Robert Houllahan

I highly doubt it would run as E6 but we can try it. I saw the first of the NC500 at Cinelab today and I rather liked the grainy pastel look of it. Of course because it is client film I cannot share any clips but I found it pleasing. I was scanning it on one Scan Station and the other Scan Station had a Pro Spot Kodak 500t job shot on a 416 with the best glass it was super sharp and rich. As it was a spot with a big sports figure they really knew hoe to expose and shoot. It was a huge contrast to the NC500 which was also S16mm but in kind of low light and a bit underexposed. The NC500 was not anywhere near as steady as the 500t on the 416. I don't know what camera they shot on but probably a SR2 as it was student work. I really liked the way the Orwo rendered flesh tones and colors. I got a few rolls coming and I will split that amongst Cinelab staff and do some shareable tests.

I would second the 200t recco it is a really nice stock. We can push or pull up to two stops for ECN easily and more with some machine setup.

The gate probably cost as much to make as a Scan Station.

Yes.

For air knives you want to use a Ring Compressor for either positive pressure or vacuum. Regular air compressors have too much pressure and not enough volume a Ring Compressor will deliver constant pressure or vacuum. We have both the type of air knife Frank described on all the processors and also a type which has two pointed apparatus that have a slit for pressurized air to push liquid away from the direction of film travel into the tank the liquid came from.

No same gate.

Mine is a 2008/09 Arriscan and I don't think there was a sensor change but I could be wrong. The Arriscan is about 2FPS in 6K HDR mode. The Scan Station is about 7.5K in 6.5K HDR mode. Arriscan is good for selects scans and short form work like commercials and Music Videos it is not exactly a dailies machine. Although Arri did try to makret it as such in 2K SDR where it gets about 8 FPS and does full res and proxy scans simultaneously.

A few thoughts I think at least some of the consumer line of sensors are build with multiple markets in mind and the same basic design of a sensor may be in your phone, a lower end camera and a machine vision camera sorting beer bottles at a packaging plant. So the CFA dyes may be a mix of color performance and sensitivity etc and not for ultimate pix quality. The Digital Bolex used a S16MM sized Kodak CCD with 4-taps and I remember the thing that was long holding back the camera release was the tap balancing, which if done wrong will show four quadrants with obvious tap lines in the picture. For some reason it seems that CMOS sensors which have many many more taps do not have the very fussy tap balance issues that CCDs do. CCDs can be run in single tap for best performance but there is a big speed hit. Other than the Digi Bolex and the Dalsa Origin I don't know of many or any D-Cine camera systems based around CCDs due to tap balance and speed readout issues. Cmos is just faster to read as a global shutter system with many more taps and largely ushered in the era of digital cine cameras. It seems that CCDs have mostly been retired by On-Semi (used to be Kodak) and with Sony making 14K 16bit cmos sensors and others like G-Pixel with the 9.4K sensor and the potential for high framerates with those super high res cmos sensors the saleability of CCDs in the "big" markets for imagers is gone.

There were no high res area sensors in the 1990's when the "Classic" Spirit arrived, it had a full res HD mono line and three half res color lines to make 4:2:2 HD scans. The newer Spirit series has 3X 2K lines and 3X 4K lines and the HD config uses the 4K lines and scalers, it is a very good machine and can scan some material like ECO exceptionally well. It is not as steady as the newer scanners and it is complex and expensive to run. The Arriscan ALEV monochrome 3K CMOS sensor might be global shutter it is not just a early Alexa sensor it is specific to the scanner. Because it is a mechanical pin registration scanner it would not matter if it were rolling shutter as the film is stopped and locked during imaging. The Arriscan beats the Spirit 4K in resolution and dynamic range especially in 2-flash where it is a actual 16-bit scanner as the sensor is 14-bit. The original Arriscan is still one of the best scanners available especially for negative, It is at least comparable to and possible exceeds the Scannity and is as sharp and steady as a Scan Station but has better color performance. The Arriscan has very little visible sensor noise at all in my experience using it.

I think allot or most of the of the early CCDs were made by Kodak which makes excellent color dyes and the CFA filters made by Kodak for the CCDs were based in the legacy of color science from film. All color filter array sensor have some or allot of color channel crosstalk as the color dyes on the photo sites are not in any sense perfect. So I think the better the CFA the better the outcome especially back when there was allot less CPU power to apply to the demosaic math.

If you are talking about the buffers in the Rem-Jet removal stack then they are often a sponge material on a plastic core. The ECN2 process goes from the prebath which softens the backing then into the buffer stack that has rotary buffers and water jets that remove the backing and wash it away. Then on to the developer tank.

We run both E6 and ECN2 at Cinelab so IDK but some people like the Cross processed look with the color shift and added contrast. Some older Ekta stocks can really only be cross processed also as they just don't run well or at all as E6. Otherwise many labs just don't run E6 chemistry so they can only run Ektachrome as a cross process.

A billion feet? Two of the Spirit scanners I have came from a Indian post house in LA that scanned Bollywood films for years with them, probably a few hundred million feet of film or more. Both Spirit scanners worked when they arrived years ago. One became a parts machine when I got the 4K from CPC London which had presumably also scanned hundreds of millions of feet of film. The two Xena scanners started life as a Cintel Mk3 and a URSA and the Mk3 was from the mid 1980s and the URSA Y-Front from 1998? and both probably also scanned hundreds of millions of feet of film before being remade into Xena scanners. The electronics worked fine and the transports were and are in great condition, perhaps having received a bearing replacement somewhere along the line of their 30-40+ year life. Newer scanners like the Scan Station have much more simple electronics and the only problem I had with the first one I got was the capstan encoder somehow worked it's way loose from the Capstan motor causing some odd behavior, this was fixed by screwing the encoder back down.

OK then it would be normal. If it was Cross Processed the color shift and clear base would make the color chart be very far off from normal.

Was the Ektachrome run as E6 or as a Cross Process? If it was a Cross process then the color chart would not even remotely be workable.

The Spirit is a true RGB scanner and there are two ways to make a true RGB scan, one is Line scan and the other is a Monochrome area sensor. At the time the Spirit was introduced there were no area scan sensors capable of 2K much less 4K and when these new generation Spirits were rolled out 7.5FPS 4K was about as fast as could be done, it is still a reasonable speed today. The Arriscan is much slower especially in HDR 4K and the large photosite CCD lines in the Spirit with the 750W Xenon lamp still makes a very good scan just not anywhere near as steady as a modern scanner. Cintel carried the CRT flying spot scanner all the way through to the same era as the last generation Spirit with the Millenium then DSX and C-Reality. 4K flying spot scanners were truly Rube Goldberg machines of even more complexity than the Spirit and made very good scans with a new tube.

That is an odd one. Only when a empty filter holder is inserted? and not on any of the other film? Usually a filter issue is a vertical line not a horizontal streak.

I might work on figuring that out as I have three Spirits and one is a parts machine. I will probably try to sell the two running scanners but I doubt the market is hot for them so conversions might be a better route as they have really nice film transports.

Without a licensed and configured SUSE 10 or SUSE 11 Linux workstation running either DFT Bones or DFT Phantom-2 software the machine is a giant dongle. They are good machines which make great scans but they are complex and power hungry and allot to maintain. I have three. I am going to look into seeing about a Xena conversion on the parts machine I have. The other two run ok. Xena would have to be able to activate the spooling transport and then the Spirit capstan motor would be replaced with a newer motor. The lamp and gate setup would have to be converted to a full aperture instead of a slit and the Xenon hot lamp would be chucked and somehow a integration sphere and LEDs would have to be fitted to illuminate the film. Allota work but maybe a 9.4K Spirit conversion kit would be a thing.

It could become a Xena,

Everything but the Bones or PhantomII workstation to run it. Probably from the Air Force?

The armorer was new and incompetent. Evidently they had taken the set guns out to the range which is insane and they had no discipline or method for verifying ammo loaded be it blanks or dummy rounds. She is the daughter of a well known film armorer but new to actual working on sets as one it seems. The production seems to have cut all corners at every turn.

Nice! I will respond to your latest email asap and I have some videos of the B&W processor at Cinelab I will send too.

Niiice!

I do not really shoot weddings, I have shot a dozen maybe. I have a few friends who either really concentrate on them or got their start in weddings and were in high demand before moving on to commercials etc. They used film and digital together, one an A7 series and S8mm and another Cannons and 16mm and the A7 shooter is particularly skillful at grading and putting a high level of polish on his work. I think allot of these wedding customers are wackus bonkers and don't really know what they want until they are told and reassured that what it is will be great.