Robert Houllahan

6 hours ago, Christian Flemm said:

Hi Rob,

Processing as reversal either industrially or by hand won't be an issue here in Berlin 🙂. However it is/was my understanding that B&W films with strong anti-halation layers, or B&W films that do not have a clear base, reverse quite poorly. Given that I won't be scanning the material, but developing it for immediate projection, I'm trying to determine whether I can use this material to create a strong projection positive.

As for shooting, I'd be running it through my Arri 2B. I was more curious as to whether you / anyone on here found it strange that the base is so thin. Though I'm not as well-traveled with ORWO material, I've never handled acetate material this thin.

Thanks again for your input.

C

You would have to do some experiments r.e. running this as a positive, the Kodak manual for Reversal has a light for re-exposure between the clearing bath and second developer so that would be ideal to run as reversal with full re-exposure. I think that would overcome any base issues for reversal development.

As for the very thin acetate I am not sure exactly why it is that way. I think the issue will be running it with camera stability and keeping it jam free. We ran a notorious 35mm feature in 2017 which was hundreds of thousands of feet of 5222 and the camera department / DP wanted to shoot 3-perf Arrcam cameras but ended up shooting 4-perf just because it was allot more steady and compatible with the Arricam pin-registerd movement.

I would think an Arri 2C would not have issues with the thin acetate base.

That seems like a nice machine and kind of similar to but updated XL1100 buffer style cleaner.

I have had two XL1100 Lipsners and they have been reliable aside from some of the questionable engineering in a few areas, things which can be remedied with some work.

Most places run an Ultrasonic cleaner for all negative scans and there is a new HFE replacement which is less costly.

4 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

 

I'm surprised Kodak sells much of anything nowadays. They have really gone to hell, at least with their film products and chemicals.

This is a clearly uninformed statement.

Kodak film products and photo chemistry are excellent in quality and in plentiful supply, labs are busy.

10 hours ago, Geffen Avraham said:

Man I wish Blackmagic would make a Cintel with a new imager, and perhaps an RGB illuminator and monochrome sensor. No other professional scanner is plug-and-play like that, getting an imager capable of 4k S16 scans would make it perfect for my use.

Well this has nothing to do with digital recording to film.

As for "plug and play" the BMD Cintel is very sub par, the LaserGraphics Scan Station beats it in every possible way.

Blackmagic seems to have no intention to replace the noisy sensor in the BMD Cintel and absolutely definitely will never make that thing a RGB scanner.

If you want true RGB HDR scans be prepared to pay Arri / DFT / LaserGraphics a half a million or more. You could have a Oxberry pin registered Xena for about $55K with a new 6.5K sensor.

I think there is some misinformation about early scanning in this thread.

None of the telecine machines even the very old ones had "sharpening" (Coring and Aperture correction) which was not able to be turned off. Even the old Bosch Quadra and other early CCD telecine had these controls, the colorists tended to ride them to taste. The original SDC2000 Spirit ( one 1920 mono line and three 960 rgb lines) which was the first real "Data-Cine" used on "Brother Where Art Thou" with the HIPPI data and Pogle had the ability to make quasi 2K scans that looked fairly good when setup correctly. Same with the Cintel / ITK Millenium and DSX flying spot 2K 4K Data-Cine machines.

The Spirit SDC2000/2001 the Millenium and DSX and especially the later Spirit 2K / 4K machines never had problems scanning prints or other positives like Kodachrome or Ektachrome, the need for a low con print was really a standard def issue not for any of the HD telecine. People would make a Low Con print to give more room in grading in the early HD days but it became a legacy practice by 2005.

The Spirit 4K was the fastest scanner for 4k and 2K until after 2010 and the fastest 4K / 2K true RGB scanner until the Scannity replaced it, it ran 2K in real time and 4K at 7.5fps.

There were no real 2K + res Bayer Mask scanners till well into the 2010's the first ones were Kodak 2K and 3.3K CCDs used in the Scan Station / Kinetta / Xena etc. scanners with some single tap and some with various levels of tap balance issues. None of these machines were major market scanners.

The Jurassic Park scans done on a Kodak Cineon 4K Tri-Linear CCD scanner hold up well today 30yrs later, it just took 4 minutes per frame to scan them to some beast of a SGI machine.Quantel had the Domino system which had similar performance both based on the Oxberry shuttle.

Great data scanning has just become available to everyone, the Cineon technical specification that Kodak built and which became the basis for all data scanning was and is a very high technical spec which has worked for thirty years, this is separate from and concurrent with scanning film to video for broadcast which is low DR Rec709 and what Telecine was built for.

7 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

You should just do the tests...to show. That is your biz! Breastfeed the info to them. Your website does a pretty good job at it already...but go the distance, Robert!

Cine' / photo deals in images, not in words or charts.

We did the tests to show.

The client.

Who we did the tests for.

And who paid for them.

3 hours ago, Christian Flemm said:

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the recommendation. To be clear, the only reason I was curious as to the stock's lineage was to determine in advance how suitable it would be for reversal processing. The base being as clear as it is is a positive sign, but as I mentioned above, the acetate base is also incredibly thin, similar to polyester-based stocks. Any thoughts on this?

Best,

C

 

Any B&W stock can potentially be developed as Reversal but you would have to hand tank it and that will be allot of work, I do not know of any B&W reversal processing labs (Like us at Cinelab) who have a 35mm capable processor setup for doing reversal. This is simply because Tri-X Fomapan etc. are only really available as 8mm or 16mm.

As for the thin acetate base I am not sure what to say about that it should not be that much of a problem in a still camera but might be an issue in a motion picture camera especially a pin registered one like an Arricam or Panaflex. I would think an Arri 2C or Camflex or similar camera without pin reg it would transport fine.

19 hours ago, Christian Flemm said:

Howdy Rob,

I’ve also only ever had good luck with old Plus-X. I hand-processed a roll of Plus-X in Super 8 for a friend not so long ago; the cartridge expired sometime mid-70s but came out good as new.

It’s not clear how old the ORWO stock is. Still I’d guess it’s no older than 1980. The native ASA of the stock is 80, so we have bulk rolled a six still canisters and are testing 80, 64 and 50, as well as those same speeds with +1 push.

For anyone following this thread, ORWO told us that NP55 is not at all related to UN54.

Best,

C

Maybe not related but still there are only a few ways to make B&W film stock so definitely cousins.

I would rate it at 20iso and not shoot in low light.

I would not say the Arrilaser is a bad design it is just the best tech and the parts available in the late 1990's

They do work and make excellent recordings even with Windows NT and odd parts.

The scanners end up having bearing issues and then if they don't start they are hard to (or impossible to??) fix.

I have two.

3 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

IMAX themselves does the 15P recording actually. They have a fleet of Celco's. I'm not sure if Fotokem even screws with the 15P format recording unless it's just VFX shots going to negative. I think their CRT tube collection is fading fast and they really don't want to use them. 

Yeah them CRTs got to be looking pretty crisped by now.

Kind of difficult to keep them and even the Arrilaser machines running.

Sony just came out with a new 4K x 3.5K Micro OLED I am trying to get my hands one one when they release them, of course they want to know how much volume you will be selling and that is not allot...

There is a French company that also does Micro OLEDs so maybe one of these panels with a piezo shift or the JVC LcOS with Piezo shift for 8k recording...

Old first gen MP film scanners used tri-linear CCDs that were 3K / 4K and then 5.7K this was true RGB scanning where there are three lines of pixels and they were R, G and B with color filters over each part of the line, they were typically made by Kodak's CCD division. This was usually in conjunction with a pin registered Oxberry transport and it took 20-30sec (or much more) to scan each frame. This is "Jurassic Park" era where only some shots would be scanned for VFX to then be recorded out and inserted in a negative cut.

So 35mm and even 16mm was able to be scanned on Cineon scanners in the 1990's to 4K and that worked pretty well.

Later scanners like the Northlight-2 got the 8K (or 9K?) Kodak Tri-Linear sensor and could to 2X over sampling or actual 8K scans. The Later generation Spirit scanners (2003-2009) had three 4K Kodak CCDs with dichroic color filters for real time 2K and 7fps 4K true RGB scanning. These scans still look really great today. The Arriscan has a 3K ALEV sensor and does a piezo shift to make 6K true RGB and true HDR down sampled to 4k.

None of the above was in any way available to the regular public to fuss over these machines were in big iron post with engineering staff and got fussed over by the big guys.

CFA scanners like the Scan Station only really got going fairly recently and the first gen Scan Station used a 2K or 3K Kodak CCD in quad tap mode and it had allot of issues with showing the tap balance so there would be obvious quadrants, they went for speed over quality as allot of places wanted the speed. Things only really got to somewhat modern when CMOSIS introduced a 5K 30fps capable Cmos sensor used in the Scan Station and the GPUs got fast enough to process that, this is about five years ago.

Now there are some new sensors like the Sony 6.5k used in the Scan Station (color) and Director (Mono sequential RGB) for up to 13K scans and DFT has put the new G_Pixel 9.4x7K mono sensor in their Polar scanner and the Sony 14K mono sensor in their Oxscan for 65/70

I don't really think there are any definitive public tests on "what res" is film as it is an organic medium being pushed into a grid pattern. In general I think Nyquist over sampling at 2X the intended res is what should be the goal and true RGB still beats CFA in detail and color fidelity and separation, I think both 16mm and 35mm really benefit from a 4K scan, negatives more so than prints.

As the sensors get better and higher res capturing the whole film image which is made of clouds and grains at reasonably higher res shows an improvement in the final results and with that resolution comes the other horsemen of the emulsion full density range and color separation especially in over exposed negatives.

I think everyone who does this work as a job sees the benefits of scanning 16mm and even 8mm at 4K and it is trivial to do now in fast color scanners and even true RGB scanners, I can see 35mm having some benefits from 8K scans too as they become more easily available. Ultimately is this a pixel peeping tech obsession or realistic best practice for the intended delivery format, most likely to be compressed online or UHD and HD video and rarely (for most) a return to 35mm prints or finely finished 4K DCI distro.

How old is it?

I used some Kodak Plus-X 16mm negative in 2019 that had expired in 1962 and it came out great, shot in full daylight and I rated it as 20iso.

We are doing some tests for a film and ran some push +3 and +4 for 7222 but I cannot show that, it looks ok but obviously grainy which is what they wanted.

We regularly run 500t to +2 and have done +3 but going beyond +3 is a bit tricky because you really have to slow the processor down allot and possibly add heat to the developer which can have unintended color shifts which have to be compensated for with a different repo on the developer chems.

This is 5222 pushed +1 and +2 we ran in F76:

You could / they may just record the part of the element you need on the stock and then print the rest, would require a traveling matte or some such rig in printing on an optical printer.

Instead of just recording the whole frame.

FotoKem would be the only lab with Celco Fury 65/15P recorders I would think.

Some of the new micro-oled panels look promising maybe with a piezo stage and multi level exposure.

13 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

It's multi-spectral in the sense that they're using many narrow-band light sources to compose the image. think 16-18 exposures per frame, each with light with a different spectral range. I'll be honest, the credibility of the person behind this is shot as far as I'm concerned, since she was the one who was responsible for that ridiculous scanner comparison paper from a few years ago that was riddled with basic factual and methodological errors. 

 

Ah yes the Disastor "test" which seemed like a make work project for some academics who don't actually use or know anything about film.

So this is Part II the more Disatoriniinnning... now with their own scan scan machine

On 2/18/2024 at 7:07 AM, John Rizzo said:

INTERESTING AND NEW?

HOW ABOUT THIS:

 

https://scan2screen.com/#about

Vague at best.

"Multi Spectral" i.e. sequential RGB? that is "multi spectral" as in red green and blue.

The example on their web site I actually prefer the look of the "other" system and think it will grade to finish better than their example.

The Scan Station "personal" can be upgraded to the latest software with 2-Flash HDR and that makes it a decent 12-bit scanner and the noise from the older CMOSIS camera is mostly gone. So for $20-25K used plus about $15K you can have a updated 35/16 Scan Station that works really well. Nobody complained about the noise from that camera more than Moi.

GPU "pin registration" using machine vision is really excellent almost all of the time I think the LG or Xena edges out my Arriscan a bit on 16mm but is about the same on 35mm. The Arriscan definitely has superior color fidelity and color channel separation and overall detail compared to any of the bayer mask based scanners HDR or not. I am sure that is why LG makes the Director 13K ( which is a Monochrome Sony 6.5K and a pizeo stage I assume ) RGB scans for the Pic quality win and speed loss.

There are a few ways to clean film I have a Lipsner XL1100 alcohol cleaner which is Ok for basic dirt / dust A Lipsner 8200 Ultrasonic which really works and for really tough stuff the option of rewashing the film in a film processor can kill all the mold and help heal emulsion problems while releasing allot of the really hard to get out dirt from the emulsion. There are new cheaper fluids for cleaning and full immersion liquid gate scanning that are environmentally ok and easily available now.

I think the cameras keep getting better, as far as I can tell the 5.4K Sony in the Archivist is one gen newer than the 6.5K Sony and it looks excellent has great dynamic range and extremely low noise. The 6.5 Sony is also great but has some odd color stuff and allot of color channel cross talk when I went through allot of setup on the Xena, this is all done by LG as a turnkey scanner product.

Most TV and Movies you see get scanned true RGB at Co3 or Postworks or FotoKem on the DFT Scannity or Arriscan. DFT has introduced the new Polar scanner using the G-Pixel 9.4K x 7K sensor so that can make true 8K RGB HDR scans. FotoKem and Cinelab London have the DFT Oxscan 14K 65mm / 70mm RGB HDR scanner for things which are big.

I could see 4K or 8K continuous motion true RGB sequential HDR scans using X-Y GPU Machine vision registration shortly and the LG Director and DFT Polar might already be doing this, massive bandwidth from the camera and allot of GPU making it possible.

12 hours ago, Frank Poole said:

@Simon Wyss It's not my goal but I would love to have a print made eventually

 

@Robert Houllahan 1962 is absolutely insane. I shot some of the same Plus-x neg 7231 like that from 1990 and it looked essentially the same as yours

There's a 2000' lot of 7276 on Etsy of all places right now, but they are in the chrome cans, not the more modern grey ones so I assume they must be from the 80s are the earliest? they looked so old I was worried. Does reversal hold up as well as neg?

I would go for it, I think any B&W will hold up very well if it is in relatively ok storage conditions.

I personally got a few rolls of the 1962 Plus-X because they were just a little shrunk for the purpose someone had them for but they went through my Aaton XTRprod just fine.

B&W film stocks last exceptionally well, I used a roll of Plus-X Negative for a music video a few years ago that had expired in 1962!

Color turned to B&W never really matches the contrast of real B&W IMO.

There are a number of options for current B&W stocks and how to process them, 7266 runs nicely as a negative and I still really like 7222 processed properly, we have dome some overexpose and pull and some underexpose and push processing for various clients that worked well for their purposes.

Here is the MV with the Plus-X from 1962:

The general rule is to overexpose about a stop per decade when using expired film.

I think that rating it at 100iso and processing normally achives the same thing as 200iso and a push +1 and may even produce a bit nicer result.

Look for a Russian Gen-1 (tube) set of Night Vision goggles with a IR lamp in the center you can turn off.

We use these and ND the IR lamp and they do work with it off too.

Nice green night vision analog tube light amplification goggles, work great for the darkroom.

The earlier US ones (and later too) are also great and better built but allot more expensive for the oldest tech to as much as a nice car for the newer ones.

I would suggest a Schneider Makkro-Symmar 80mm / 5.6 it is what we use on one of the Xena scanners for 8mm and is excellent.

Here is a MV / Spot we ran which is 5222 Push +1 and some 5219:

You might want to talk to the lab you are working with and have a discussion about target density and target gamma.

What we do every run for process normal is shoot a test strip on a XRite Sensitometer on some fresh stock we are running which is then processed and read on a XRits 310 Densitometer. We aim for a "standard" reference D-Max and D-Min and some stocks and processes will be based around a target D-Max. For example when we make optical tracks for printing the target density is a 2.8 specified by the person who records our optical 16mm tracks.

I am home now but I can get the last Sensi strip and densities for 7222 from last week tomorrow and post them, we run F76 at 75Deg F / 3min (50ft /min) and a 1:3 mix with the developed being about 100Gal with allot of turbuation so a pretty active developer, For 3378 Sound film we run at 80Deg at 20Ft/min so more than double the dev time and higher temp, that gets it to the high density.

So it is a good idea to do some experiments and shoot some brackets and see how things turn out with more or less target density and then a lab can process to that density / gamma specified.