Why was the Imagica cine' scanner so slow?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

 

In the description on eBay, it says it takes half a minute to scan one frame in 4K. Did it use a camera to digitize? Or was it something like a flatbed scan with a slowly moving scan eye? 

 

Click to enlarge

 

It has a lot of parts and guts to it. What era was it mainly used in? Any commentary to add to the historical record?

 

 

 

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DDTJRSGFA

Edited March 23, 2022 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Perry Paolantonio]

It's from the mid 1990s and it was one of the earliest 4k motion picture film scanners. Everything inside is custom hardware. It uses an ancient SGI 02 machine (I always wanted one of those) to control it. It takes an hour to warm up the lamp before you can start scanning and the lamp only has a lifespan of about 150 hours. This is slow because it's old. It's a monochrome 4k line sensor with a corresponding fiber optic light pipe, which we've discussed here before. The sensor and the slit light are synchronized and both sweep past the film, which is held steady with registration pins. it does this three times - once for each color channel - then combines them into a color image. 

We just got rid of ours, which was 80% of the way converted into a modern film scanner. It went to someone locally who is going to finish converting it. It's a very nice transport.

Originally it was used for scanning short shots of film, not entire films. At the time, nobody did that. This would have been used for grabbing a scene from a film reel probably for visual effects work.

The lens inside (a 95mm Printing Nikkor) is worth almost what they're selling it for. The rest, not so much. it's about 400-500lbs of equipment too. 

Impressive that it's still working though. it's a very complicated machine. 

The prayer cards inside the door are missing. They're there to ward off evil spirits. It's probably cursed. 

Edited March 23, 2022 by Perry Paolantonio

[Robert Houllahan]

Sometimes dream do come true… ill scoot you one of these once I figure out which run and which don't… 

[Perry Paolantonio]

4 minutes ago, Robert Houllahan said:

Sometimes dream do come true… ill scoot you one of these once I figure out which run and which don't… 

haha. that would be amazing. I always thought they were super cool. They were capable of analog video capture (with an add-on card) and didn't cost that much more than a fully tricked out mac with a video board at the time. There was even a version of Premiere that ran on it, I think.  

I also accept Aaton donations, by the way. No questions asked, you can just leave it at our door. 

[Robert Houllahan]

Ha... no my Aaton is MY Aaton..... U Kan Not Haz.

Some of these have SDI Video I/O even....

Edited March 23, 2022 by Robert Houllahan
comedic

[David Sekanina]

? I worked on one of these O2s at art school in Lausanne more than 25 years ago. The software was Alias Wavefront and Power Animator, which later became Alias Studio (for design)  and Maya (for animation). Adobe even ported an early version of Photoshop to Irix.

I still have the muscle memory of certain mouse gesture functions ?

Edited March 24, 2022 by David Sekanina

[Robert Houllahan]

SGI was an amazing company that built some really way out ahead computers back when that was a thing, in some pretty cool cases.