Tyler Purcell

Once we're happy enough and delivering decent product, I will gladly show. I think our constantly in-flux business model, precludes us from sharing too much. Not because I don't want to, oh no... I share a lot. But because I'm just not settled/happy with some of the solutions. Our gate is nice tho, I have shared many pix with people.

I heard from a little birdie, that imager they're using now is very special and they'd have to re-design the entire camera/thunderbolt interface. They actually do the registration in the scanner, not on the computer. That hardware is specifically written for that imager as well. So it becomes a real issue, not something that can be updated easily. They could easily use the 6.5k imager that's in the Scan Station, but the data bandwidth maybe too much for thunderbolt. No more optical reader, we just use AEO-Light now. Works way better. The audio in that sample sucks compared to the quality we CAN deliver.

Bingo... that's what I felt using it. You read my mind. Tho probably 7975WX. We'll see. They haven't come out yet, but should be shipping any week now. Good to know. We already have a PCI gen 4 quad NVME raid card that we use for caching and such. Unfortunately our 10G network storage is kinda slow, but not slow enough to hinder Phoenix. Thanks for the tips, good to know it's really our system that's slow.

Yea, I've used Phoenix for years now. Sadly, most clients can't afford a full scene to scene/shot by shot restoration. We're doing mostly 16mm, mostly films that just a bit of cleanup, maybe a day of dirt removal and some automated tools. Phoenix is just too slow to preview finished scenes fast enough for me. I want instant results, which I can do in Resolve, right off the 4k DPX files. So most of the time I just use Resolve. I'll run the film through Phoenix's automatic dust/scratch removal overnight and then toss it into Resolve for stabilization and frame by frame dirt removal. Results are ok. Not the best, but they're good enough for 90% of the clients out there. Diamant would be nice, but they charge too much money for something (yes I've tested it) that isn't THAT much better for OUR workflow. I guess if all you did all day long was film restoration, if that's your ONLY business and you lived in the software 9hrs a day, 5 days a week, YES! Diamant is the way to go, 100%. But if you're doing basic restoration here and there, want something to throw the film into, hit render and come back later to hand off to the client, then I don't know if it's worth the money. Phoenix full license today is $350/month, which is a STEAL for how much ya get. That's worth the price of admission. Diamant doesn't offer anything like that from my understanding. But I agree... with faster hardware, Phoenix maybe ok. We just haven't invested in that yet. It will be something we do, if we get more restoration jobs. Also, I appreciate your feedback.

Yea, what do you have for a system? On our mac's, I can nearly real time stabilize in Fusion.

We're working on it. Been trying some unique 3D printed ideas first, stuff that doesn't touch the film directly outside of PTFE material. I'm not sold on the design, but it's close to something that works at least. The pinching gate is tricky to manufacture and it also allows for any dust/dirt on the film to be pushed deeper into the film itself. Sometimes we clean stuff 4 times or more and its still got plenty of grime. So I get worried about a straight metal clamping gate. Our design doesn't clamp that much, just enough and it seems to be ok. I'll send pix once I feel we've got it working well. I used gaf tape to hold it together for our last scan because the hinge doesn't work right. lol ?

I've tried both Nucoda and Phoenix, they both seem to be the same thing. Have you found any differences? I just resorted to using Phoenix for everything. I wonder if there are certain plugin packs that don't work on one or the other. Yea, I agree, if the perfs are good, the Lasergraphics and Arri scanners will do a good job. I get so many films WITHOUT perf's at all in certain sections, it becomes a lot of post work to fix up.

I've not been able to get it to work well. If the frame moves around too much, or has too many jitter issues, I've not been able to get it to lock. Also, Phoenix doesn't use the GPU for stabilization. So it's extremely slow. Mind you, our Phoenix system isn't that fast, we're gonna be building a new one that's a 32 core threadripper shortly, but I don't think it'll matter too much. At least with Fusion in Resolve I can easily and quickly preview stabilization very fast, within a few seconds, make sure it works and then let it render. Once you add cleanup tools in Phoenix, it's all over, damn thing only plays at 5fps at best before rendering. But yes, theoretically Phoenix should do better.

Thanks, yea its not easy. I do a lot of coloring, so I'm kinda use to the issues we have to deal with on a day to day basis like these. You need a decent system to run Fusion's tracker, which is what we use most of the time. Our new M3 MacBook Pro is actually the fastest at it. She'll render at 14fps and finish an entire 30 minute roll of 16mm without stopping. It's very nice! Can't wait until the M3 Ultra.

That's a cool idea. Yea the only way for a wet gate to actually work, is if the film is suspended in liquid during the capturing process. So the FF system does work ok. Is it perfect? No. Our process is to physically examine the film on our rewinds, light box and loupe first. We also thread it up and roll through it by hand to see how bad it is. If it's not horribly dirty, we'll run it with just the wet gate. If it's really dirty, then we clean it with alcohol, running through the PTR's at slow speed, under tension. It works pretty good. We've tried our friends pert machine, it doesn't work that good, for sure not worth the effort. I'd rather just scan and if we see major issues, we can address those issues during the scanning process by hand cleaning the tricky sections with 100% alcohol. I don't think it's a great process, but we can't have any other chemicals without proper venting. So it's challenging. A vent hood with rewinds and a light table, would help greatly, but we'd need some system to view the film so we can find the issues. Currently, we find them as we scan and we can just assemble the cuts (start stops of scanner) in post. We find it works ok, we've got good results. Then we throw the film through Phoenix first, which cleans up 80% of the small dust and scratches. Then we finish in Resolve with color, stabilization and manual dirt removal. It takes around an hour per minute of finished film, for the entire process (Clean + Wet Gate Scan + phoenix + Resolve + soundtrack + final output). Here is a sample:

Sorry been busy! hahah Thanks for sharing tho, I'll have to dig it up and watch. I think love stories in general, no matter how good they are, can be tropeish and many aren't exited about them. But hey, I'm willing to give most things a chance, especially if they're pretty. ?

Wow awesome Dirk! Looks fantastic.

I mean, has there been in the last decade? Not really. Scanners have been scanners for awhile. Laser Graphics dominates the mid tier. They make THE BEST machine for the money, period. DFT and Arri dominate the upper tier. Outside of resolution, none of their machines have changed much in years. The lower tier like BMD and Film Fabriek, nothing new there. BMD will require an entirely new design to use a new imager, so that being the only "negative" about the BMD scanner and unfortunately makes it not a very good machine to boot, means there isn't any real developments on that front. They will not be making something new anytime soon sadly. Film Fabriek may have a prototype of their new machine by NAB, but doubtful it will be ready for production. I also don't think it will be game changing, probably just fixing the issues of the old machine. So no, nothing new really. I will say for the record, I'm pretty chuffed we were able to scan this destroyed film that was literally tearing itself to pieces as it came off the roll. We took a slab, put it between two blocks to get it flat and measure it, which was 15mm wide and the frame size was down by half a mm. It had shrunk THAT much. Emulsion was flaking off in our hands as we worked with it and it was so brittle, it would tear sneezing on it. However, with low-tension mode, a clever little gate I developed with PTFE clamping material and our wet gate, plus two layers of digital restoration, it's now a watchable product. Mind the audio, we did make a mistake on this demo sample that I haven't fixed yet. Before: AFTER:

A private entity did a study in the early 2000's and they found that 4th gen (OCN>IP>IN>Print) was between 600 - 800 lines. http://tye1138.com/stuff/35mm_resolution_english.pdf It makes sense honestly, I have never seen a 4th gen standard print that looks good. Answer prints made directly off the negative, are generally 1400 lines, so a marketable improvement. Many show prints look outstanding. These tests were done using early vision stock tho, today I have a feeling with our finer grain stocks, the resolution would be a bit higher, especially on the negative which only resolved 2100 lines, which seems a bit low to me. I'd expect it to be a bit closer to 2800 lines with our modern 50D Vision 3 stock, which would of course be the highest resolution stock available. Still a far cry from anything digital projection can do. I've been present with the setup of Dolby Cinema projectors now thanks to my job and holy crap, my vision isn't good enough to discern the actual lines of resolution, it can display that tightly. Mind you, still a DLP grid, which creates aliasing, but if you discount that issue, it's WAY sharper than 35mm projection of any kind. Even 5 perf 65mm isn't that great either, because there is so much loss in simply projecting. I'd say that 5 perf is close to modern day 4k on the screen if prints are struck from the negative like Nolans movies have been. They're pretty damn good and worth the upgrade over 35mm due to the resolution and brightness alone.

Yes, my bad. I just dug a bit. The A model does have the same shutter system as the 435 I guess. It's just not controllable without the SCU (or some sort of other external controller) which is typical Arri. Must buy accessories to make your camera do it's job lol. Good to know tho, thanks for catching that.

Man works great! Fits perfectly! Great job with the design. ?

We couldn't get them to be consistent with TPU sadly. We are investing in a new printer shortly and we will try again.

You read my mind! hahaha I was gonna model it myself, but thanks for doing the work, can't wait to test print it. We got the TPU and everything! Thanks so much!

Really enjoyed! Tho... "electronic shutter" on the "A" model? From my understanding, both the A and B models have the same movement. Tho, it's one of the only Arri's I have little to no experience with.

I learned a long time ago, to never turn down money. The great thing about A Minima's is that they're easy to work on. So, we do a great job making them work great. Doesn't make them good cameras.

Friends don't let friends buy A Minima's LOL

Please shoot me an email info@narrowgaugefilms.com We have them in stock, but I will need the viewfinder and camera to properly replace it, as it's optically alignment needs to be verified on the camera.

Na, because the front part of the body is too far away from the flange of the camera.

Dang how did I miss this post! lol As a habitual fluid head operator, I actually use fluid heads on sticks, sliders AND jib arms. I love shooting from the viewfinder, I love the camera body tucked under my shoulder and being able to twist my body in order to follow the subject. I think the hand held look, which includes gimbals, comes and goes with the times. It was very popular when the first light weight Arri 35mm cameras came out. Seems like everyone was using it for at least a few shots in their films. The use of hand held and wide angle lenses, can help relay certain emotional elements to the audience. Kubrick used it widely in his movies and for good reason. I think many people try to emulate what others do and it works, sorta. I personally prefer keeping my camera on a surface which isn't my body. Even though I do shoot quite a bit of Steadicam work, it's mostly because I don't have a choice. Time, money, sometimes even the shot itself, prohibits it for one reason or another. So my chest of tools, does have Steadicam, but for everything else, a stack of fluid heads, with nearly every mount type imaginable. This way, I can rent a dolly or jib arm and connect my Mitchell mount head to it. Stick me on a Fisher 11 dolly all day with an extension plate and my fluid head, I'm happy!

Sure, Cinelab in New Bedford MA and Color Lab in MD. Both can do prints no problem.