Robert Houllahan

The 2-flash is useful for allot of things and mostly gets sensor noise down and more detail in dense film so a reasonable cost for that feature and LaserGraphics has a staff of engineers and support people to feed. Tommy at Colorlab has a background in software and Colorlab probably sees more of that Kodacolor film than anyone with their proximity to the national archive so it was likely worth it for him to develop it. It is pretty problematic as Perry said with defining the little squashed lenses from so long ago and there is so little of this kind of film in circulation.

I have two model C Bell&Howell printers (one 35mm and one 16mm) and a Producers Service computer controlled optical printer at Cinelab in New Bedford about 45min south of Boston, c'mon down if you want to see them. I made prints on the 16mm printer today.

I have scanned some Kodacolor jobs and sent them to Tom at Colorlab for him to process, his GPU based software works and the results are certainly a mixed bag. Kodacolor was a terrible color process and was made far worse by years of being squished so the lenticular stripes became flat. At best it is a low res color image with lines and at worst it is a low res B&W image with lines when the processing does not quite see the stripes, I am sure Tom has improved it over time as it has been a few years since I have seen any7 Kodacolor come into the lab.

None of those machines should be anywhere but in the landfill or metals scrap.

I have found that comparing the Scan Station (both the Archivist and our Scan Station and other Scan Station 6.5K HDR machines) to the Arriscan it has better overall detail and much better color rendition and accuracy. We recently ran a feature on the Arriscan and the production did allot of tests between the Arri and Scan Station. The Scan Station edges out both the Arri and the Scannity in overall registration using GPU perf stabilization.

These imbeciles probably charge as much or more than a lab does for cleaning in a Lipsner and you get scratched film too! They probably also scan film on those piles of junk SD scanners and charge full price for that substandard scan.

You can also composite with an optical printer, between the Aerial projector and Main projector you can put four images together and shoot them onto the camera stock. The camera can also have sensitive stock and a traveling matte stock to mask areas for FX like blue screen.

They work like any imager the data stream is the whole sensor or the ROI you select, the CCDs just have fewer taps than the CMOS cameras and the way CCDs work makes it harder to have all the taps perfectly balanced. Since I have been building scanners in 2010 I ahve always run these and other CCD sensors in single tap mode as that is perfect and the scans come out flawless, just slowly.

The speed is limited by the CCD sensor itself. New CMOS Sensors have many more taps and they are balanced (pretty much) so they can move more sensor data off the sensor into the bus compared to a CCD. These CCD sensors can be run faster in 2-tap or 4-tap mode but then you get tap balance issues and in film scanning you will see quadrants in the scan unless a ton of work is done to balance the sensor taps.

As Perry said these are (relatively) older sensors and the speed is slow, the 6.6K OnSemi (Ex Kodak) 5.5micron CCD was made through 2019 or 2020 and especially in single tap (1-2fps) is virtually noiseles and without any tap balance or cmos tap grid artifacts issues. They also made a 5K (4.8K) 7,4 micron CCD that is 14 bit which yeilds true 16 bit in 2-flash HDR mode and in single tap that is 2fps which in True RGB and HDR is about 0.33FPS

If you don't need speed you can find some used Kodak CCD cameras from Imperx or Vieworks or other Machine Vision camera companies. The Ex-Kodak 5.5micron CCDs in 3.3K 4.8K and 6.6K are available as color or monochrome and make excellent scanner cameras if you can accept scans at between 1fps and 5fps run in single tap mode they are pretty flawless cameras. Figure $450-$1500 for a Gig-E camera. Lamp that can do RGB LED balance and lens and then a transport etc. you could put a basic slow scanner together for around $10K if you write the software to run it.

This post should probably be in the post section.

I would not pay more than $1500.00 for a desktop canning machine.

They used to cutup 35mm prints and perf them for leader or filler. Allot of times those were used as slugs in 16mm mag tracks.

White paper artists tape or no tape and bag it and wrap the bag around the short end roll before you put it in the can. Kind of depends on if you are planning to use the short end or if you are going to sell or ship it. I would just leave it un taped and put it in the bag then can and then in the fridge.

There was a Mitchell GC 2-Perf factory conversion kit on eBay a while back.

This happens especially with older 16mm films, especially 2R 16mm films, which were spliced together by a enthusiast filmmaker at the time they were shot. Sometimes it is better to leave the film assembled as it is and scan it than to try to take apart cement splices from the 1940's for example. Furthermore not every family archive wants to pay for a extensive restoration, sometimes there will be backwards segments in assembled films and that is how they have been for decades. So as the lab or post house you can go through the films and spend allot of bench time to undo hot splices (if possible) and reverse segments and make a scan reel that is all correct. Sometimes you end up scanning the reel as it is with issues and then fix the backwards or upside down segments in Resolve or Phoenix after the scan. Or sometimes the job requirement is to just scan as it is and deliver it to the client and they can edit it.

Also especially with archival materials this nitwitted scanner would necessitate more scanning for a finished scan, essentially scanning the film at least twice and maybe more times. I would think that the best practice would be to scan the film once in high res DPX or ProRes and make multiple other viewing copy files like MP4 and DNxHD etc at the one time you scan. Easily done with the Scan Station internally or other scanners like the DFT Polar from the DPX files and Resolve or Baselight etc. If you scan a very delicate film once on this and it ends up breaking multiple times you then have broken film and a bad scan.

No I was just scanning the IP for a client, they will have to do the rest of the pot work, I just scanned it so no shots were clipped either in the shadows or hilites. I have done full restorations on films from the IP I did one for Sergei Bodrov on his film "The Prisoner of the Mountains" for which I went to Chicago and retrieved the IP from MGM's Iron mountain archive and did a 4K scan and then a scene to scene shot matching using the battered print I had and the DVD to make it look like new. Pretty easy to finish grade the IP to match the print.

I think that if the emulsion dyes have transferred into the base it will be very hard to remove them because they are now part of the base not just on the surface. You might try soaking a small head or tail piece in Film Renew or Vita Film and then take some more very aggressive action like using a scotch brite pad to it just to see how far you need to go to possibly get it out. You might want to ask some more experienced colorists about how to "notch" out the color spectrum of the transferred dyes as they seem to be a very specific color range. There are great color picker tools in all the modern software like Resolve or Phoenix. Maybe make a post on the Lift Gamma Gain forum to get some more colorist opinions.

I was just scanning a 35mm feature IP today, they are interesting as they have allot of the final look in there but still need to be timed shot to shot. And they have excellent range and resolution while still being a positive image.

Most scanners these days have pretty sophisticated RGB LED lamps which can be calibrated to any RGB balance making the filter unnecessary. Doing a good 4K scan which is un-clipped and then trying to work on the base to remove the transferred dye. I would suggest finding a section at the head or tail to experiment on. Start with alcohol and move up in solvent strength to see if anything works.

Some of this could be Interpositives being scanned as they have much more detail and latitude. That said you can scan a print and they can look great especially 35mm prints, the look is just more baked in.

Jeeze that is a tough one to fix. I wonder if you could do some kind of notch or bandpass color filter in Resolve or Phoenix that just selects the fairly uniform color range of the dye imprinted onto the base from the tight wind and extract it. If they dye is really soaked into the acetate base it probably won't ultrasonic clean off.

You can try tapping the cartridge on a desk or counter a few times to see if that will loosen up the wind. Also you can pull a loop of film out of the window and then rotate the takeup on the cartridge to pull the film forward back into the window. The takeup reel will only advance there is a cam that keeps it from going backwards.