Robert Houllahan

42 minutes ago, Karim D. Ghantous said:

You have a point here. My question is more hypothetical. Remember, too, that long exposures don't eliminate shot noise (as far as I understand the concept).

longer exposures will actually show more of the inherent fixed pattern noise present in the shadow area of the sensor.

Allot of the reason for "HDR" multi flash is to work to overcome the sensor noise flaws by pushing a "hot" second exposure to get the densest part of the negative into a better response portion of the sensors dynamic range and by doing so keeping the FPN out of the visible scan.

This can get more DR from the shot film especially if it is overexposed but mostly the HDR process cleans up noise from the sensor.

"

9 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

the Archivist does not use the CMOSIS 5k imager that the SSP and the ScanStation used for a while. I believe it's the same family of Sony sensors as the full ScanStation uses, just at a lower res. Don't confuse the two. I don't think Lasergraphics has used the CMOSIS sensor for a while now. 

It's not clear this is the case. 

It is.

I got one.

It is a even newer gen Sony camera than the 6.5k one and it is excellent, extremely low noise and higher resolution than the 5k cmosis.

The JAI Spark with the CMV20000 is 5120 x 3840.

The New Sony in the Archivist is 5.4K x 3.8k

And if you can find anyone who has been more of a pain in Stefan and LG's butt about sensor noise on the Scan Station with the 5K camera than me you should buy them a donut and a coffee.

3 hours ago, Karim D. Ghantous said:

Yes, but if you didn't have the option of using different light intensities, I wonder if multi-sampling could be a decent substitute.

Well to what purpose? on a monochrome sensor scanner? You could control the camera exposure time if you cannot control the lamp but why bother when precision PWM LED lamp control is a trivial thing to do these days?

5 hours ago, Joerg Polzfusz said:

But they don’t tell how ORWO managed to get the formula from Agfa-Gevaert: InovisCoat only took over the coating devices from AgfaPhoto. And AgfaPhoto didn’t produce any cine-films. Agfa-Gevaert is still in business and never mentioned having sold any formulas. And ORWO got separated from Agfa in 1945. So, there’s no way that the statement is true - unless InovisCoat also bought some formulas from AgfaPhoto and unless AgfaPhoto‘s last still films have been accidentally based on Agfa XT 320 - without the renktet.

I honestly don't care if Orwo made a deal with ZUUL and had the formulas for the Agfa 320 smuggled out of Valhalla by Tinkerbell.

The only relevant thing is a new color film stock and there are some rolls being shot already so it appears to be real and not vapor. 

After that the only question is if they can make it consistently and at a fair price and stay in business.

Just now, Perry Paolantonio said:

interesting. The Vieworks cameras and most of the DSLR cameras do more shifts. I wonder if (for the DSLRs) it's to overcome bayer issues? The Vieworks we were going to use in sasquatch originally is a mono camera, and does either 1x, 4x, or 9x shots per frame. The pixelshift in that camera is 0.5 pixels distance, but I see that some (many) of the DSLR cameras do a full pixel. 

Yeah I have one of those VieWorks too but Rennie found it to be complex to integrate into the Xena especially for the speed.

I think the Arri (and probably the director?) do a single 1 pixel X-Y shift per microscan.

I ordered some 16mm print stock from Orwo and am ordering some 100ft rolls of the color.

I hope the stocks are sent in a relatively timely manor.

I am willing to cut Orwo some slack as I cannot think it is an easy business to run and I hope they make it as a supplier of film materials. That said it would be encouraging to see them have a person who really can take care of the communications.

1 hour ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

A correction on this - PixelShift uses more than 2 images. Minimum is 4. Some cameras can do even more. An older Vieworks camera we have here can do 9 shifts per image to make a 14.6k image using a 4.8k sensor. So assuming the Director is doing 4 shifts, the number of exposures taken for a 3-flash HDR image of color film would be 36 (3 each R,G,B x 4 sensor shifts)

 

I think for film scanning the Director and Arri work the same and do one X-Y shift for microscanning, two exposures.

The VieWorks does 4 quadrant shifts for 4 exposures.

1 hour ago, Dan Baxter said:

FYI I could point out stuff you've said that's misleading like microscaning taking just two exposures. Microscanning was developed for scientific imaging not film scanning, it only works with monochrome cameras, and to make the matrix with the sub-pixel imager shift takes nine exposures to get to 3x the resolution (or four exposure to get to twice the resolution as used in some film scanners). So you take a 1.3K imager, 9 exposures, it's now 4K. Film scanners that do this so far as I know started with 2K-3K imagers and did only 4 shifts at incredibly high speeds.

The Arriscan was the first microscanning application to film scanning and it is one microscanning step per color.

So for 3K it is R,G,B +IR for 6K it is R,G,B +IR (step) R,G,B +IR

And for 3K HDR it is R,G,B - R,G,B + IR and 6K HDR R,G,B - R,G,B +IR (step) R,G,B - R,G,B +IR

So 14 exposures per frame max in 6K HDR and it runs at about 1.6 FPS in this mode with IR (and that is hardly used)

The ALEV Mono sensor in the Arriscan is shifted in both X and Y for the microscan

1 hour ago, Giray Izcan said:

1000ft of nc 500 is now 1916.00 dollars... hahahaha

Yeah that is intermediate stock prices a 1000ft roll of 35mm Ektachrome 100D is $1300.00 from Kodak and I thought that was a premium price.

Maybe they are just grabbing some cash for the 35mm at the rollout and maybe the price will drop later?

IDK it is allot.

Going to order some 16mm now...

I always assumed that multi flash HDR was a base feature of the Director at least from the 5K/10K on and I feel that the 5K cmosis camera is realistically a 10bit camera so 2-flash would get you 12bit and 3-flash 14bit.

I got LG to sell me the 2-flash HDR for my 5K Scan Station "personal" mostly used for 35mm and that sensor is pretty poor without it, the 2-flash really fixes most of it's flaws.

I suppose the theory behind 3-flash is to attain 16bit precision from "cots" cameras which are mostly 12bit like the 6.5K Sony Pregius that replaced the 5K cmosis.

The Arriscan and Xena pin registered scanners do 2-flash RGB and the new DFT Polar 9.4K scanner does 3-flash RGB.

"Perhaps a substitute for HDR scanning is multi-sampling?"

Well as others have said it is multiple "samples" or exposures of the same film frame and sensor at different light intensities.

The 16mm on the Orwo store is $47 for a 100ft daylight spool and $185 for 400ft on a care which seems reasonable.

The 35mm is quite expensive.

I thought this stock was based on the Agfa 320T color negative.

I shot some of that stock at school in the 1990's but I do not recall much about the look.

2 hours ago, David Sekanina said:

Thank you Robert. I knew the Arriscan does it from what I've seen at Cinegrell, but wasn't sure about the other scanners.

I think the Arriscan was the first to employ this technique, basically each color is ramped until the sensor clips and then the intensity is backed off. This maximized the DR of the sensor for each color to the sensor. In CFA scanners a similar set of pulses are done but then full RGB illumination because there is allot of color channel cross talk on a color sensor.

Fairly simple and a fast way to match the lamp to the sensor / film stock for most dynamic range and color balance.

14 hours ago, David Sekanina said:

The color of the base of the film is quite different to other color film stocks. Should scanning facilities modify their scanning procedure, and plug-in creators create a special profile for ORWO conversion to positive? Or do the current methods work well?

Modern scanners like the Arriscan or Scan Station etc. do a "base calibration" where the individual RGB lamp channels are swept through a range of intensity to find color balance and lamp output relative to the clear base. This works fine for stuff like Ektachrome that has been cross-processed and does not have the orange mask. So not really an issue with this stock I would think.

It is worth noting that the Director is a "True RGB" scanner like the Arriscan etc and uses a monochrome sensor and multiple individual color captures. Bayer mask sensors do have allot of color channel cross talk which is made up for in math and that is not always perfect.

11 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

So riddle me this... if I did pick up a Xena, could I pay you to make us a wet gate for it? We've been thinking about it for the future. 

Shoot me an email I am sure that could be figured out.

2 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Interesting. Have you tried any of this yourself? We'd love to do ceramic parts someday. Thanks! 

Some of the re-worked RTS gates I have for the Xena scanners have really nice ceramic guides (they were something like $30-40K each back in the Telecine days) and they work exceptionally well for stability.

I have not tried to make any ceramic parts on the Form Labs printer but that seems like a really interesting material option.

I find that the ceramic guide systems on RTS and Spirit gates work really well. Basically a fixed ceramic guide on one side and a spring loaded guide on the other. They tend to distribute pressure more evenly over a few frames of film. Roller bearing guides are a bit less effective IMO.

The Form Labs SLA 3D printers can print material which is a Kiln Fireable ceramic.

22 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

The spirit is completely different it has a line-sensor. If the film isn't perfectly steady through that then the transfer is warped and it looks deformed. That kind of design won't handle even the most slightly shrunken film because you're vertically stacking lines to make a picture.

I have three DFT Spirit 2k/4K scanners of the very last generation and I can tell you that they can scan shrunken film and make very good scans. These machines use 4K 3-CCD linear sensors and have excellent color and DR they are just costly and complex to run in 2022.

A Spirit 4K was $2M in 2008 and the machining work that went into building the film transport and gate(s) far exceeded the cost of building many more modern CFA based scanners. The Scannity is still the "goto" scanner for many high end jobs for TV and Film and it too can scan shrunken and damaged film with good results.

The Spirit like the Cintel DSX etc. uses a very high precision sprocket encoder in the gate to "time" the scan and a secondary capstan encoder for the servo and so the scan registration is not based on the irregularities of the rubberized capstan. I know sprockets are "not modern" but really well made sprockets can be used with shrunken and damaged film quite effectively.

The Kinetta / Xena / Scan Station all use a high resolution capstan encoder and GPU machine vision pin registration now.

I cannot imagine having to use a scanner without that these days, secondary perf detection to fire the camera (laser or sprocket) without GPU stabilization just does not yield the same results. Having to do post stabilization is just ridiculous at this point and with the amount of film we scan as a lab it would be a completely impossible workflow.

One thing I do like about the Xena perf stabilization is that you can select X-Y or X or Y only and there have been some very difficult films that has helped me scan.

The Track Perf pin registration on the Scan Station works 99.8%  of the time totally reliably in my experience.

8 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

The Scan Station does not need to have perfectly optically aligned film. Have you seen how bad the alignment is without the computer stabilization? It's really bad actually, way worse than our scanner.

I scanned 25ft of 16mm ECN ( which did not have perfs at all ) two days ago on the SSA and it was decently steady enough for that film ( from a Minox ) and the frames were steady enough to be worked with.

The Scan Station 16mm and 8mm gates do have a set of roller bearings on either end of the gate to get the film basically in position.

Looks good to me!

We just ran a Music Vid shot on an SR3 HS with Hawks and it looks great but I know the glass was expensive to book.

2-Perf will as others have said look finer grained and will overall be easier to source camera and lens kit for.

LG will do some upgrades to a SSP if you ask enough...

12 hours ago, Carl Looper said:

There is no suggestion in the posted description of cineon encoding that positives (as distinct from negatives) would be encoded in linear rather than log.

Actually it is pretty clear that negatives are scanned with (gamma cineon log) and that prints do not have that curve applied.

IDK if you think you are somehow magically reinventing the wheel here but since Kodak's Cineon data scanning was invented in the early 1990's hundreds (or thousands) of billions of feet of film has been scanned with 99.99997% of all prints and other positives like Reversals being scanned as linear data with the 00.000038% having been scanned (somehow) as Log because some scanner op made a mistake.

There is nothing new here this ground has been covered and re-covered and run over by artillery horses then model Ts then Chevys then Land Cruisers and tanks then horses again and a few HumVees and then a pack of dogs then followed by crows and a herd of cats.

This conversation is moot.