Robert Houllahan

Some attempts at answers: 1. Tech Advances? film scans work exactly like any other on set dailies except the time offset of the lab and scan process, it is easy to drop ProRes or DNx proxies into a DIT cart for sound sync and on set previews just like any other show. 2. Film developing and film itself is a chemical miracle so IDK what you might think of as "advancements" in film processing, the process control and temp controls on film processors have been computer controlled since the 1990's and a film processor is very much similar to many other industrial manufacturing or process machines with pumps rollers and air knifes etc. 2.a PhotoMEc in the UK and a number of smaller manufacturers build new motion picture film processors today. 3. The DFT Scannity the LaserGraphics Scan Station and Director and the Arriscan are the premiere industry film scanners today offering scans from 4K through 16K for motion picture film. There are a number of other smaller scanner manufacturers who take off the shelf machine vision cameras and combine them with RGB+IR LED lamps and a film transport plus software and GPU to build very advanced new scanner in a range of prices. 4. Resolution is always a hot and silly topic, film is fluffy clouds of silver and dyes and as such is not a fixed grid so in many ways the more resolution the scanner has the better those clouds are resolved. What is the practical limits for reproduction? IMAX 70mm is likely at least 12K and no digital projector does more than 4K native. 5. DI is just the film scan as the input to a color finishing process and there are many ways to control the image process and displays both digital and film. 6. Arrilaser 4k recorders the Imagica 2K recorder the Cinevator direct to print recorder and various new recorders built around LCD / OLED and Micro OLED are running to record digital to film today. I would say that anything digital starts off complex and expensive and eventually becomes a commodity and that has happened with film scanning. I am sitting in a room with two LaserGraphics Scan Station machine and an Arriscan and a Xena which is getting an upgraded sensor. I have three DFT Spirit scanners in a room next door not in service. The three Spirits all built between 2006-2009 plus the DaVinci 2K color corrector cost a total of almost $5 million. The Arriscan and the LaserGraphics scanners I have plus the Xena cost less than $750K and you can build a extremely good scanner these days for less than $50K

Until they put a better sensor into the thing it really does not matter, any little secret is overrun by the FPN and sub rez.

If BMD put a better sensor into the Cintel then it would be different but they have stuck with their old old URSA sensor that has allot of FPN and makes sub rez scans.

People who buy these will use confirmation bias to sell themselves on their purchase and into thinking it is a better scan than it is, already people sell 16mm scans as "2K" from this and it scans the full width of 16mm at about 2K but not the picture area, Also you have to run the film through twice to do "HDR" it is not a 2-flash scanner nor does it have GPU-Machine vision Perf Stabilization. I suppose it is ok for 35mm or for TikTok and Instagram vids but not for real work. Effective Resolutions 3840 x 2880 - Super 35 3390 x 2465 - Standard 35 3390 x 2865 - Anamorphic 35 1903 x 1143 - Super 16 1581 x 1154 - Standard 16 892 x 638 - Super 8 752 x 567 - Standard 8

I can use this at Cinelab I will PM you.

HI The only really mass produced film recorders using lasers are the Arrilaser 1 and 2 machines, they only record to 35mm film. I built a 16mm recorder 8-9 yrs ago and we are on the 5th generation of the recorder now. We went from using a CT Scan medical imaging LCD to a very new Micro OLED for the recorder recently. It uses a pin registered Mitchell 16mm camera and software which records DPX frames to 16mm one pin reg frame at a time with an intermittent movement and image control of the micro OLED. I have not made this machine Super 16mm it is a Standard 16mm gate and recording. We can record to just about any 16mm stock with a calibration, our usual stocks are 50D 250D 500t and 7222

Vertical scratches are usually something in the camera gate or loop path. Processing scratches usually move left-right and can be a piece of debris trapped in a squeegee for example. If this was scanned on a Spirit or Scannity there may be a chance that there is some dirt in the aperture slit on the scanner.

It is a great machine and any Scan Station with a newer Sony sensor and 2-flash will make pretty consistent scans it has largely become the "New Spirit" with everyone having one making a certain high level of quality scans into more or less a commodity. Scan Station still uses an off the shelf Sony color sensor camera and CFA scanners have allot of color channel cross talk which has to be dealt with in math / color matrix etc under the hood and they have separation issues especially in very dense negatives. The Sony Pregius IMX342 does have FPN if you look close enough and the 2-flash primarily gets rid of the noise in certain aspects like very dense negative. The Arriscan Director and other scanners which are RGB and don't have the color filter array and debayer issues and make allot more accurate color through the density range.

The Spirit is mostly used for archives or smaller shops keeping them running now it is old. The Scannity is a top performer for new film as is the Arriscan and Arriscan XT and LaserGraphics Director, all true RGB scanners. The Cintel scanner is a noisy piece of junk that scans 16mm ant sub HD rez and that is pretty useless for anything but 35mm and not the best for that. Most labs have replaced the Spirit with LaserGraphics Scan Station scanners which offer excellent and fast scans. There are the Xena FilmFabriek and Kinetta scanners which offer different ranges of quality speed and cost. Most modern scanners have benefited from new sensors and fast GPUs allowing for much lower cost and much faster scan speeds. The best scanners still do true RGB scans and to do that fast requires more complex systems like line scan (Scannity) or will be slower like the Arriscan XT but you get true 16bit and better color fidelity than a scanner with a color sensor.

With a 6x can minimum order. 7203 50D is also an option to use as an IN as Dirk said. I have someone right now who wants to try a Ultra 16mm 100D Ektachrome to 35mm optical blowup which I am working on getting our Producer's Service optical printer ACME shuttle U-16mm modded for.

Yeah Andec is the only lab I know of making 8mm prints and to be clear I think they are only making prints from negative no intermediates for prints from reversal or print dupes. I think they slit and perf their own from 3383

P-M-A also supplies rollers for Allen processors. Each Processor manufacturer has or had slightly different roller designs. https://www.p-m-a.com/

Kodak still had 16mm mag in the catalog as of a few years ago, no longer there. I might have some at the lab I will look tomorrow.

This also but it was a print with sound that this was scanned from:

I shot this on 7222

Steve said there are some faint images it is not prepped and scanned yet. I think this was a roll of new very old stock that someone got and decided to give it a go at shooting it. Will probably put it on the Scan Station on Monday.

So in a rather strange twist we developed a roll of Kodacolor today. Developed. Kodacolor 1925-35

Here is a shot I am pretty proud of that I did with mine a few years back. I have to rescan this as the Xena scanner I scanned it on was in between some software updates and the GPU perf stabilization is not perfect. I had the PhotoSonics camera set to 460FPS for this.

You could try it in a Lomo tank but as Tyler said the ECN-1 Developer Part A and B are totally different as was the Bleach and Fix I believe. I can ask Bob Hum who worked at Cinelab and was running film in the early 1970's he would know more specifics but I think Kodak ECN-1 was being phased out by about 1970-71 with the transition to ECN2 happening fully by the mid 1970's The Kodak ECN-2 formulas are readily available and it is a CD-3 based developer you can search the reddit r/darkroom forums for people mixing from powder. I am not sure where to find the ECN-1 formulas they do not seem to be out online anywhere. ECN-1 was lower temp because the emulsion was less stable at higher temps and those stocks would turn back to jello at the 106F temp ECN-2 runs thus ECN-1 having more than twice the development time.

Looks like un-slit standard 8mm with half the needed perforations. how the hells? Maybe: On the LaserGraphics scanners I would try to load the advanced settings on the 16mm gate and then select ultra Standard 8mm setting. Then you could try an over-scan with the stabilization turned off. This might get you close to individual frames per frame scanned one side then go back and scan the other side?

B&W film stocks age very well I used some Plus-X 16mm negative which expired in 1965 on a music video for a friend's band in 2020 and it looked great, I rated it at 12iso and I think it was 40iso on the can. I would say that in general Plus-X reversal will look lower grain and nicer as Reversal if it is machine processed in a lab like ours. For a X-Process you would want to shoot a wedge sensi and process it to the gamma and density you want, there can be allot of variables in the look of the stock based on the way it is developed as a negative i.e. time and temp and how dense you want to make it.

Wow that is a cool looking camera!

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.