Robert Houllahan

12 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

How did it come out? 

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!

On 7/11/2024 at 12:20 AM, Todd Ruel said:

 

I'm guessing that's why Lasergraphics has not created some sort of $11K software license for this like they did with 2-Flash HDR.  Too much work for so little content.

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.

On 7/14/2024 at 9:26 PM, Owen A. Davies said:

https://share.icloud.com/photos/055l8PmtYj3WWMdHJqUj9mk3Q

These stills were all done on a Bell and Howell contact printer with printer lights. Very reminiscent of Eastmacolor to my eye. I am trying to learn more about the color timing process but there are so few still left in use and wokring condition. I found one in Brooklyn. Are there any still being used out in L.A?

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.

10 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

Looks like they're having some trouble with their "professional" transfer machines:

But yeah, Tobins which were designed for 2005 not 2024.

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.

On 6/17/2024 at 11:43 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

 

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.

On 6/6/2024 at 8:48 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

Oh interesting, I've seen this phenomena before. 

So they don't work like standard camera imagers then with a final combined output? 

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.

14 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

So really it's just down to a bandwidth issue in terms of speed. Did anyone make something faster or was it just lower res? 

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.

21 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Huh interesting, I never thought about going CCD. 

So why are they so cheap compared to CMOS? Is it just down to imager size and tech? 

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

22 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Camera alone is gonna cost $5k. 

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.

On 5/21/2024 at 2:44 PM, Robert Hart said:

What happened I wonder. Were they expedient, unthorough and :-

failed to check the wind of the film before scanning?

flipped the film to scan though the base to avoid false triggers from splices or avoid an eroded emulsion surface which was defeating the triggering system then forgot to flip the image in their post work?

Things happen like somebody interrupting for advice and distracting the operator from task.

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.

On 4/16/2024 at 2:43 PM, Perry Paolantonio said:

My point is that you shouldn't do this in the scanner. It's not saving you any time.

 

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.