Robert Houllahan

Yes we have an Arriscan and two Arrilaser recorders plus two LaserGraphics scanners and two Xena scanners.

I have recently done some Digital to 16mm recordings on NC500 for people who wanted a dirtier grainier look than 7219. Pretty happy with it for that, kind of recorded it as if it were 250iso In my own tests I shot it outdoors golden hour in a Bolex at f5.6-f8 24fps and felt more light really helped it.

There are two, maybe three labs in the US which can and would possibly do this, and have the optical printer to do it with.

I am kinda excited to see what comes of 100D Ekta up printed to 2254 Vision3 IN stock which is most commonly used for Arrilaser recrdings and I bet has allot more range than the older IN stocks they used for Texas Chainsaw.

I am actually working on a project right now that is doing the exact workflow that TX Chainsaw did. They shot 16mm color reversal and up shot it on and optical printer to an Internegative and then went on to make prints from that IN. The job we are doing tests for now is shot on Ultra 16mm Ektachrome 100D and I am setting up to up shoot it on our Producers ACME optical printer to 35mm 2254 IN stock. As far as printing lights go that is a bit of test and see how the stock and exposures resolve on the IN stock to print.

We are doing allot of digital to 16mm recording and I have three recordings I am doing right now which are for recording to elements to make prints with sound. For 35mm we can record to IN on the Arrilaser and make a print with an optical track but that is pretty expensive, I am looking into doing direct to 35mm prints.

Cineon LOG is a kind of lossless compression designed by Kodak to follow the characteristic curve of how negative film works, so the density range could be put into 10 bits. All digital sensors are linear response and early Cineon and Quantel scanners used Kodak tri-linear (RGB LIne) CCDs which were 12bit or 14bit linear, the Arriscan is a 14bit ALEV sensor and 2-flash gets it to 16bit precision. So all LOG curve schemes have followed on from the Cineon LOG designed by kodak in the late 1980's There is still calibrating the scanner to the film base and both exposure and lab variations and I think there is no way to just add technical and look LUTs to get a perfect image without also doing some base grading.

I did that to one of my Arri 2B cords too!

16bit DPX is linear not LOG.

The linescan issue in the Spirit is a temporal scan issue not a horizontal one. The Spirit scans the line x samples as the film moves past the aperture and "builds" the picture in the framestore in real time, the speed is governed by the encoder on the sprocket which is 4-800 lines per revolution and does not feed back into the frame store. So when there is frame instability like on a splice the velocity of the lines scanned jumps and you get the issues. In the later version of the Spirit 4K and Scannity there is some feedback to compensate for this. As for new sound scanning. The 8000 line / rev optical encoder used in these newer scanners allows for very detailed film velocity information to be mathematically combined with the horizintal picture scan info or (on the Xena) analog sound capture to create a audio signal that should be very accurate in pitch / stability.This method allows for the info to be processed for temporal variations in film velocity in a very high resolution and not just spit out to a framestore. The LG SS Optical sound reader is just doing a more detailed AEO like sound decoding, I am actually not sure it is a line scan as they may be using a area scan sensor to scan the sound areas Perry would know more about that. We use the built in AEO Light audio on the two Scan Station machines I have and it also works fantastically well, Arri is using AEO in the Arriscan XT now. I have not really had any pitch issues on any of the 8mm 16mm or 35mm films with sound we have scanned from either the Scan Station or Xena scanners.

Just use a 12v voltage regulator inline from the V-Lock plate to the EBM power plug.

oh boy. Real new scanners do not rely on the crystal locked frame rate of the film to correlate the sound like legacy telecine. So if you look at how sound heads are setup on the LG or Xena or DFT/Sondor machines there is a very high res optical encoder drum at the sound reader, this drum will typically have a 8,000 line/rotation encoder that drives sampling the magnetic or optical sound. This frees the scanner to run at any scan frame rate and have the sound be resolved to the resultant required playback speed. The LG machines use a line scan to basically do a high res picture of the optical track and decode it in the same manor that AEO Light works, but with higher accuracy as it has a known number of hundreds of thousands or millions of film velocity samples per second. The Xena uses a 8000 line encoder and a A/D in a National Instruments high res digitizer card. Not sure how the Sondor on the Scannity or Polar DFT machines works but I think it is similar to the LG system. So there is really no actual technical way for wow or flutter to be introduced on these new scanners because the physical scanning speed is irrelevant to the resulting playback speed of the sound or picture. The playback sound speed is done in math with vastly more sampling in time and visual representation per film frame than are necessary or have ever been available before.

My Scan Station SSP (perzonalz) with HDR has the same build moniker (lg_7_3_349_1221) as all the Scan Stations. The Archivist has the build as sa_7_3_289_5531 not lg I probably need to update them soon to the latest builds with DNx For comparison: The Arriscan update requires cloning the CERN Scientifc Linux drive from the Sun workstation and sending it to Arri and then they send it back and remote in to finish the update.

I would suggest 3D printing a cover with a 4-Pin XLR that could be fitted over the existing Arri motor terminals and cutting them down to flush with the motor casing and then soldering on wires to go from the two terminals to the XLR.

LaserGraphics has sold so many Scan Station scanners I half expect to see my local Pub or 7/11 offering MP scans sometime this year. Everyone has one, I personally have two. They are just so reliable and in constant use by the labs, post shops schools and archives and they cost relatively so much less than a big iron machine that it is not likely that many used Scan Station machines will show up on the used market. Anyone want to buy a nice Spirit 4k?