Robert Houllahan

7 hours ago, Mark Dunn said:

Digital to film-out to scan- someone's done a really good selling job there- all that work!

It sells itself honestly.

On 6/21/2025 at 5:13 AM, Mark Dunn said:

Why would anyone want a S16 film-out as it was never a projection format, or am I missing something?

Allot of productions especially Music Videos and Commercial spots are recording to film and re-scanning for the look.

I know the Colorist Mafia will way they can do it with a LUT but that has not proven to really be the case and there are hundreds of recordings we have done for this purpose.

On 6/19/2025 at 7:42 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

Thanks for the test Robert, cool stuff! 

I was gonna ask, is your 4k 16mm recorder S16 or still N16? 

I am working on having two gates for it right now a Std 16mm which is what we have been recording with and I got a whole Mitchell 16mm movement with the gate I am having EDM cut to S16mm so I can offer both Std 16mm or Super 16

I will post some 16mm recording wedges from other stocks next week for comparison, the Kodak vision stocks perform much better.

2 hours ago, Robino Jones said:

Thanks Robert for sharing this test!

I assume your Mitchell 16mm is converted to 1R? I find mine a little unstable sometimes and thinking of adding some sort of removable edge guide. Wondering how stable is yours and if you did anything else to it. Also how many FPS do you film record at, on my setup I do 3 fps right now, probably could go faster but haven't tested yet. Thanks again for the footage.

 

The Mitchell camera I built the 16mm film recorder around is converted to 1R and is generally very stable / steady with Kodak film. The Orwo perforations are not well punched and that makes this test a bit less stable than a typical recording on Kodak would be.

I record at about 2FPS on this system from DPX frames.

I actually used this roll to record a music video today that was shot on MiniDV and then I recorded it to the NC500 and it is a weird dirty but really kind of cool look.

I setup the recorder basically the same as I would record 250D in terms of exposure time.

Here is a link to the 2.5K ProRes444 scan. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dTjtvhzJ38iYqzm8B3dWywCyzHxtrCGi/view?usp=sharing

7 hours ago, Chelsea Craig said:

Hi Robert,

Just checking with you, any chance you've been able to shoot a wedge on NC500?  I'd love to see the gradient to get an idea of its contrast.

 

Thanks 😊

Trying to get to it hopefully tomorrow.

Lab ahs been busy and our office man has been out with flu so I have had to fill in there.

6 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea it works great, it's a hog resource wise, but it's a very good tool, arguably the best. 

I'm starting a huge project shortly that the client doesn't have a lot of money for, so I'm gonna license PFClean and use their new AI tools and see how it goes. I hope it works well, the tests we've done with them thus far, have been stellar. The DRS AI frame generation tool is incredible as well, but they charge more for it. 

As far as I understand it the AI frame gen is included in the permanent license price.

I ran it on a Xeon E5-2699 CPU  X99 system with a new RTX 3080Ti GPU and it did not lag or feel clunky despite the X99-Xeon being a bit older CPU and chipset.

OK so similar to MTI DRS Nova pricing only a bit more for the permanent license.

Screw subscriptions especially for software like this I don't really want to even look at Phoenix.

I just used the 30 day trial of MTI DRS to do a restoration on a 1984 16mm film about Phillipe Petit with a Philip Glass soundtrack and the A&B rolls had extensive issues with the cement bleeding onto other areas of the film as the rolls were wrapped / taken up when the negative conformer cut it.

I really liked using DRS it worked very well and was very easy to learn and seems to have a pretty great deep feature set.

What is the yearly cost for Diamant? 

We have had allot of film come from Canada to Cinelab by FedEx and DHL without any issues.

Some prod companies have also sent courriers with film from Canada but I am not sure what arrangements they make with the airlines for that.

On 5/28/2025 at 11:39 AM, Chelsea Craig said:

Hi Robert,

That would be incredibly cool if you could shoot and share that!  Thank you for the generous offering, and yes, I've heard it looks better when rated 200-250 ASA.  🙂

Let me see about recording a standard wedge I do on NC500 early next week and I can post the full res version link to it. I have recorded a few music video projects on NC500 for artists who wanted a gritty look and I did the exposure cal at the same setting as 200t on the recorder for those.

I think your interpretation is about right and how this film stock looks in real world use.

I have a roll left over and I cold shoot a step wedge and DLAD on the 16mm film recorder for you.

I have found that it looks better when down rated a stop.

It is us or Cinegrell in Berlin as far as E6 35mm motion picture processing.

E6 is a complex and expensive process to run.

We did allot of tests over a two year period for Euphoria S3 but they decided to shoot the new 35mm stock instead of E6 100D for the show.

We just did a test for a unnamed Warner Bros feature show and we have run 35mm E6 for spots shows and music videos, we ran the 16mm E6 for the episode of "Severance" that had the flashback to his wife etc.

Just shot some film with a 70DR I bought a few years ago which looked like it was brand new or had maybe shot 3 or 4 rolls through and then was sitting for decades. 

As Tyler said getting it "unstuck" is a pretty easy thing to do but there are some small spring loaded parts on the turret which will escape across the room when disassembling to CLA and get running again. Once they CLA and re-lubed they tent to run perfectly.

This LCD might be interesting

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/DUOBOND-Tft-6-8-Inch-8520_1600100133759.html

43 minutes ago, Jeff Mattsson said:

@Robert

Any chance you have a photo of, or better yet one for sale, a Hycam adapter for 100' daylight spools?

I am not sure what you mean by adapter? The Hycam only uses daylight spools by design and any 100ft 200ft or 400ft daylight spool should work with any Hycam.

1 hour ago, Geffen Avraham said:

If the contrast will present an issue, the Sony ECX344A is a 3.5K x 4K micro-OLED currently shipping for about $1,000. 

5000 nits if I'm not wrong, and about the size of a 35mm film frame.

Quite a bit less than 5000nits for that M-OLED and it is 3840x3552 at 1000nits 20% duty cycle and 1.3" but a great looking chip and very hard to source in small quantity.

500k to 1 contrast and the brightness does not really matter too much in film recording unless you are trying to do real-time recording which there are other solutions like laser D-ILA projectors with 80K to 1 contrast and tons of brightness.

Apple uses that Sony ECX344A panel in the porno vision goggles.

I found the LCD manuf spec sheet online the panel.

Resolution is great but looks like it is 8bit and 300:1 contrast limits it as being useful in a commercial film recorder alas.

The Mico OLED has a 500,000:1 native contrast ratio.

Easy to use to make a new film recorder (I have several at Cinelab for that purpose) it just takes removing the older motor (If equipped with one) and adapting a new stepper or servo motor to the shaft. 

Pretty easy to mod and make run, this one in the pic above has the smaller film magazine but some have Mitchell standard 400ft 1000ft and 2000ft magazines also.

The 16K LCD with a RGB LED backlight seems pretty good very high res indeed.

I am using a Micro OLED for the 16mm recorder which has vastly better contrast than any LCD and up to 2800nits brightness.

Are those 16K LCDs available as a part? Will look at that too thanks.

43 minutes ago, Giray Izcan said:

I didn't know you could buy Portra in bulk like that. Can you get and shoot Portra in 1000ft in any 35 camera? Stills film perfs cause problems with motion picture film cameras as far as I know.

Kodak is making it as a new MP stock now with some changes like BH perfs.

The Arriscan ALEV (1?) sensor goes into a frame grabber card on the Sun Opteron workstation which does the assembly of the frames from the piezo and HDR multi flash into the final DPX and or TIFF full res and proxy res files. I do not see any proprietary image processing hardware unless it is on the frame grabber.

5 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

If you scroll down to "Stable Diffuse Light Source" it's explained how this works. It negates the need for a wet gate in most cases, because a wet gate does effectively the same thing for superficial scratches, but only if the light source is collimated.

Hmmm but also no.

A real full immersion liquid gate with a liquid like Perc can actually fill in all (and significant) base scratches which are still quite visible on a non liquid gate scan no matter the light source. Perc or other liquids like used on the Arri XT are basically liquid "base" and match the refractive index of the base of the film.

This can instantly eliminate allot of the damage and leave the digital restoration more time to work on damage to emulsion. Obviously the costs for a real liquid gate system are large and or the facility has to be arraigned for the use of chemicals.

7 hours ago, John Salim said:

I believe they output everything to 35mm stock only Peter ( ...  just the image's actual 'patch' size is recorded )

John S

Yes the record everything on an Arrilaser which can only record to 35mm film stock. In setup they make different "patch" sizes for 8mm 16mm and 35mm but they are not recording to 16mm which can then be printed with a soundtrack for example.