Tyler Purcell

Nope, it was Steve Yedlin's process of camera color science prep in camera and then post. They didn't have the money to do a film out. Where it's absolutely very complex and burdensome, I feel it worked well. Most people would never know and if there was a 35mm film out for theatrical projection, it would be even better. https://filmmakermagazine.com/124994-film-look-35mm-holdovers-emulation/

It's challenging, many features shot on 16mm, have moments where the image literally falls apart and it can be distracting in those moments. I feel with digital cinema projection, a lot of the film grain and such gets washed away, even with a 16mm screening. I have presented many films from DCP and have always been disappointed with the grain structure compared to my grading monitor. Where it's pleasant at the office, in the theater it's either non-existent/too soft to notice, or the image just falls apart. Where I do think 50D or 200T can work well if you're doing a western or something outdoors where you have more control over your light, if you're trying to make the el'natural look where you need higher ISO range, I feel it's a lost cause with 16mm. I almost prefer shooting everything on 35mm and use a more grainy stock like 250D or 500T for the entire movie, IF you want the grain in the film. I've been experimenting with realtime AI grain generation for digital footage and it's very impressive. Watch The Holdovers and you'll see what I'm talking about. We can manipulate digital footage so well today, the point of shooting film for theatrical, almost doesn't exist anymore. Even recording to 35mm and scanning that as your finished product, doesn't hold a candle to the digital manipulation from scratch. Things like halation and a bit of wobble/dirt along with the consistent grain, it all really adds up to create a great image. Where I love film and will continue shooting it myself until it no longer exists, but we're at a precipice where digital cinema cameras are very good, have excellent dynamic range and with the right lenses and post processes, can give a very pleasing image, which is tailored to the theatrical experience. If I were to shoot a feature right now, 16mm probably wouldn't even be on the table. I would probably do 3 perf 35mm or digital.

Nice job Florian, I really enjoyed this.

Market value is based on what people are willing to pay. First place to determine market value is by looking at what has sold prior. The "market" today are auction sites like Ebay, tho there are plenty of other ones that exist. Unfortunately, the rarity of the camera, does give one pause to understanding its full value. One such camera did sell (NIB) for $6k recently but it was not S16. Is the 1mm of added width, worth double the money? I say, only if it sells and I guarantee you whomever bought that $6k one, is absolutely shelving it. I do find it humorous how out of touch you are with pricing. This image below is one of your other auctions on eBay, a standard roll of 16mm Ektachrome 100D, basically the same E6 stock that's out today, but of course for twice the money because it was hermetically sealed in a bag and has an older looking sticker on the can. I love your comments in the discrpition as well "Forget about the new Ektachrome 100D, this is Classic Ektachrome 100D - with all the sugar and twice the caffeine. This was manufactured until 2013. It offers the look of classic reversal film - lots of contrast and great colors. It blows away the new sissy 100D." Even though it's basically the same stock.

Yea, the ladder belts are kinda shitty, the older ones are made out of a polyurethane style material which the ozone corrodes over time. They fail from simply existing. Usually they last 20 years or so, but most people don't understand and they see the shutter spin, not realizing its not actually spinning properly because the belt has shattered and it's just barely moving along. The BL's are also a nightmare to work on, one of the most tricky cameras because of the way the movement isolation system was developed, so installing them can be very labor intensive. Arri moved away from these belts in the cameras after the BL, which means they are less prone to this issue. So you probably just have a belt failure. It's part of the reason I always suggest to people; its better in today's world to buy cameras like the Moviecam SL or Compact, because they use very much off the shelf belts which will be available forever and they are made of a rubber compound that doesn't degrade nearly as much. Also, BL's have many other issues, like the paper thin foam gaskets failing on the mags, especially around the mag throat. I've seen major corrosion on the film slides, which hold the film from the supply sprocket to the throat area, which need to be taken apart, re-aligned and put back together again on MOST mags before use. The 535 has a spiral slide, which is easier to work on, but those coaxial design cameras are a nightmare magazine wise. If you aren't a tech, you'll be spending most of your money fixing them rather than using the camera. Most of the time when I service BL's, they need a lot of parts. We have been making new gaskets/seals using a special 3D printed material which do fill the requirement, but aren't perfect. The aging rubber mounts for the mid plane to the chassis are liable to also be falling apart, which are tricky to get a hold of. As a tech, the screws sometimes get stuck and it's challenging to get the cameras apart sometimes because of corrosion. I'm always replacing screws in cameras that lived in humid climates, they're always a problem.

Yea, it's 100% going to be priced high.

Yea just do Alexa Mini. I'm still waiting for my URSA Cine, but from my brief tests, it maybe another option, as they do have some really nice film LUT packs for BMD color science. I just haven't tested them yet, as the camera isn't here yet and the workflow is BRAND NEW.

Until 50D is released, I wouldn't worry too much. The 250D and 500T which have been released, will be fine.

Seems to hold up fine. I really wanna see what 50D looks like. One of my friends tested it last week, but no results yet. I think the higher speed stocks, will have less of a problem.

Yea, it's slightly more than vaporwear, which is unfortunate because it seemed like a great idea. He checked nearly all of the boxes, but clearly never got them quiet enough for actual sync sound production, which is a shame. I'm all for people making something new, but it needs to be better than what existed before and this evidently for some reason, just didn't fit the bill. I would make the gross assumption it was cost and good ol' Hollywood not needing MORE vistavision solutions, at a time when there were PLENTY of MOS VV cameras at rental houses. Seems like someone did wind up using it in Europe, but who knows if any actually sold. Thanks for the pictures, these are the only ones I've ever seen after researching this camera for years and coming to my own conclusions after nobody had ever seen one.

I've shot a bit of 7222, never noticed it. I guess it depends on exposure. Also 7222 is a different backing, Kodak has already said they're using a silver backing on this new stock to prevent the added halation, so hopefully it works? It looks more like the Ektachrome backing and having shot a bunch of that, never seen it either. The Aaton 35mm cameras have chromed pressure plates, so that would be a problem. I need to first see the results and get feedback from people using chromed gates. If there are no real issues, then we'll just all move on. If there are issues and people have cash to deal with them, I can easily have new pressure plates for the Aaton cameras made, no big deal. I have all the specs, it would be a cinch to model them and get them made with DLC coating. I'm pretty sure there won't be any issues, because the stock is currently being used on a wide array of productions without modified cameras evidently.

That actually doesn't effect anything evidently. Yea, well Andree didn't get them, he's trying to get some made. So who knows.

Aaton 16mm cameras don't have chrome backplates, they are specifically designed to deal with black and white film which has no remjet. Arri cameras have chromed backplates, across the board. I know some people did make modified pressure plates which were black, but there aren't enough to go around. My main concern are the Arri 2Cs, Arri 35-3, 425, 235, Arricam, Moviecam, 416, SR, etc. We have some ideas on how to solve this problem, but without tests, I don't know if it's worth it. Currently Kodak has new stock available, but they won't give me a roll to test.

Well yea, you can't really upgrade line scanners that easily. Line scanners tho, kinda whole other world. The Cintel II is a single module and imager. It's really not the end of the world. The only thing different from doing an imager upgrade in a Lasergraphics is the added magic box. Well... they now have full AI auto tracking/AF. So I mean, that tech an easily be used to perf stabilize. Canon and Nikon use the same tech to de-warp lenses. This could be used to de-warp film. So I do think there is merit to the example I used, it's just not implemented by anyone. Scanner companies do not think like restoration technicians and they need to. The first person to release a scanner that you feed film and out the back end comes a fully restored file (within reason obviously) will win this battle. Where it's true scanner companies have attempted to sell concepts to help hide dirt/scratches, today with AI tools, there is no reason why a lot of the cleanup can't be done on the fly. Not saying it would necessarily be done in hardware, but you get my point. I was told multiple times by several people at BMD, over multiple years at going to dozens of events related to this industry, the entirety of the process is done ON SCANNER. They proved it by going into the real-time logs and showing that Resolve is literally doing nothing when scanning. I also asked them why their stabilizer tool doesn't work anything like the scanner tools, to which they said "because it's all done on scanner". Now, obviously playing back the file is different, it does use a tiny bit of resources when doing so because well, the CRI files are compressed. I know the CRI's are not stabilizing in playback. I was told that camera is identical to the original 4k Blackmagic camera. Not sure how true that is, but they did not develop the imager at all. Yes, they should have updated the blackbox by now. Imagine how many 2k scanners were thrown in the trash for the same reason? Yea, I mean it's a big problem, no argument. They make it work by doing realtime HDR scanning, which hides the issues with the noise floor. I'm not gonna sit here and say their imager is good, because it's not even in HDR mode, but I have been pretty happy with the results over the years, if you don't actually care about getting 4k out of it and understand its limitations. Partial debayer is when you deal with de-noise, profiling and edge reconstruction in imager, this saves considerably on data AND most importantly, means your computer does not need to do these tasks, which lightens the load. Yes, it's very proprietary.

They've been working on it for years. Remjet is a big problem because it means MP and still film are basically an entirely different product. Without Remjet, you can process both ECN-2 and C41 without much consequence. This would mean one string to make all films. It would also mean still only emulsions, could be used in MP cameras (proper perforating) which means more cross pollination between 35mm stocks. I see this as someone in their MP team wanting to keep their product alive and negotiating with corporate. I know the guys in CA have done a shit ton of work to keep MP prices down and keep it even existing. Corporate wants to raise MP prices to still prices per foot, which would basically end MP as we know it today. Possibly the way they determined to fix this, is to simply change the emulsion to lower cost, a great way would be to keep the emulsions all the same. The new anti-halation layer supposedly doesn't work well, in initial testing people are complaining about lots of halation especially on the lower speed stocks, where there is so much light bouncing of the pressure plate. One of my friends is doing a test this week, let's see what he says. It would be easy to fix cameras, the pressure plates would need to be DLC coated. It would not be difficult OR very expensive. The thickness is the only real problem as we would not want to upset that. DLC can be made black AND non-reflective if necessary. It's also very slippery so it would work great as an anti-friction device as well. 16mm cameras may not be as effected, as many already have black pressure plates. Where I'm worried this MAY actually rase prices AND cause people to back away from film, I see it as a means to an end for Kodak, at a time where the cost of goods is going to skyrocket. I have seen the writing on the wall for a few years now, so I've been divesting in film personally and buying Digital equipment so I can keep making films when Kodak finally raises prices to a point I can no longer participate.

Got it, turn on classic stabilizer, turn cloud tracker on, set it to "rotate" and not zoom, then hit the left right button on the left, hit stabilize and BAM, perfect. The horizon on this, with the rotation the camera, really screws with the built in stabilizer. I noticed it's a 4k source, is this done with a pocket 4k? Looks like it doesn't have the metadata for the auto stabilizer. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/2l7m83fw3ufjeusw8fu0z/Test-stablizer.mov?rlkey=cfu37n7b8lv8kqp9wkd05n4l0&dl=0

Yea, your drawings are basically similar to what I would do, even if it was 3D printed. One COULD theoretically just yank that assembly out of a K3, maybe cut the front of the K3 off and just power it by a motor, it maybe the easiest way to go about it. The nice big flange the movement is mounted to in the ACL, that's just grand. I really like that design and it's why I'm gonna be using it for my prototype. We still have to get the metal machines in, but with our current commander and fascist, there is probably no way we'll ever be able to afford them OR the raw materials anymore. We ordered a new style of 3D printer (at great expense) two months ago, but seeing as they're coming from China, I doubt we will see it in the next month or two. But theoretically it can print more accurate parts for prototyping that would allow us to make the thing 3D properly (with a copied movement) and then send it out for metal manufacturing. In the US however, there is very little metal prototyping going on, they only want contracts for big jobs. So we would have to send over to Asia, but now that we're cut off from them, I have no idea what to do. The entire project is sidelined.

When you did the 6.5k imager swap, I'm certain it was not cheap. I've asked them before, going from an older 4k imager to the 6.5k with the required support contract, was practically the same cost as a whole new BMD Cintel II. Plus, the amount of bandwidth you need to deal with the larger files, require a whole new discussion about storage, which is grossly expensive. Where I do like the modular and more open source design, had BMD offered an upgrade for their black box, it probably would have been 1/4 the price of the scanner. Plus, there would be little to no storage changes as the thunderbolt mac's, already have enough storage bandwidth integrated into them, unlike some old windows box. Having high speed connectivity integrated into the bus, is game changing. There is no integrated high speed connectivity on X86 systems, they basically expect you to by a threadripper/Xeon with lots of lanes and use a NAS solution, which of course is not client friendly in any way stretch of the imagination. Sure, capturing to Pro Res? No problem, you can use slow drives. However, when working with DPX/Tiff/Targa even .CRI files from the Cintel, high speed storage is a must. This is why mac's are such a killer offering for creatives, even with older TB4, the 40Gb interface was just fast enough to get the job done. Today with TB5, it's a game changer and working with high res files like the 12k off my BMD Ursa Cine, is a piece of cake. Impossible to do on an X86 system without extremely high speed storage, which is again, very costly. So in the end, you wind up paying 3 - 4x more in the X86 world to deal with problems you literally never have to deal with in the Mac world. Mind you, no other scanner uses Mac's, so it's hard to quantify how much savings there would be with something like a ScanStation, but having worked on both platforms for years, it's probably considerable. I was told most of the debayer happens in the magic black box on scanner. It's similar to how BRAW works. It's why there is little to no way you can make adjustments AFTER you've scanned. The finished CRI file has your look baked in, there is no magical headroom or changes you can make post scan, like you can with any other raw file type. Heck even BRAW has "some" leeway, but very little compared to Red or Arri raw codecs. I also know playing back the CRI files that come out of the Cintel II, is very easy for a potato computer, as I edited an entire UHD short film from a lowly thunderbolt SSD on a 6 year old Intel Mac laptop (shit computer) without ANY issues. It barely used any system resources to work with those files, unlike any other camera raw system which would be debayering in playback. Also, when you're in preview mode and scanning, when you make adjustments to the color, there is a delay because the changes you make, are being done in real time on the FPGA in scanner.

Using electronics to join multiple motors together is fine, but with 16mm cameras especially, you can't use a sprocket intermittent to pull the film down, you will need some sort of pulldown claw. A sprocket, won't work. The reason cameras use pulldown claws, is because they can have very tight tolerances. A sprocket has very bad tolerances, which would cause lots of up and down movement in the image. Even if you were to reduce that with a spring loaded side rail, it would still be an extremely unusable/unstable image. I know it runs through the camera ok, but those micro movements can't be seen by the naked eye. As Aapo suggested, the best thing to do is start with a movement from another camera. So that all your main components are made of metal already. I really like the ACL movement (minus the mirror) as it's mounted to a nice thick piece of metal, that you could easily find a front housing for, even perhaps an ACL one. To save even more money, re-working a K3 movement, is probably pretty straight forward. Shims yea, that's the way most cameras work. Arri has a few cameras that the entire movement can move back and forward but for the most part on 16mm cameras, it's done with shims between the lens mount and the body. The kit to measure would have a flat piece of metal for measuring that is the width of the 16mm gate. A FFD gauge, which usually has a flange that you would push onto the lens mount. Then a tester tool, so you can set the FFD gauge to zero before putting it onto the camera. FFD tools aren't horribly expensive and are available for sale, but the 16mm width flat piece of metal, maybe harder to find. I had to buy one from another tech. You can't use the ground glass method because it adds too much depth. A very thin piece of smoked paper can work on 35mm cameras to see if you're in the ballpark, because the image is so much bigger, but on 16mm cameras with that small of an image, it's just impossible with out proper FFD tools. No matter what, to "dial it in" you will 100% need the tools, there is nothing you can do about that. A collimator could be used theoretically, but they're more expensive.

Cameras that have full blown AI ML engines in them today, which use what, maybe 5 watts? You talk about frame registration, when FPGA's can literally dewarp in real time these days, Canon has that tech built in to their original 5 year old R5, today with the Nikon Z8 and Z9, a single FPGA can automatically remove lens distortion at 60fps in 8k. Again, with a chip that literally uses no energy. So for someone doing restoration, being able to have the AI engine on board, deal with things like examining the outside of the frame line and looking for warping issues, then automatically de-warping as it's scanning, these are all huge advancements that nobody has done yet and all the tech is available right now as programmable FPGAs. I mean, BMD built their FPGA based scanner a decade ago, if you're saying a decade old scanner is going to deliver images comparable to a modern one, that's up to you. But generally the imagers are the issues and if you want a better imager, you need a whole new system; computer, software, imager and back end (network) to really "update" anything anyway. So the fact you can't update an FPGA easily, is irrelevant when everyone is buying all of those bits every decade anyway. Yea and you need a windows specialist to keep a system running when you are updating components all the time. It just isn't something the average consumer running a business can deal with. Not only that, but the computer needs to be a powerhouse, at a time when good GPU's are $4k each and threadripper/Xeon are the only chipsets capable of having the lanes, which are grossly expensive in of themselves. This isn't 2018, building a modern X86 desktop system today for this work is more than a Mac Studio Ultra and in the end, all you get is something that will be out of date in 2 years. The great thing about a scanner that's plug and play, is that your computer can literally be a toaster. You don't even need network storage. The compressed CRI files the BMD scanner delivers, are relatively small and a day of scanning can easily be put onto a decent sized thunderbolt NVME device. Then you can unplug it and carry it over to your finishing workstation. You save, oh gosh, tens of thousands of dollars as a business owner doing that. We scan DPX and TIFF/TARGA, which range from 10 bit to 14 bit. I have a lot of raw data to move around so I'm stuck to high speed network drives unfortunately. But when I've used BMD scanners in the past, the thunderbolt workflow is very good and saves a lot of money. It may be simple, but you've clearly been working on it for a while, majority of people who are trying to pay their rent, don't have that kind of down time. It's disingenuous to think people running restoration businesses, are going to be writing their own code. This is why the scanner manufactures do it. This isn't some BMD only thing either, MOST scanners work this way, they deliver a finished image to the computer, you know this. They may use different hardware, but in the end, it's even MORE locked in than an FPGA. Good luck updating a Spirit, Scanity, Arri scan or any of those line scanning systems to anything modern, not gonna happen. Your "open source" scanner concept is great, absolutely understand it, but the majority of people will not make that kind of investment. They need something reliable and capable of recouping their investment immediately, not in a decade.

So 3D printed material, no matter what it is, will not have the tolerances for proper FFD, never going to happen. Manufacturers spend an ungodly amount of time engineering the gate to flange distance and making it perfect. The gate and lens mount, really need to all be made of metal and somehow connected. So the tolerances are based directly on film channel/float. Some cameras have a pretty large film channel, this is the gap between the pressure plate and aperture plate. Metal gates are used because you can polish the side rails and the film can be at the same depth as the physical aperture. The pressure plate, shouldn't actually be putting pressure on the film itself, it should be very smooth but held firmly in place by the gate laterally to prevent wobble. Yea, you will need gauges that go down to .01, as the FFD range is .00-.03mm, depending on how much float the film has. Some cameras can be run at .03 and not be a big deal, others need to be spot on .00 and that's the tricky part. Engineering the pulldown, the consistency with the FFD across the frame, film channel, a spring loaded side rail gate, timing with the shutter, all of these things are very challenging to get right and I'm afraid, no way a 3D printed camera would actually create proper images. Someone tried it with a 2 perf 35mm 3D printed camera and it was basically unusable. The tolerances are incredible, .01mm off and you go from working to not working. As someone who services film cameras for a living, it's a miracle any motion picture camera works at all. I commend the work tho, I'm glad to see you playing around with it. I'd love to see if any images come out.

Good movies, can (not always) have a lot of magic behind them. Moments that weren't necessarily scripted a certain way, which just fell into place and worked. For the audience to know everything about production, including how those magical moments came to be, may undermine the filmmakers skillset. It may make them seem less like a genius and more like someone who struck oil accidentally and accepted the revenue simply because they touched the ground. On the other hand, some productions are so tedious and difficult, when you hear about what the filmmakers went through, it kinda opens your eyes a bit. I almost prefer the horror stories, because you can learn what NOT to do. I generally don't purposely seek out production information, but I will read the trades if there is an interesting story. I haven't let those stories effect my enjoyment of a film.

Or just use some tape to mask off the monitor, either way.

The Cintel II uses manual focus on the outside. I assume when you change the optic, something about that focusing system changes and it's more complicated to setup right. I have not been under the hood, but they said it's much more complicated. It's an FPGA based system, so the bandwidth of the system is limited, that's why they can't just change the way it works. They would need to change the FPGA entirely, which means updating everything including software. This is the trap they got themselves into when developing it in the first place. They're still using TB2 for transferring data, which is extremely slow compared to the modern TB5 120Gb/s protocol which they would probably move over to with any new hardware. The "black box" is fully replicable evidently. I assume their goal would be to offer an upgrade for older systems, like they did with the lamp replacement, updated gates and updated drive system. They've been very good about updating older systems. It would be a camera and black box swap out, which is basically the entire back bone of the scanner yes. Na, PC's are horrible at this work because they're just using raw power to chew through processes. FPGA's are night and day better, it's why everyone uses them for cameras. You can buy specific FPGA's built for tasks like processing the bayer imager and encoding the raw file. Those tasks in of themselves done via software, require MASSIVE power. Have you worked with Red Raw 8k before? It'll gobble up half your GPU just playing back at full res because there is NO optimization. Scanners like the Scan Station have/had (not sure if they've updated this or not) two dedicated GPU's, to do what a basic modern cinema camera does in real time at 80fps. It's just a cost reduction method. Blackmagic's concept is lightyears better, but they are using decade old tech, that's the problem. I'm not sure how the Director works, but the spirit, scanity, imagica and arri scan, do "nearly" everything on the scanner.

As Dan said, they're entirely different imagers, so yea, there is a significant gap. Nobody is scanning vertical 35mm in 10k anyway, the point of the high resolution scanner is for VistaVision and 65mm formats like 5 perf and IMAX.