Robert Houllahan

Well we run ECN2 on two processors every day, mostly 8mm and 16mm on an Allen and a PhotoMec. As with any lab if you ask for dailies and your shooting 10k or 100k Feet of film it will get done right away. If you send in 100ft of film there is not the incentive to move the lab schedule around and do the required setup tests to shoot a 100ft of 35mm through in a rush with the 16mm. Remember that Kodak built NY Lab for Spielberg and others shooting high profile work in NY.

I think 16bit RGB DPX is good for almost anything, remember that is 16bits per color channel. No film scanner I know of scans to EXR so if your doing a film scan it would already be a DPX to EXR conversion.

Yes.

I think the Arriscan II is $850K I "gave away" the Imagica Imager XE+ because the Toshiba tri-linear CCDs in those scanners go bad and it had too much noise to run as the scanner would only finish a calibration once out of maybe ten tries. Plus it was extremely slow by today's or even ten years ago standards.

I have two Arrilaser 4K recorders and I am in the process of modding one for camera negative but in general the laser recorder is a complex tech to DIY and the laser power is really good for slow intermediate stock, with the laser ND mod that Arri came up with the Arrilaser can shoot to 50D but anything faster it cannot calibrate to. The 16mm recorder uses a Radiforce CAT Scan imaging panel and a servo motor controlled CP16 but I am rebuilding it with a very very nice Auricon 860. I am also thinking of possibly using a DLP or LcOS or LCD 3-panel projector and a lamp mod for another Auricon I have to possibly shoot 2K(ish) Pix and Optical sound to print stock in realtime. I am also thinking about either buying a Definity 35mm recorder or building out a Radiforce panel 35mm recorder so I can shoot to a wider range of stocks without using up the hella super expensive lasers in the Arrilaser recorders.

I built a 2k 16mm recorder and I am in the process of making a updated second one with an optical sound galvo. We have been doing allot of filmout to 16mm and scan back for music vid projects. Here is a few Alexa shot filmout 16mm rescan jobs we did: https://www.garylongdop.com/sober https://www.garylongdop.com/x-lovers

for 1.33 / 4:3 material I would advise1440 x 1080 at the minimum, anything less than 1080 vertical resolution is N/G really. I know some places offer 720P scans but I think that is not very pro of them.

Some machines have fixed lenses for each gauge of film and fixed image area settings, Arriscan and DFT Spirit and Scannity are like this. Newer scanners have moveable lens and camera positions, Scan Station Kinetta Xena etc. The moveable lens-camera systems use specific high end lenses which work well for a range of magnification.

Some do like the Arriscan and some (mostly newer ones) do not have any sprockets at all. Newer scanners use high performance GPUs and high resolution high bandwidth sensors which scan the whole gauge and the machines use Machine Vision to "see" the perforations and stabilize the film using multiple perfs as reference. So if it's 16mm the newer scanners might not work with the perfs flipped to the opposite side as the machine vision is expecting to "see" the perfs in a general area. If it is 35mm and it is flipped the scanner will expect to see perfs on both sides so it will still be registered and stabilized. Any new modern editing software can flip the clip X-Y and reverse it if necessary, BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve offers and extremely powerful free version of the software that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

We see allot less Double (Standard) 8mm than Super-8mm and so turnaround times for Std-8 are longer and slitting is labor intensive especially with the softer thicker emulsion of ECN. It can be a great format like you said with more mechanical simpler cameras. We have also been supporting the UltraPan 8mm which is like techniscope 2-Perf for 16mm as it shoots the Std-8mm roll once but is widescreen across the gauge. Also Std-8mm stocks are a little harder to find and more expensive for color.

We offer the choice of either leaving it as 16mm or slitting it and making a single strand R8 reel. Honestly if I had to do all that post work to try to turn unslit R8 into single strand scans I would charge $200 a roll to scan it and we charge $25 for 2K and $50 for 4K scans of slit R8. usually when R8 is left unslit it is because our customers want the quadrant look.

Oh well if it is unslit then it is scanned as 16mm and each frame has 4 R8 frames in it. I know our Scan Station has issues with scanning unslit R8 as it is "looking" for perforations to lock onto to stabilize and that is an entirely automatic process in the Scan Station. Did you want the 4-frame look? Is that why the film is not slit and assembled as a 8mm roll?

That is just bizzare then, the Scan Station has a drop down menu in the settings for playback framerate and they have some 18 into 24 or 16 into 24 settings and then there are 16fps 18fps 24fps etc. settings. If the Scan Station is working properly (it probably is if it is scanning film) then they should just select the 24fps playback framerate. The odd 18 into 24 etc. type framerates in the dropdown menu might be the culprit. Otherwise I am as confused as you are because there should be a 1:1 film frame to Quicktime frame scan at 24.00 fps.

The Scan Station should just output a 1:1 film frame to video frame in Quicktime and then the Scan Station has settings for what it tells the metadata in Quicktime to be. Quicktime can playback at a range of framerates and the metadata should be set to play the film at 24FPS so it plays 1:1 what was shot to the digital playback. Keep in mind that unless your Bolex has been modified with a crystal sync motor the mechanical governor will not film at an exact speed and it will be variable from things like how much wind on the spring and ambient temp etc.

Like others have said if BMD puts a decent sensor in a Cintel3 it could be competitive with other scanners like the Scan Station for 35mm. As it is a fixed lens and camera 16mm will always be lower res. As they are now fixed pattern noise will show badly in dense negative like skies for example. Also the Cintel is sprocket drive (both 1 and 2) so poor for archives and it does not have machine vision perf "pin registration" like Scan Station, Kinetta, Xena etc. The new Archivist is 16mm/8mm only they dropped the possibility of a 35mm capable version. I have a Scan Station "personal" (dumb name) with the 5K sensor which also has fixed pattern noise issues so I mostly use it for 16mm and 35mm prints. I have asked LG about an update to the machine to get rid of the JAI 5K and replace it with a Sony 5K which is much better but LG seems not to care about supporting it. Scanning is rapidly becoming a commodity with more and more people owning scanners and I expect scan prices to be driven down due to all the Scan Station machines out there.

Good! Still waiting for my Ferrania from that KikStarter ? maybe someday....

I think the K3 can be made into a good camera it just is variably built from the factory and needs to be post manufacturing finished into a working camera. The Autoload will never work properly though, it is no Rex.

The first camera I bought after NYU was a K3 I still have it, I used to shoot with it but it really has some issues, the advantage is it's a cheap spinning shutter reflex camera and the disadvantage is it's a cheap spinning shutter reflex camera. I don't remember when we developed scanned that but I have seen some "fluttery" stuff from K3's over the many years. It cold be a good-ish camera with some fixes but man I doubt it will ever load as nice as a Rex. The CJ Vid was shot with a Arri SR3HS. And I own a XTRprod which has always been rock solid flicker wise...

This video is 2K I don't think they finish many music videos in 4K in general they requested a 2K scan.

Hard to tell without seeing the overscan of the scanner gate, which is cropped in this pic. Has to be a newer machine which can image the full or most of the film gauge width so a Kinetta or Xena (full width) or a Scan Station (almost the full width) with our Xena I can scan the full 16mm width at 6464 pixels for example.

Proper Log-C Cineon 10bit. Color at Co3 by Bryan Smaller.

Here is a Super-16mm job we processed and scanned on the Xena 6.5K this week:

As with all digital things scanning motion picture film was technically complex and expensive and with newer progression of tech like sensors and GPUs scanning is largely becoming a commodity with minor differences between new scanners. The Scannity can make a good scan but it is locked into the older linear CCDs from Dalsa and machines like Scan Station, Xena, Kinetta etc. can just pop out the older area scan camera and drop in the newest sensor for relatively little cost.

With the $9K 6.5K sony Pregius sensor camera probably $50K depending on gates. Call and ask.

They actually had it on the LG Web site as an option for the Archivist but they evidently decided not to make it available and it is gone. It was going to be basically like the Scan Station "Personal" I have with a fixed camera / lens and 35mm 16mm and 8mm gates at 5K 2.5K and 1.2K respectively. They told me it was to be $65K or so. But no longer going to be available evidently. If BMD put a decent sensor into a Cintel3 then that would be a good option for $30K Or have DCS Build a Xena 6.5K for ya, the scans are very top shelf. For example I just developed and scanned a major music video (S16mm) Monday for an artist named CJ the song has 333,000,000 plays on Spotify and the clients could not be happier the DP says the Xena 6.5K looks better than the Scannity.