Robert Houllahan

The DSX is a good candidate to turn into a Xena scanner. www.digitalcinemasystems.net Rennie has control over all the transport systems and is doing a refit to one now.

It took me all of ten minutes to learn and start using the scan station, Steve Klenk came to do training but honestly with a few caveats the machine does not really need much of a manual to use it. You should see the 285 page manual for the Arriscan and you also better know linux and be decent at math for that machine. Similar to our DFT Spirit 2K/4K Data machine which runs SUSE 10 for the Bones or SUSE11 for the PhantomII control software. It took me a week to get the PhantomII software running on a Z840 with SUSE11 configs and drivers etc etc. I have the original sales receipt for our Arriscan it was $580,200.00 in 2007 and the DFT Spirit 4K was $1.75M in 2008 So "they" have made a low cost scanner and it has sold like hotcakes, it is called the Scan Station.

Basically a tri-linear 4K CCD machine i.e. a not as good version of the Spirit 4K or Scannity. Evidently not the most reliable of scanners either.

Actual full immersion liquid gates do not "drip" they have a chamber that is completely filled with liquid and the liquid is managed with pumps that push it through the chamber / gate and constantly cycle the liquid through filters. There is a vacuum system that removes the fluid and air knives that dry the film before it is taken up.

I don't really know but I can only assume that they do if they are scanning on a BMD Cintel

Most Cine scanners won't scan the 8-perf stills / VistaVision format 35mm, some will like my Spirit 2k/4K series but the Scan Station won't nor will the BMD. So you would have to shoot with a Pen-F or similar half frame camera or scan half frames and do some stitching to compare.

Ha well I have allot of scanners and am not exactly rich, a fool maybe but not rich.

Yes allot and probably more so than in a while, film is a current and future medium and available choice and some of the best current shows are made on film. Any school that teaches film and doesn't offer shooting on film is a doing their students a disservice at best. Fine arts schools didn't stop offering oil paints when acrylics were invented, same deal. Some of them do! Motion picture scanning is largely becoming a commodity and any fool can buy a scanner and do ? actually operating and pushing film through a scanner on a daily basis is a actual job not everyone really wants. Wet lab stuff is for the brave of heart who like heavy machinery and running thousands of rolls of Tri-X takes a kind of mad hatter to do, many schools teach how to develop film in a Lomo tank with all kinds of chemistry including beer and coffee.

https://www.broadcaststore.com/store/model_cat.cfm?id=441

RIP Genius.

Wet gate printing hides any scratches in the base of the printing elements, the Perc fills in the scratches and has the same refractive index as the celluloid.

FotoKem staff stated that they did a Cross Process in ECN2 for this in an interview, looks like that was on the Kodak instagram, I will see if I can dig that up. I think the production approached us through a production co. asking for us at Cinelab to run it as E6 Color Reversal, as one of a few labs capable of running 35mm E6, with Spectra in LA being the other one. FotoKem would either have had to setup a E6 processor specifically for this show or send it to us on the East Coast or send it to Spectra in LA and I think they just made the decision to run it in ECN2.

Yeah it is basically a whole new machine and only the film platters and dancer arms are likely to be the same between the two. I would guess that the Director 10K is about a $400-450K machine.

Similar to how the new latest Director uses a piezo stage with a 5K sensor to make 10K Also the new Director is a pinless sprocketless system with a monochrome sensor multi-flash RGB-IR LED lamp and uses LaserGraphics excellent machine vision GPU perforation registration which is why they offer 8mm on it now. Arri does offer a upgrade path from the Arriscan to the ArriscanXT I think it is $80K or so to do the sensor and electronics swap. I don't know if LG offers a rebuild of the old Director into a 10K machine but if they do I imagine it would be pretty expensive as the whole gate / lamp / camera system is entirely different.

I had an Imagica ImagerXEPlus (last latest model) It was dead ass slow, like 15-20sec a frame slow for 4K and the Toshiba Tri-Linear CCDs in the Imagica scanners fail at a high rate and are noisy to begin with, I gave the Imagica scanner away, for free. A Northlight is a better scanner in that speed class with it's Kodak Tri-Linear CCD. An ArriscanXT is $385,000.00 that is the current price without the liquid gate option. The 4K Director is probably apples to oranges with an original Arriscan (1.5fps 4K 5fps 2K) both pin registered, both true RGB both very good machines. Some situations and high end clients won't accept scans from a CFA scanner they require true RGB scans, and also I think the Director like the Arriscan can do IR.

As I said above too, you should check to see if the install thumb drive is taped to the computer and or chassis. This way you could have someone install a new boot drive and get the machine running in it's original installed state. LaserGraphics provided the thumb drive with the machine when it was delivered, it should be on the machine or with the documentation.

HI Maybe I can add some situational awareness to this. 1. This is a very specialized machine for a specific high end segment of the film business, this means high initial cost and extreme depreciation. A 2008 DFT Spirit 4K or Arri Arriscan (this machine's competitors) initially sold for $600,000-$2M and are now valued at around $30K-$40k on the used market, running. 2. It is unclear in this eBay listing if the machine runs or not and what options it has, the built in computer is not plugged in and the eBay listing says the hard drive was removed, I understand the general Military policy procedures as I have personally done consulting work in the film/video biz for the US Naval War College-War gaming dept. so I understand the policy on removing drives in general. If you are lucky there may be a thumb drive taped inside the chassis or inside the computer to restore the computer to it's original Windows 7 and scanner install, I would check as this would be a big point on getting the machine into a running / saleable state without the major cost of having LaserGraphics bring it to a "current" state of software release. 3. LaserGraphics is particularly rigid and protective of new machine sales over support or upgrades of older machines they have sold. The Director is a "Current" model but there are little similarities between the new Director 10K and this 2010 model, only the chassis and the platter system to hold the film are the same. Most possible sales prospects for this model of machine are large clients like Sony or other big studios, they generally lease new machines to write down the depreciation. 4. This model original Director may be old and slow but it is a true RGB pin registered scanner and it still has some big advantages over the new faster scanners like the Scan Station 6.5K which has a fast color camera. This Director has a monochrome camera and does sequential R , G , B , IR "Flashes" to make true color and the "New" scanners do not meet the requirements for color accuracy for very high end clients. So In My Opinion if you can get this machine running to it's original state it would be a fine machine to offer to a very niche business doing motion picture scans for maybe $30-40K.

If you bought a C&C machine from a company that was 10yrs old or a 10yr old John Deere automated farming combine and you wanted it to be under service contract it would be a similar percentage of the original cost to be under service. Same with a Scannity or Arriscan as they are professional tools with high initial costs. Of course they will never sell this Director for anywhere near that asking price on eBay and the latest Director is a completely different gate and camera system etc. etc.

I think they graded it at NFL Films in New Jersey we did the processing and scans for them.

Maybe it was badly processed? I don't find it to be particularly grainy... We did this in 2020 and just ran another job recently for NFL and I thought the 16mm Ekta (run as color reversal by us) looked pretty nice and not grainy: https://www.nfl.com/videos/who-are-we-nate-burleson-narrates-the-stories-behind-the-2020-season The very first shots are Ekta and it was a mix of Ekta 100D Tri-X and 7219 plus Alexa. Also here is some E100D and Tri-X S8mm I shot a few years ago:

http://www.claytonchem.com/pdfs/Darkroom/PBF76PLUSFILMDEVELOPER.pdf

It appears FotoKem did a X-Process in ECN2 for this.

Maybe pushed +1 and maybe stretched a bit in post ? Definitely looks like nothing else and kind of makes everything else look like boring vanilla.

So a show is being originated on some Kodak Ektachrome 100D 35mm.... sure looks great.

That is not even comparatively that bad I have scanned much worse. Also that would be prepped to try to get it a bit flatter before going onto the scanner. And while scanning turning the speed down and stopping the lens down for better field of focus with more lamp time works pretty well.