Robert Houllahan

Well there it is....

I really loved my LTR54 and it was a great camera for me, it was a very late one and even had Aatoncode which the Abel tech said he had not seen on a LTR before.

I am glad I traded it and got an XTR Prod...

I would think there must be some way to replace the older Aaton motor and electronics with something modern.

The LTR is a simpler camera compared to the XTR and when I had an LTR it was very reliable.

I think quite a few mechanical parts are the same but the electronics and motor are different.

No set AIM for a partial bypass it is a test to suit process and thus kind of labor intensive.

We ran a series of tests for the client and they settled on the one they wanted, it was not exactly linear in terms of number of racks bypassed as the ECN2 process has "extra" bleach in the process design most likely for consistency in process as the bleach gets more exhausted.

We have done this in the past, ECN2 has allot of bleach and if you run some tests you can bypass enough racks to get partial retention.

It takes most of the bleach racks out if I remember correctly from when Bob did it so the film runs through about 1/5 of the normal bleach time.

I think it always looks like it is too smooth or the contrast is not right compared to real B&W stock.

Maybe if you really worked some of the curves along with the de-saturation you could get it closer.

When I first saw the HDS+ I thought that there really wasn’t enough space for the lens - gate - camera. 
 

Here is the lens and camera on the 4K xena I run small gauge on:

Yeah one of the less looked at or understood specs on these lenses is the magnification range that they work in.

I assume the lens on the SSP was chosen because it is fixed and not a moveable.

The Sony Pregius 4K IMX-253 1.1" sensor is pretty small with the same 3.45u photo-sites as the bigger 6.5K IMX-342 but a smaller piece of silicon to image. The 80MM Makkro-Symmar is great for the 8mm magnification to the 1.1" Pregius but definitely falls far short on the 6.5K camera for 16mm and 35mm.

It is pretty remarkable that the Scan Station can image all three gauges well considering the distance of the camera to the film plane for 8mm, seems sub optimal distance and magnification.

Here is what is used in the scanners we have:

4K Xena with the 4112x3008 Sony Pregius (same sensor as the HDS+) Schneider 80MM F4 Makkro-Symmar has excellent results for 8mm with this setup.

6.5K Xena is a Printing Nikkor 95MM F2.8 Incredible lens tack sharp and extremely flat field. There is a Schneider which is comparable that runs in the $4K range 85mm Macro-Varon.

Arriscan uses a Printing Nikkor 95mm F2.8

Scan Station P uses a Schneider 80MM F4 APO-Rodagon-N (Or APO Digitar) 

The "rule" is one stop per decade generally.

As Perry said a positive film is a Linear scan and we use basically the same sensor on one of our Xena scanners to do small gauge scanning it is 4112x3008 12-bit and I can almost always scan color and B&W reversal stocks with a full grade-able range to 10bit linear DPX so it is a good sensor for this work.

I am not sure what control the HDS+ has over RGB balance etc. so it is possible that the scanner show did some corrections in Resolve to fix color balance etc they could not get done in the scanner.

If you look at the scans in Resolve etc. and open the scopes are the RGB levels balanced? Is there any clipping in the shadows or hilites?

25 minutes ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

That's the spec for the raw sensor. The camera that sensor is put into may impose further limits on speed/resolution/bit depth, depending on how it's configured. So the same sensor in two different cameras may produce slightly different image sizes, at different speeds, especially if one of the cameras is doing any kind of processing internally. 

Yeah the Imperx dual camera-link camera I use is 4112x3008 12-bit at 14fps

I think the Flir is 4096 pixels wide and not sure of the rest of the specs so yeah different machine vision camera manufacturers setup the same sensor in different ways.

6 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

This is probably unnecessary. Our ScanStation's host PC has dual GTX1070 cards, a 25gb nic (for the camera), a 10gb nic (network), Cameralink card (optical track reader), RAID card (internal RAID) and it's only an i7 9800 with 32GB RAM on a decent gaming motherboard.

This is because the Scan Station does almost everything in CUDA on the GPUs and at least on my SSP the Scan Station app is 32bit and does not use much memory or CPU, CUDA is why it is so fast.

I think the IMX-253 (4112x3008) Pregius sensor goes down to 14FPS at 12-bit and 33fPS at 10bit in CameraLink or even less in GigE

Not sure if that is a sensor or interface limitation I run one using CamerLink on the Xena we do 8mm on and get 14FPS with machine vision GPU stabilization going.

I scan to a 100Tb 8G FibreChannel raid formatted to NTFS and can scan and render to a Mac over 10Gb/e simultaneously the Xena runs Win10 so I am not seeing a frame rate limitation on that FC Raid system. The Xena Win10 box sees it as a local disk and the Mac is a SMB share.

1 hour ago, M Joel W said:

Crazy question maybe, but could I pay a lab to develop in caffenol? I want the home made look without all the effort. (Or actually I'm just afraid I'd screw it up.)

Also – as well as the added grain, there's a feeling of more macro-contrast, almost like applying unsharp mask in photoshop? Or is that an illusion?

Hahaha no you cannot pay a lab to develop in caffenol and it would not work anyway the time in developer in a linear processor will be far far too fast for that.

12 hours ago, M Joel W said:

Can you develop 7222 in caffenol? Based on your description 7222 sounds like the better stock for me to use regardless. Thanks.

Yes you can, I think any B&W Stock can be developed that way.

It will likely yield a grainier look than what we do as a lab in a linear processor with F76 developer.

2 hours ago, M Joel W said:

Thanks, Robert. I want a lot of texture/grain, to feel that the image is composed of grain without losing tonality and having it feel thin. 7266 I worry might have that look?

I want something similar to Death to the Tin Man, Bait, Following, etc.

If 7266 is shot properly is is not particularly grainy it has a smooth look imo and it is only when underexposed and pushed that it builds up allot of grain. If you overexpose Tri-X it gets thin and ghostly looking as there is not allot of latitude but I do like that look personally for some things.

7222 has more latitude to work with and takes well to being pushed we just did a really nice spot for Beats by Dre which was almost all 35mm 5222 pushed +1 and +2 and it has great subtle texture and was shot with hard light with allot of contrast and dark areas.

Fuji may have recommended a different pre-bath formula but I can guarantee that no lab every mixed that.

We used to have a deal selling Fuji stock I think we sold 400ft 16mm with process and a transfer for $120... sold allot of it... those were the days of sub $100 400ft 16mm rolls....

I have never personally liked the idea of freezing film to keep it and I definitely think that contributed to rolls of Fuji having backing removal issues. We did have 100ft come through recently and it had no problem.

7266 tends to be more contrast with less grain and it is usually run as Reversal so a positive and has less latitude.

7222 has more latitude (it is a negative stock) with more grain but if it is run in F76 the grain can be really nice. Also takes to a push +1 or +2 well in F76 developer.

We run it (it is getting rarer and rarer) but the Rem-jet tends to stick.

Fuji is ECN2 it is not a different process but for some reason the Rem-Jet backing tends to stick on Fuji stocks now especially down on the tighter end of the wind i.e. end of the roll.

Any lab running ECN2 can run it but the results will vary, we ran a 100ft roll of F250 about three weeks ago which was fine.

I have run allot of feature length films with small budgets through Cinelab over the years and there are ways to make it work even on very small budgets.

The cost of scanning has dropped allot which kind of offsets the increase in the cost of film stock.

Really depends allot on the subject matter and creativity of the people making the film.

Also frankly there is allot of fetishistic tendencies towards camera gear and what scanner and all kinds of stuff that does not necessarily show up on screen but people want on set. 

If the writing is good and the cast can act you can make a film with a olde aaton some vintage glass bubble gum and duct tape.

Nobody is really using a Rank-Cintel telecine much anymore, even the "Classic" Spirit is largely gone now.

The Universal MK2 makes a somewhat good image for what it is, the camera has limited dynamic range and there is no built in optical-GPU stabilization like a Scan Station or Xena 6.5K etc. Also I am not sure if the 2K image size is the picture area on that or wider like the Blackmagic. Also the lamp on the Universal MK2 is rudimentary and does not adjust RGB to match the stock.

The Blackmagic Cintel scanner will do a better job and those are pretty "cheap" at $30k and maybe allot less if you can find a used one. It is also limited in resolution to about 2K wide for the whole 16mm frame.

9 hours ago, Norman Gregory said:

Hi Does anyone know what the current cost if for having a Arriscan on maintenance with them 

thanks in advance 

Probably a sort of standard 10%-20% of the original cost i.e. $45K-$85K

Could very well be poor turbulation / agitation the developer in ECN2 is very agitated in processing not only by the film traveling in a continuous processor but also by wands driven by pumps that agitate the tank.

Ok I can share this now, all Push 5222 some +1 and some +2

We made them some 16mm prints from digital for on set 16mm projection / props.

Have not got around to watching it yet.