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Low-Budget Scanning For Indie Features


Thomas Beach

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4 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

That camera has a USB3.1 Gen1 interface, which is only 5Gb/s

Yea we have a PCI USB 3.2 card. It can do 10Gbps. 

4 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

That's 625MB/second, assuming you're getting full saturation, which you almost certainly are not, because it's USB. A 4k 12bit file is a bit over 18MB/frame. So the USB 3.1 connection can move 33 frames per second, theoretically, assuming it's an RGB image off the camera onto the disk.

Our scanner writes 40Mb files per frame 10 bit 4k. That's about what our spirit 4k writes as well. 

So that's roughly 15fps if you divide by 625. 

We've gotten 14fps to work for a few seconds at a time before it craps out, but it's pretty stable at 12fps if the drive is reformatted and empty. However, as it fills up, the reliability drops fast. I've done full 400ft loads at 12fps before. I think part of that is due to the raid is a internal hardware raid from the BIOS and I bet it doesn't have enough cache, probably 128k or something stupid like that. It really needs a few GB of cache to work properly. Perhaps a hardware raid card would help that consistency. 

4 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

That could include any image processing they're doing on the computer, whether that's GPU or CPU based.

Yea, they're using the CPU for sure, the GPU not at all. 

4 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

his is why professional scanners don't use USB cameras. 

Yea exactly. I didn't know it was a 3.1 interface. I figured it was 3.2 10Gbps. It's a pretty modern camera. 

4 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

To get 4k files off the camera to the PC at speed, you need a proper interface on a PCIe card: CameraLink (though nobody is really using this anymore), or Coaxpress, or 25GbE (5x faster than USB3.1 gen1). And you need a motherboard/CPU combo with enough bandwidth to allow all that data to move back and forth.

Well the problem is the camera in this case. I can easily do 25Gb fiber, but what camera will work? That's the problem. 

4 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Also, that camera has a tiny image buffer onboard - it can only hold about 6-7 frames of 12bit 4k, so if the FPGA on the camera is doing any processing that could be a choke point as well. 

Could be. 

4 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

The problem isn't your disk speed.

Well, the whole discussion started by sharing the problems our shared storage has. It's 10G and it gets between 600 - 800Mbps and we can't even write 4fps directly to it OR any of my external raids. Only that internal SSD raid can even get our "average" of 7fps. 

Our system is a Ryzen 3950X with 3080Ti. I think we need a better system to add more cards and get the proper throughput on the PCI lanes. Xeon or Threadripper would allow me to run a 25Gb card and a fiber camera. I just don't know if it will deliver better results. Faster yes, but reality is... if it's not marketably better, what's the point? 

Thanks for the input tho, always good to talk these things through. 

Edited by Tyler Purcell
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10 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea we have a PCI USB 3.2 card. It can do 10Gbps. 

But the camera can't. 

 

10 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Our scanner writes 40Mb files per frame 10 bit 4k. That's about what our spirit 4k writes as well. 

Sorry - you're right. I was using my calculator set to monochrome. For color it would be 3x larger, so a 12bit file would be about 55MB/frame. For 10bit it would be about 46MB/frame. You could never do 10bit DPX faster than about 13fps because of the speed of the camera interface, and even that's a huge stretch. Probably more like half that speed in real-world usage. 

 

10 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea exactly. I didn't know it was a 3.1 interface. I figured it was 3.2 10Gbps. It's a pretty modern camera. 

It's in the spec sheet for the camera. This is almost certainly why you can't get faster speeds. 

 

10 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Xeon or Threadripper would allow me to run a 25Gb card and a fiber camera.

This is probably unnecessary. Our ScanStation's host PC has dual GTX1070 cards, a 25gb nic (for the camera), a 10gb nic (network), Cameralink card (optical track reader), RAID card (internal RAID) and it's only an i7 9800 with 32GB RAM on a decent gaming motherboard. We can capture single-flash 6.5k scans at 15fps on this and 2k scans up to 60fps. A good i9 should be sufficient. 

Edited by Perry Paolantonio
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I think the IMX-253 (4112x3008) Pregius sensor goes down to 14FPS at 12-bit and 33fPS at 10bit in CameraLink or even less in GigE

Not sure if that is a sensor or interface limitation I run one using CamerLink on the Xena we do 8mm on and get 14FPS with machine vision GPU stabilization going.

I scan to a 100Tb 8G FibreChannel raid formatted to NTFS and can scan and render to a Mac over 10Gb/e simultaneously the Xena runs Win10 so I am not seeing a frame rate limitation on that FC Raid system. The Xena Win10 box sees it as a local disk and the Mac is a SMB share.

Edited by Robert Houllahan
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6 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

This is probably unnecessary. Our ScanStation's host PC has dual GTX1070 cards, a 25gb nic (for the camera), a 10gb nic (network), Cameralink card (optical track reader), RAID card (internal RAID) and it's only an i7 9800 with 32GB RAM on a decent gaming motherboard.

This is because the Scan Station does almost everything in CUDA on the GPUs and at least on my SSP the Scan Station app is 32bit and does not use much memory or CPU, CUDA is why it is so fast.

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6 minutes ago, Robert Houllahan said:

This is because the Scan Station does almost everything in CUDA on the GPUs and at least on my SSP the Scan Station app is 32bit and does not use much memory or CPU, CUDA is why it is so fast.

Right. My point was more that you don't need Xeon or Threadripper to get the PCIe lane bandwidth to add a 25gbE NIC. The PC the ScanStation uses is nothing especially fancy, just a gaming rig really, with a mediocre CPU. A similar motherboard with an i9 should provide plenty of PCIe lanes. 

Of course, you also need the software to support whatever camera you put it. I seriously doubt it's a simple drop-in replacement so this whole tangent is kind of moot. 

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1 hour ago, Robert Houllahan said:

I think the IMX-253 (4112x3008) Pregius sensor goes down to 14FPS at 12-bit and 33fPS at 10bit in CameraLink or even less in GigE

That's the spec for the raw sensor. The camera that sensor is put into may impose further limits on speed/resolution/bit depth, depending on how it's configured. So the same sensor in two different cameras may produce slightly different image sizes, at different speeds, especially if one of the cameras is doing any kind of processing internally. 

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25 minutes ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

That's the spec for the raw sensor. The camera that sensor is put into may impose further limits on speed/resolution/bit depth, depending on how it's configured. So the same sensor in two different cameras may produce slightly different image sizes, at different speeds, especially if one of the cameras is doing any kind of processing internally. 

Yeah the Imperx dual camera-link camera I use is 4112x3008 12-bit at 14fps

I think the Flir is 4096 pixels wide and not sure of the rest of the specs so yeah different machine vision camera manufacturers setup the same sensor in different ways.

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On 6/20/2022 at 4:57 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

Flir GS3-U3-123S6C-C

 

 

A while back you had complained the lens that came with the HDS was subpar and giving you soft images...or some such thing.

Did you ever find a lens you are happy with for the HDS?

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

Did you ever find a lens you are happy with for the HDS?

A friend of mine had some suggestions, but I haven't had the money to try things. Sadly, the lens I want to try is a bit much to just blow suddenly. I need to do more research and discuss some options with other people who have scanners. The HDS isn't "soft" it's just not as crisp as a Scan Station. It's around the same as a scanity, so I'm not really complaining when I say it's "soft" I just know the imager isn't the problem. 

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On 7/2/2022 at 9:25 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

A friend of mine had some suggestions, but I haven't had the money to try things. Sadly, the lens I want to try is a bit much to just blow suddenly. I need to do more research and discuss some options with other people who have scanners. The HDS isn't "soft" it's just not as crisp as a Scan Station. It's around the same as a scanity, so I'm not really complaining when I say it's "soft" I just know the imager isn't the problem. 

 

What lens are you looking for Tyler? What lens mount does the HDS+ use?

How do you know it is the lens and not the imager? I'm thinking you need to try other lenses before making that determination. Or am I wrong and there is another way to determine this?

I thought the Scanity had a very good reputation. (Although I never had any scans done with it.) 

Have you compared aperture to resolution? F4 or 5.6 is usually best for sharpness. But it may vary.

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

What lens are you looking for Tyler? What lens mount does the HDS+ use?

Here is the lens I have now, but it's been adapted to be "macro" and that cold be part of the problem. It's a: https://www.stemmer-imaging.com/media/uploads/optics/14/141080-Schneider-APO-Componon-12-40-2.8.pdf

I think with a better lens, it would be great. 

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

How do you know it is the lens and not the imager?

Because the imager is very good and I've tried other lenses, that won't work because they need to focus at a closer distance. 

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

I'm thinking you need to try other lenses before making that determination.

Yep, which is hard to do! Very costly. 

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

I thought the Scanity had a very good reputation. (Although I never had any scans done with it.)

The Scanity is very good, but not analytical like the Scan Station which has in my opinion is crisper. 

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

Have you compared aperture to resolution? F4 or 5.6 is usually best for sharpness. But it may vary.

Yea, we've tried many aperture settings, they don't appear to make much of a difference honestly. 

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8 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Here is the lens I have now, but it's been adapted to be "macro" and that cold be part of the problem. It's a: https://www.stemmer-imaging.com/media/uploads/optics/14/141080-Schneider-APO-Componon-12-40-2.8.pdf

You're probably aware that it started out as an enlarging lens- I think it's been re-mounted for machine vision. As an enlarging lens it's designed for that magnification range. It's not "adapted for macro" as such- that term really applies to a camera lens that can work at short distances as well. This one doesn't have extra optics added.

I don't know what would be better- Schneider were, and I assume are still, some of the best enlarging lenses, full stop.

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16 hours ago, Mark Dunn said:

It's not "adapted for macro" as such- that term really applies to a camera lens that can work at short distances as well.

My lens has a 6mm "makro" adaptor. I assume that's required to work with our scanner and absolutely could be a cause of the softness. Not saying the scanner is soft, it's just not crisp. 

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5 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

My lens has a 6mm "makro" adaptor. I assume that's required to work with our scanner and absolutely could be a cause of the softness. Not saying the scanner is soft, it's just not crisp. 

Ah, right, not in the spec for the lens as such. Hmm. I wonder what the "6mm". refers to. Is it a single element? Could be a problem with it I suppose.

Edited by Mark Dunn
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10 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

My lens has a 6mm "makro" adaptor. I assume that's required to work with our scanner and absolutely could be a cause of the softness. Not saying the scanner is soft, it's just not crisp. 

Rather than guessing, why not contact a company like Schneider and ask for a recommendation? You will need to know the exact size of the sensor, the pixel size of the sensor (all available from the spec sheet), the distance from the film to the sensor, and the type of mount you're currently using. 

The calculation for a lens is just math. You pick the lens based on the enlargement you need, the space you have to work with, and the resolving power of the lens, factoring in the size of the photosites on the sensor. We chose our Schneider lens for our 70mm scanner after discussing with them exactly which model we'd need to cover everything from 35mm to 15p IMAX (it's a kind of macro/bellows setup with separate stages for lens and camera so we can move both camera and lens as needed). You can easily buy a lens with the same focal length, magnification factor and model name on ebay, but if you get the wrong version it's not optimized for the sensor's photosite. There are a lot of factors to consider and this problem could be resolved with a couple quick emails with a lens manufacturer. 

We also looked at lenses from Linos, Myutron and Nikon (Rayfact), but ultimately went with Schneider. All were helpful in choosing the correct lens (though Schneider was the most helpful), but you need to give them the right information. 

Edited by Perry Paolantonio
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Looking for a suitable lens across many brands i found the Stemmer Imaging search quite helpful:

https://www.stemmer-imaging.com/en/products/category/fixed-focus-lenses/

For my application (recording a medium format image with a 1" sensor) I ended up with a 24MP lens from Kowa:

https://www.kowa-lenses.com/en/c-mount-lenses-machine-vision

Some sites explain, what magnification ratios you can achieve with a given focal length and extension tubes of different lengths. (I think Schneider even has it in its data sheets)

Edited by David Sekanina
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15 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Rather than guessing, why not contact a company like Schneider and ask for a recommendation? You will need to know the exact size of the sensor, the pixel size of the sensor (all available from the spec sheet), the distance from the film to the sensor, and the type of mount you're currently using. 

I mean one would assume Film Fabriek did this work already. Clearly the lens they choose is the optimal lens, but maybe at a price point. Looking at Schneider's catalog, they have nothing else like it. So I assume, they'll just recommend the same lens because it's the only one they offer like it. This is the problem with contacting a manufacturer directly, they are only going to discuss the options they manufacture, not options from other vendors. 

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20 hours ago, Mark Dunn said:

Ah, right, not in the spec for the lens as such. Hmm. I wonder what the "6mm". refers to. Is it a single element? Could be a problem with it I suppose.

Yes, it's a single element adaptor, that I assume is required for the close focus needed to work with this scanner. The imager is very close to the film gate. 

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1 hour ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yes, it's a single element adaptor, that I assume is required for the close focus needed to work with this scanner. The imager is very close to the film gate. 

It's most likely an extension tube, acting like a fixed bellows, allowing a non macro lens to be used as a macro lens.

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1 hour ago, David Sekanina said:

It's most likely an extension tube...

There is a 6mm extension tube listed on page 5 of those lens specs.  Extension tubes having no optical elements, right? The only "adapter" close to that length that I saw was 6.5mm length, just above on that page.

Edited by Gregg MacPherson
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14 minutes ago, Gregg MacPherson said:

Extension tubes having no optical elements, right? The only "adapter" close to that length that I saw was 6.5mm length, just above on that page.

Correct, like bellows, extension tubes have no optical element at all.

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8 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

This is the problem with contacting a manufacturer directly, they are only going to discuss the options they manufacture, not options from other vendors. 

Then contact other vendors. I don't really see what the problem is here. You write one email and send the same one to 4-5 manufacturers and see what you get.

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