable, and in fact, SOP in the post production world. We have annual support contracts for our SAN, for our restoration software, our scanner, and other critical tools we use. We can't get support unless we are paying for support. This is normal, and it makes perfect sense. These are typically smaller companies with limited resources and can't spend all day long answering every question they get. So you pay for support. You're paying for those people to do what they do.

And it's well worth it - when we run into trouble, we get quick answers and often quick fixes. Compare that to companies that do free support (like Blackmagic). Ask a question and unless you get lucky and the right person reads it, you may as well be screaming into a black hole. Ask for help on their support forums and be prepared for 50 different people with 100 different opinions on what's wrong or on how you should "really be doing something," most responses being completely off the mark.

Even consumer software companies are charging for support, but as monthly subscription fees. It doesn't seem like as much because it's a slow drip. but you're still paying for updates and support. 

What you're asking for is unrealistic. It's not going to happen. 

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