Robert Houllahan

Mine is a 2008/09 Arriscan and I don't think there was a sensor change but I could be wrong.

The Arriscan is about 2FPS in 6K HDR mode.

The Scan Station is about 7.5K in 6.5K HDR mode.

Arriscan is good for selects scans and short form work like commercials and Music Videos it is not exactly a dailies machine. Although Arri did try to makret it as such in 2K SDR where it gets about 8 FPS and does full res and proxy scans simultaneously.

A few thoughts

I think at least some of the consumer line of sensors are build with multiple markets in mind and the same basic design of a sensor may be in your phone, a lower end camera and a machine vision camera sorting beer bottles at a packaging plant. So the CFA dyes may be a mix of color performance and sensitivity etc and not for ultimate pix quality.

The Digital Bolex used a S16MM sized Kodak CCD with 4-taps and I remember the thing that was long holding back the camera release was the tap balancing, which if done wrong will show four quadrants with obvious tap lines in the picture. For some reason it seems that CMOS sensors which have many many more taps do not have the very fussy tap balance issues that CCDs do. CCDs can be run in single tap for best performance but there is a big speed hit.

Other than the Digi Bolex and the Dalsa Origin I don't know of many or any D-Cine camera systems based around CCDs due to tap balance and speed readout issues. Cmos is just faster to read as a global shutter system with many more taps and largely ushered in the era of digital cine cameras.

It seems that CCDs have mostly been retired by On-Semi (used to be Kodak) and with Sony making 14K 16bit cmos sensors and others like G-Pixel with the 9.4K sensor and the potential for high framerates with those super high res cmos sensors the saleability of CCDs in the "big" markets for imagers is gone.

5 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

With CCD you mean, the first Arriscans which were contemporaneous with the Spirit 2K (although not previous model Spirits) had CMOS area sensors with a rolling shutter that weren't as good as CCD but came with 2-flash HDR to compensate for the lower quality of the CMOS sensors.

There were no high res area sensors in the 1990's when the "Classic" Spirit arrived, it had a full res HD mono line and three half res color lines to make 4:2:2 HD scans.

The newer Spirit series has 3X 2K lines and 3X 4K lines and the HD config uses the 4K lines and scalers, it is a very good machine and can scan some material like ECO exceptionally well. It is not as steady as the newer scanners and it is complex and expensive to run.

The Arriscan ALEV monochrome 3K CMOS sensor might be global shutter it is not just a early Alexa sensor it is specific to the scanner. Because it is a mechanical pin registration scanner it would not matter if it were rolling shutter as the film is stopped and locked during imaging.

The Arriscan beats the Spirit 4K in resolution and dynamic range especially in 2-flash where it is a actual 16-bit scanner as the sensor is 14-bit. The original Arriscan is still one of the best scanners available especially for negative, It is at least comparable to and possible exceeds the Scannity and is as sharp and steady as a Scan Station but has better color performance.

The Arriscan has very little visible sensor noise at all in my experience using it.

I think allot or most of the of the early CCDs were made by Kodak which makes excellent color dyes and the CFA filters made by Kodak for the CCDs were based in the legacy of color science from film.

All color filter array sensor have some or allot of color channel crosstalk as the color dyes on the photo sites are not in any sense perfect. So I think the better the CFA the better the outcome especially back when there was allot less CPU power to apply to the demosaic math.

If you are talking about the buffers in the Rem-Jet removal stack then they are often a sponge material on a plastic core.

The ECN2 process goes from the prebath which softens the backing then into the buffer stack that has rotary buffers and water jets that remove the backing and wash it away.

Then on to the developer tank.

2 hours ago, Andrew Wise said:

What’s the incentive to cross process it? I just don’t understand the appeal when we have such a variety of negative stocks. 
(I’m only very new to shooting film) 

We run both E6 and ECN2 at Cinelab so IDK but some people like the Cross processed look with the color shift and added contrast. Some older Ekta stocks can really only be cross processed also as they just don't run well or at all as E6.

Otherwise many labs just don't run E6 chemistry so they can only run Ektachrome as a cross process.

 A billion feet?

Two of the Spirit scanners I have came from a Indian post house in LA that scanned Bollywood films for years with them, probably a few hundred million feet of film or more. Both Spirit scanners worked when they arrived years ago. One became a parts machine when I got the 4K from CPC London which had presumably also scanned hundreds of millions of feet of film.

The two Xena scanners started life as a Cintel Mk3 and a URSA and the Mk3 was from the mid 1980s and the URSA Y-Front from 1998? and both probably also scanned hundreds of millions of feet of film before being remade into Xena scanners. The electronics worked fine and the transports were and are in great condition, perhaps having received a bearing replacement somewhere along the line of their 30-40+ year life.

Newer scanners like the Scan Station have much more simple electronics and the only problem I had with the first one I got was the capstan encoder somehow worked it's way loose from the Capstan motor causing some odd behavior, this was fixed by screwing the encoder back down.

On 3/13/2023 at 4:30 AM, Andrew Wise said:

It was E6, tetenal kit at home, so variable/depending on my skill lol

OK then it would be normal.

If it was Cross Processed the color shift and clear base would make the color chart be very far off from normal.

17 hours ago, Andrew Wise said:

This was ektachrome BTW. I'll have to give vision3 another go 

Was the Ektachrome run as E6 or as a Cross Process?

If it was a Cross process then the color chart would not even remotely be workable.

12 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea, they aren't worth much unless ya need a telecine, which they can be used as without a computer.

They are very nice movements and systems in general, just overly complex for no reason. 

The Spirit is a true RGB scanner and there are two ways to make a true RGB scan, one is Line scan and the other is a Monochrome area sensor. At the time the Spirit was introduced there were no area scan sensors capable of 2K much less 4K and when these new generation Spirits were rolled out 7.5FPS 4K was about as fast as could be done, it is still a reasonable speed today.

The Arriscan is much slower especially in HDR 4K and the large photosite CCD lines in the Spirit with the 750W Xenon lamp still makes a very good scan just not anywhere near as steady as a modern scanner.

Cintel carried the CRT flying spot scanner all the way through to the same era as the last generation Spirit with the Millenium then DSX and C-Reality. 4K flying spot scanners were truly Rube Goldberg machines of even more complexity than the Spirit and made very good scans with a new tube.

That is an odd one.

Only when a empty filter holder is inserted? and not on any of the other film?

Usually a filter issue is a vertical line not a horizontal streak.

30 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

AH ok, so he hasn't done it, got ya. 

Dang... Oh well. Maybe someday! 

I might work on figuring that out as I have three Spirits and one is a parts machine.

I will probably try to sell the two running scanners but I doubt the market is hot for them so conversions might be a better route as they have really nice film transports.

22 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

It's also 1400 lb lol 

Last time we moved one, we destroyed the carpet because it weighed so much. 

Kinda useless without the software. 

Robert, I didn't know you could turn these into Xena's.. That's cool. 

Without a licensed and configured SUSE 10 or SUSE 11 Linux workstation running either DFT Bones or DFT Phantom-2 software the machine is a giant dongle.

They are good machines which make great scans but they are complex and power hungry and allot to maintain.

I have three.

I am going to look into seeing about a Xena conversion on the parts machine I have. The other two run ok.

Xena would have to be able to activate the spooling transport and then the Spirit capstan motor would be replaced with a newer motor. The lamp and gate setup would have to be converted to a full aperture instead of a slit and the Xenon hot lamp would be chucked and somehow a integration sphere and LEDs would have to be fitted to illuminate the film.

Allota work but maybe a 9.4K Spirit conversion kit would be a thing.

47 minutes ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Pfft! Pull it apart and make a new scanner from it! It's a nice chassis, if a bit overpriced. 

It could become a Xena,

Everything but the Bones or PhantomII workstation to run it.

Probably from the Air Force?

On 10/25/2021 at 1:44 AM, Uli Meyer said:

Why would there be any live rounds in that gun in the first place? Someone loaded real bullets into a prop gun and laid it out on a props trolley? Why have live bullets on a movie set in the first place?

 

The armorer was new and incompetent.

Evidently they had taken the set guns out to the range which is insane and they had no discipline or method for verifying ammo loaded be it blanks or dummy rounds.

She is the daughter of a well known film armorer but new to actual working on sets as one it seems.

The production seems to have cut all corners at every turn.

Nice!

I will respond to your latest email asap and I have some videos of the B&W processor at Cinelab I will send too.

Niiice!

11 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

If they've specifically asked for film they probably do love the sound.

I do not really shoot weddings, I have shot a dozen maybe.

I have a few friends who either really concentrate on them or got their start in weddings and were in high demand before moving on to commercials etc. They used film and digital together, one an A7 series and S8mm and another Cannons and 16mm and the A7 shooter is particularly skillful at grading and putting a high level of polish on his work.

I think allot of these wedding customers are wackus bonkers and don't really know what they want until they are told and reassured that what it is will be great. 

I would suggest just shooting with a Bolex it is not that loud and in general I have found that people actually love the sound of it.

YMMV

Just a followup note.

You can get to good but not accurate and with non repeatable control over image dimensional and color by shooting off a screen. 

The better the screen (lcd etc.) and the better it is calibrated the better the result.

making a 24.00fps file and having a camera with a crystal 24.00 fps motor will be best.

35mm will be much more expensive than 16mm either DIY or professionally.

A Arrilaser or Imagica recorder will be able to properly and repeatedly record the full density of the film with actual RGB recording per image pixel. A LCD (etc) has co-sighted colors with a very limited grey to grey contrast ratio so there are allot of very fine issues with really recording digital to film that are allot of work to address. The last 20% or so of fine work imaging digital to film is a very steep curve to climb and gets complicated and expensive to do, stuff for features and accurate archival preservation.

YMMV.

As someone who has two Arrilaer recorders and has built three generations of 16mm recorders I have a few thoughts.

1. It is relatively easy to film off a computer monitor, I would recommend a sync sound camera not a K3 or Bolex as the frame rate will be off for the whole recording.

2. Setup the monitor and take a spot reading of a grey card to find your exposure.

3. Try to use the most rectilinear lens available, this will keep the image the least distorted.

4. Carefully setup the camera and screen to be parallel to each other.

My 3rd generation 16mm film recorder uses a Mitchell pin registered camera and a Eizo Radiforce panel and runs at about 4fps with the camera shutter time and interval between DPX frames being controllable. I also have the panel profiled.

You should not try to shoot video that is pushed into the shadows and if that material is then use the log tools in Resolve to elevate the shadows about 100-120ire on the scopes to retain hat detail.

10 minutes ago, wally stall said:

What does a service contract cost for a Lasergraphics archivist scanner?

I think it depends on the level of service but in general a full service contract for a machine is about 10% of the purchase price annually.

I am happy with the duo of LaserGraphics machines we have at Cinelab now that the "personal" has 2-flash HDR. The Archivist's newer Sony sensor 5.4K camera is very low noise and makes excellent scans.

Digital sensors are linear devices (even when encoded into log) so a ISO change on a digital sensor is an overall dB gain increase.

Film negative has a characteristic curve and a photo-chemical push will accentuate that logarithmic curve with more sensitivity in the middle than the top or bottom of the curve.

In my experience 5219 pushed +1 is in the same sort of working range as an Alexa in the 1200 maybe to1600 ISO range, with the Alexa having some more shadow detail and 5219 more hilite overexposure tolerance and the mid being similar.

YMMV

I would scan HS film at the framerate you expect to deliver at, i.e. 24fps 25fps as then it will have the intended slow motion.

You could get a ProRes and DPX scan if you expect to do any speed changes in post.