Robert Houllahan

Kodak cartridges have a tray the film is on for the feed side. It is not on a spool or mechanism which would allow for rewinding more than a small amount of the S8mm film.

When I had my LTR54 it had the three plastic guides like those in the pics of this LTR7. I had an overhaul done at Abel on the LTR54 and the guides were replaced with round pads. My LTR54 was a pretty quiet camera either way. You can remove the feed spindle by undoing the flat head screw and check the pad under it and see if it is deformed or if something got caught in it. Looking at your video I think you may have too long a loop. I measure out 13 frames in the loop when I load and have done that on the LTR and now my XTR.

Hi I have a Spirit-2K and a Spirit-4k and a Scan Station 5K and a Xena 6.5K so all the scanners.. The late gen Spirit HD/2K/4K are all the exact same machine under the hood with a few boards as options and have 2K/4K CCD arrays. They make excellent scans and are a true RGB scan with a CCD linee for each color. They were never designed to be able to see outside of the image area and cannot be modified to do an overscan. Newer scanners like the Xena the Scan Station and Cintel etc. use off the shelf sensors and have gates which can see more of the film gauge or the entire width of the film gauge in some cases. The new Sony 6.5K sensor is truly excellent but the 5K in the Scan Station and Especially the 4K in the Cintel leave allot to be desired and exhibit fixed pattern noise and limited dynamic range, so some tradeoff for overscan.

We have published rate cards on the Cinelab web site. I just updated the Student and Professional cards: Cinelab-Student Rate Card 2020.pdf Cinelab-Pro Rate Card 2020.pdf

No such thing, you sure you don't mean 1.66?

Also be aware that scanners like the BMD Cintel and the Scan Station will not scan 8-Perf (VistaVision) so a film you shoot in a 35mm SLR which is 8-Perf will be cut in half in the scan.

If you put it in the refrigerator you can wait months or even a year or more with no appreciable effect on quality.

There are so many S8mm cameras it is hard to really get a scope. I have a few nikon R10 cameras which are fantastic. I also have some small cheap S8 cameras which are also great.

Yeah I have shot with me LTR and XTR on their sides and no issues, just mount them right so not to damage the camera.

Sounds interesting! Would be great to update the electronics in a really nice mechanical camera.

I like the global shutter allot, looks like a little nice camera I kind of want one.

The Alexa classic is a thirsty beast and I have shot a bunch of B-Roll stuff with it to ProRes internal and ArriRaw with an Odyssey7Q and to SxS cards with just the EVF mostly using Anton 120Wh batteries and I don't think I ever got more than an hour from a battery.

Depends on the scanner and or telecine and also how it is setup. These kinds of artifacts are from FPN (fixed pattern noise) in the sensor and show up in dense negative typically. The hilites are the densest part of the negative and they translate to the shadow area of the sensors response. Think about black shading a RED camera for example. So if there are noise issues in the sensor that is where they will show in the negative scan, and that is why film scanners need very high quality sensors with low noise. A BMD Cintel with its 4K cmos sensor or a Scan Station with the 5K CMOS sensor will easily show this and even worse vertical lines throughout the dense parts of the negative. The new 6.5K sensor used in the Xena and Scan Station basically eliminates this problem. A "Classic" SDC2000 series Spirit will show this much more than the newer 2K/4K series will. And any Spirit which is run without doing a FPN calibration and light intensity adjustment for the density can show FPN noise as above. On my Spirit 2K (Setup as 1080P HD out with the scaler boards) I can make 1080P REC709 scans without showing FPN and noise in extremely dense negative, that is a 2008 built Spirit. Older Classic spirits will have a tougher time, as will many Cintel CRT telecine.

I have an Aaton XTRprod (no Reg pin) and a few bolex and B&H (Eyemo Filmo) 16mm and a 2B and a 2C they all make very steady images. I also recently got a PhotoSonics 1PL 500fps capable pin reg 16mm camera. Scanning registration has improved greatly, what used to be telecine has been replaced by new optical machine vision registered scanners. Here is an example of a dual pin pulldown dual pin registered 260fps 16mm on the PhotoSonics shot scanned to 3.4K on the DCS Xena 6.5K: And shots with the XTRprod scanned on the Scan Station to 2.5K: One pin reg and one not.

I personally think it looks really nice, I would tread lightly with grain reduction. Grain is not noise it is how the picture is made in film and I feel that the NR tools which are commonly available are not very capable at "grain management" like the DVO tools in Nucoda for example. If you use neat video I would put it on a node and selectively target the shadows and not degrain the whole picture.

Cool!

Yeah allot of stills shooters are missing Lumens Lab (Joe) and while I would want to support ECN2 Stills we are just over worked and the time and staff it takes isn't practical for Cinelab right now.

The lab has been pretty busy through the pandemic everything from personal 8mm projects to budget music videos and spots on 16mm and 35mm

We had an employee who ran his own still lab and would run ECN2 still in the PhotoMec at Cinelab. Joe moved to Taipei and so that stopped. It is allot of prep work to staple all those little still clips together and get them twin-checked and prepped. With the pandemic reduced staff and fairly high volumes of motion picture film coming in it is just impossible for us to offer this service at a reasonable turnaround time or price right now.

Also consider the Scan Station cannot scan Vista-Vision and the Northlight may need a Vista-Vision gate for 8-Perf still scanning. I would say the Drum scanner will yield similar results in any case.

I think allot of times when people see work on film like the two Instagram examples above they kind of reach for how the film was scanned and on what scanner as a metric of the look of the work, where they should be asking more questions like what film stock? what exposure? and especially who lit / shot / graded the film. As with people wanting to qualify everything about the look of something into how many "K's" In the past the difference between say a Cintel MK3 CRT Telecine and a SDC2000 classic Spirit were pretty obvious, but at the end of the reign of the "HD Telecine" the Spirit, the Millenium, the DSX were all making very equivalent work (if the CRT machines had a good tube) and the look came down more to the colorist. Now with ubiquitous data scanning (Scan Station, Scannity, Arriscan, Xena, Spirit4K etc.etc.) proper 12bit (10bit Log) Cineon Log film scans with low scanner noise and excellent dynamic range the scan is becomming more of a commodity and the other aspect like stock choice, exposure of the stock and how it is pushed or pulled and the work of the colorist. You can still get a somewhat under-performing scan from scanners like the BMD Cintel or a Scan Station VarioScan etc. with the 5K CMOSIS sensor which exhibit fixed pattern noise especially with dense negative but that is 99.994% gone with the new 4K and 6.5K Sony Pregius sensors that are going into machines now and I would think BMD would put the 4.6K chip in the BMD Cintel on it's next update.

As someone with five motion picture scanners (Spirit2K Spirit 4K Scan Station 5K Xena 4K Xena 6.5K) and a full service lab I think that film scanning has come to a point where if you get your film scanned on any of the professional scanners with a competent operator the scans will be similar (if not the same) and have a great deal of dynamic range and color fidelity where the scan can be graded any way the colorist wants. I think there is some separation at the high end when film is scanned on a true RGB scanner vs. a scanner with a color sensor mostly in color separation and fidelity especially in a dense negative. Those differences are subtle and not likely to be seen by people working on more regular projects vs. major films and TV shows with high end monitoring.

I was going to ask if the camera has a film timecode system installed, it should be a little matrix of LEDs in the gate, the placement of the fogging/mark seems outside of where that would normally write into to the film but maybe if there was something off about it this could be a cause?

Almost all processors are demand drive not sprocket, the sprocket drive processors were usually made for high speed print processing like the TFS 1500ft/min machines they used at Tecnicolor and DeLuxe in the days of film prints. PhotoMec / Allen / Treise / Calder processors are no sprocket demand drive.

From a lab perspective I would say that it would be hard for a processor to make a consistently repeating exposure like that, as the film on the load side of the Processor is on a flange then into a load elevator and then the prebath/remjet then developer all in the dark. Typically if there is a light leak in the processor before the developer it would be a streak not a repeating pattern.