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Robert Houllahan

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Posts posted by Robert Houllahan

  1. 8 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

    Who has the most impressive collection you ran across Robert?

    These machines are tools for work and not classic cars I would not characterize them as "collectable" really.

    Big post houses bought new scanners as new tech allowed for better and faster scans.

    I think Co3 was running something like fifty scanners at one time. I know they had more than a dozen "classic" Spirit SDC2000 machines in a room with suites upstairs in NYC when they were uptown. They also had Spirit 4K and Arriscan and maybe Northlight machines in other rooms for DI work.

    Postworks (used to be Technicolor-PW) in NYC has maybe ten spirits in the basement and two running along with a Scannity and Arriscan, if you watch "Succession" on HBO that is where it was scanned.

    So IDK who has the biggest pile of machines it is not me.

  2. We have done rewash on films that were night and day difference, something a ultrasonic clean could not even begin to get out. The rewash can kill and remove mold and to some degree soften and “heal” the emulsion. One film in particular for a big Scorsese doc was so severely damaged and had black mold splotches all over it making it really unusable even after ultrasonic. After rewash it had just the finest looking “cracks” where the emulsion had split I scanned it on the Spirit 4K everyone rejoiced.
     

    I am building a multi process rewash / backing removal processor out of spare parts.

    the Integration sphere is just literally what it sounds like, on the Arriscan it is a square box about 6-7” on the outside and if you look into the quartz window you see the interior of a white sphere. The LED array is not visible it bounces light into the sphere.

    The Scan Station and other scanners use a holographic diffuser which also works well. Look on Edmund optics for Holographic Diffuser and they have them in different degrees, its fairly expensive material.

  3. 1 hour ago, Giray Izcan said:

    Unfortunately, u16 really limits you in terms of post. You are bound to one or two labs that handle the format. 

    Just about any film processor can develop Ultra-16mm without damaging the area between the perfs, I don't think any lab worldwide is running a Sprocket drive film processor at this point.

    I also don't know of any lab which does not have a Scan Station and scanning U-16mm is a pretty basic framing setup on the Scan Station.

    We often do 16:9 or 1.1.85 cropped scans of Standard 16mm and as long as the lens is good and the exposure is right they can look really fantastic.

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  4. I really like the Aputure 120d II I got it on eBay for much less than the retail, it is daylight but very nice fixture.

    I would look for some Kino-Flo 2 and 4 bank fixtures for soft light you can get both Daylight and Tungsten Fluoro bulbs and they are dimmable.

    Alost look at Ianiro RedHead PARs or Mole-Richardson Teeny, Baby etc. fresnels they are really solid and usually less $$ than Arris.

  5. There are more Pros than Cons to the Scan Station line of scanners, the addition of 2-Flash "HDR" to the 5K SSP basically just fixes my biggest issue with that scanner. It is great for 35mm dailies and 35mm Commercials and Music Videos etc. which need 4K or 5k overscan and a fast turnaround. The HDR option for the SSP cost the same as the HDR option for the full Scan Station and that is fine.

    They do not offer HDR for the Archivist but the Sony Pregius sensor in that machine has far better noise performance. I see these two machines as basically replacing my two Spirit DataCine machines.

    Every lab I know of has a pile of scanners, Spirits and Scannity Northlights and Arriscans Golden Eyes and Oxberrys hanging around. Every lab I know of has at least one Scan Station.

    YMMV

  6. On 10/13/2022 at 12:57 AM, Sam David Zhang said:

    However, I wanted to reach out to the community and ask any cinematographer who has worked a lot with film – or is currently working with film on a show – how reading the spec sheet has informed your decision on a film stock. What did you do with the information? How has it led to your testing phase? Is it even important in the end versus real life testing?

    I find that most DP's will look briefly at the Kodak spec sheet but then do allot of tests with the stock and camera lens they want to work with. Also if they plan to do any push or pull processing etc. or other look creation work they test test test.

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  7. The Spirit (all versions) uses a Xenon lamp (700w on the newer 2K/4K) and it has a filter wheel and a few other filters auto drop in which alter the light before it hits the quartz rod to illuminate the line slit on the gate. These filters do not do RGB balance but are for different stocks like positive or negative etc. The color separation is done with dichroic filters on the CCD line arrays.

    There was a telecine made by Sony called the Vialta that initially had a Xenon lamp and a dichroic box like the B&H printer and a F950 3xCCD camera image head. I know they eventually went to RGB LEDs for the lamp house in a version upgrade. As far as I know that early Vialta was the only Xenon RGB balance-able lamp house scanner made. Everything else has been a hot lamp Xenon or Metal Halide (Northlight) etc or eventually individual RGB+IR LEDs

    The Arriscan has always been RGB+IR LEDs in a (beautifully made) integration sphere. The Northlight 1 and 2 eventually saw FilmLight make a RGB+IR LED replacement lamp.

    I think with the right high end RGB LEDs (maybe a mix of 2 colors of R and G ?) that LEDs work as all the scanners running these days (except the Spirit 2K 4K) are running some form of LED lamps. I am not exactly an engineer but nobody is complaining about Arriscan or Scannity scans color fidelity as far as I know.

    I was thinking that a newer daylight balanced Xenon equivalent LED film lamp might be a possible replacement for the Xenon lamp in the Spirit 2K/4K series scanners to keep these true RGB scanners relevant.

  8. 2 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

    Did Renny make those, or was that home made?

    What do you mean "Home Made" ?

    Rennie designed them and they were fabricated with CNC mills out of brass and stainless steel etc. They have a very large flow turnover and the quartz apertures are distanced to make spots etc out of the focus plane, they do not look very different than the Arri liquid gates for the XT they are very costly to build.

  9. In response to the OP's question about scanning rates, as others have said the more pixels and DR the more money you have to spend, in a log ca$h curve ;-).

    A Scan Station 6.5K in 6.5K mode and HDR runs at 7.5FPS (Same speed as a Spirit 4K) and I think it can go 60FPS in 5K SDR mode for 2K scans.

    My Arriscan runs at just about 2FPS in 6K HDR RGB mode, expect to pay more than $2/ft for HDR true RGB 16bit scans and I would expect a Director 13.5K would be even more I am not sure if anyone has one yet but I would ask $3/ft for 6K and $5/ft for 13.5K scans on that machine if I had one.

    As for the Archivist I can let you know in about 3 weeks when I get mine, I will sit it next to my absolutely not obsolete Scan Station SSP with 2-flash HDR for 35mm and 16mm. Beyond the perfectly working optical pin registration on the Scan Station as a plus over the HDS+ the Archivist has Mag sound for 8mm and 16mm that works. Add the speed and total reliability plus a million at the same time file output formats to the mix the LG machine is way ahead.

    As for Liquid gates I have  8mm 16mm and 35mm full immersion Perc based gates for the Xena scanners (5.4K and 9.4K machines) expect to pay allot of $$ for any machine with real full immersion liquid gates for films which need this for damaged base scratches. Not every damaged film needs a liquid gate but if they do then it is a very consistent way to fix base problems without having the variability of who and how is doing digital repair, the base scratches are gone and more time can be spent on fixing other stuff.

    Basic scanning up to 4-5K prices have come way way way down the Spirit 4K I have cost $2.2M in 2009 when it was built, the cost to run it made the cost of scans allot. Also the expectations for fast turnaround are higher than ever so scanning to DPX and rendering even with scan and renders going simultaneously becomes very slow for 4K and higher res DPX scans.

    New LaserGrpahics Xena Kinetta HDS etc. color sensor scanners cost pennies in comparison and scans up to 5K are kind of commodity and the scans are really good. Businesses have to make money to keep the doors open the payroll taxes paid and electricity on, so $0.15-$0.25 more per foot for 4k/5K over 2K is just a really small amount to pay for more pixels in the overall scheme of things.

    YMMV

  10. 14 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:

    If we're talking about CRI, we're talking about principally white light. Are they using white-emitting, phosphor-converted LEDs for these scanners, then filtering it green for the green flash?

    No and LED fixtures like the Arri Skypanel or the Aputure LED do not either they use RGB LEDs similar to the scanners.

     

    From Arri:

     

    "

    SkyPanel is a compact, ultra-bright and high-quality LED soft light that sets a new standard for the industry. With a design focused on form, color, beam field and output, SkyPanel represents the culmination of more than a decade of research and development of LED technology at ARRI.

    Incorporating features of ARRI’s successful L-Series LED Fresnels, SkyPanel is one of the most versatile soft lights on the market, as well as one of the brightest. The SkyPanel ‘C’ (Color) versions are fully tuneable; correlated color temperature is adjustable between 2,800 K and 10,000 K, with excellent color rendition over the entire range. Full plus and minus green correction can be achieved with the simple turn of a knob. In addition to CCT adjustments, other control options are available such as: hue and saturation, gel selection, RGBW, source matching, x,y coordinates, and 16 professional lighting effects programmed into every fixture."

  11. 12 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

    One issue which springs to mind here is that this is, we're told, a scanner using RGB illumination and a monochrome sensor. Much as that's great with respect to getting no-compromise cosited RGB information, using LEDs to do this does raise a couple of concerns. There's a decent red emitter available, but most (not all) LED blue is more royal blue than the deep indigo we might prefer. Green-emitting diodes, in particular, are notoriously not a very deep green. I have never looked into this formally, but I would speculate fairly confidently that there are deeper greens in film negative than the green of the sort of LED that is likely to be used in this sort of application.

     

    For what it's worth, the filters on a Bayer or other CFA sensor also tend to be rather feeble and that's one reason Bayer cameras struggled for years to produce workably accurate colour, until people got smart enough to apply a lot of matrixing. This probably wouldn't ywork so well with RGB LED scans because the problem isn't solely that the green is unsaturated - it's pretty saturated - it's just too yellow. There is not much ability to fix this sort of thing in post.

    Does any of that make sense to anyone?

    1. There are more expensive LEDs which are in the right color spectrum range for film scanning and also for LED high CRI lighting, so it is just a matter of cost and devices for the LED Lamp for any of these scanners.

    2. There is allot Alooooottt of color channel cross talk with any Bayer mask sensor, the dyes used are not strong like a dichroic filter. So that is the big disadvantage with a fast CFA scanner, just like with the digital cinema cameras. A matrix or LUT or combo can tune the system back to better especially if the LED lamp if properly balanced for the film and the CFA of the sensor before a matrix transform is applied.

  12. 2 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

    Don't you have to lock-in a frame rate on a Pro Res file creation as the scanner scans, on let's say a scan station?

    You can use Digital Rebellion's Quicktime edit to change the metadata on a Quicktime / ProRes file to whatever frame rate you want. This is just a metadata edit that tells whatever plays the Quicktime file what the playabck FPS is and it is an instant change no render. This same 'Clip Conform" setting was in FCP Studio7's Film Tools.

    There are probably other Quicktime editors which can edit the metadata, Quicktime edit is just the one I have been using.

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  13. On 10/1/2022 at 11:53 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

    I think it's a one man band. 

    Similar to Jeff Krienes at Kinetta Rennie runs it and has other people build parts do wiring etc.

    The Xena is "technical" but not as technical as running or installing an Arriscan or DFT Scannity or Spirit 4K it is fairly easy to use and I have had staff at Cinelab run Xena scans pretty easily. There is allot more under the hood control on the Xena in the GUI than there is on the ScanStation.

    • Like 1
  14. 19 hours ago, Larry Baum said:

    The data has to be stored relative to something though doesn't it? I'm still not understanding how now. Either simply whatever the filters on the scanner's camera are or something else if they decide to remap it. At the end of the day, it's basically just a DSLR inside the scanner in a sense, taking a digital picture of each frame. Any DSLR RAW photo stores it's data relatively to the raw performance of the sensor + color filters. Any program like say ACR in Photoshop that loads it properly goes to a custom table that the software maker creates to look up what they found the proper primary locations to be (would be nice if the camera makers just gave it in the metadata but they seem to wanna be all secretive).

    Well actually not really, especially on "real" RGB scanners which shoot each color with a monochrome sensor and RGB+IR LED lamp pulses, these are mapped into a Cineon Log curve to make 10bit RGB DPX frames. So there is no "Raw" file to be demosaiced as each channel is a full scan record. With a 16bit DPX or Tiff the linear data is mapped into the 16 bits from the sensor, the Arriscan for example uses a 14 bit ALEV monochrome sensor and in 2-Flash HDR it is a full 16 bits of data per channel for each RGB color. So it pulses the lamp R+ R- G+ G- B+ B- (and IR if a dirt map is to be made) in 2-flash HDR 16 bit mode, which runs at about 3 FPS scanner speed. The important thing is not to clip the file, i.e. to get all the density range on the film into a digital container without losing any detail in the shadows or hilites.

    Scanners with CFA cameras (Scan Station Kinetta etc) basically mimic to the best degree possible the operation of a "true" RGB scanner by setting each RGB LED lamp pulse to just below clipping on the clear part of the film base, then they do either a Matrix or 3D LUT in the scanner to fix the color channel cross-talk from the sensor's CFA dyes and that is generally then mapped into a RGB file like DPX or ProRes4444.

    I can ask some high end colorists who work on Marvel films etc. but in general there is no setting color space from a film scan the color space is set really by the display device and space you are grading in, not by the scanner.

    • Upvote 1
  15. On 9/27/2022 at 7:55 AM, Simon Wyss said:

    Do not expose more than 4,000 frames on a nominal 100-ft. roll. Lab workers need the freedom to shorten the developed length back. Else a portion will get longer and longer by the overlength you claim and the leader added by the lab, if necessary for printing. Of course they will respect the netto length how ever it lies within the brutto, say, 109 feet.

    We only really cut a few inches off either end of the roll to build a processing flat (usually up to 2000 feet of film) so I would recommend just shooting the whole roll and be aware that the beginning (usually exposed from loading) and the end will have a bit taken off for processing.

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