Perry Paolantonio

I consider the Lasergraphics scanners to be stable, in terms of image registration. But I don't really consider them to be "doing stabilization," which often has other meanings. We get a lot of clients who apply post stabilization to their scans because they're unhappy about the shakiness of the image. But that shakiness is baked into the picture. The job of the scanner, IMO, is to reproduce the image digitally as faithfully as possible, and then to do fine tuning later. In the case of something shot on a very stable camera, the scan is often all you need because the picture within the frame is stable to begin with. But for stuff shot on cheap cameras like the K3, it's not uncommon to need more work in post. I don't think that really belongs in the scanner. Kind of the same as color grading. We will offer a one-light scan if someone really wants it but we don't do scene by scene in the scanner because it's just not the way modern scanning workflows are designed. With tools like Resolve available for free, and more capable than color correction systems from 15-20 years ago, it makes no sense to break down a film scene by scene in the scanner and apply a grade - that's a lot of wasted time that could be used scanning other film. The color grading tools in Resolve are way better than what you get in any scanner software anyway, so that's the place to do that. So I feel the same about things like lenticular film. I would rather get the best digital reproduction of the film I can, then do the color reconstruction in post, vs permanently baking the color work into the scan. That leaves open the possibility to revisit it later with potentially better color restoration tools too, without having to scan. And on film that's 100 years old, the possibility of not being able to re-scan it 10 years from now is very real.

The scanner (at least ours) can handle warped film, and there aren't any real side effects except for some slight blurring in extreme cases. There are options to install a modified gate, which has a pressure plate to hold the film flat. I think the one from Lasergraphics is too expensive so I've been designing my own. Yet another project... The issue here with lenticular film is that there are 400 or so lenses baked into the film itself, and those are tiny. Any slight variation causes issues when applying the color to the R/G/B channels that correspond to those lenticules. So any software that deals with this first has to make sure all those lines are perfectly straight. That's doable, but it's a lot of pre-processing, and in cases where the film is really dense it can be hard, if not impossible, to detect the edges of those lines. So you have to make some guesses about where they should be based on what you know of what you can actually see. That's where things get tricky.

If you're not pinching the film hard you're most likely not damaging it. The same thing happens on the buffer rollers on our Lipsner Smith cleaner, which is why we keep a couple extra sets of rollers around. I wouldn't sweat it. Alcohol is a safe and effective cleaner as long as you use the right kind and you're not rubbing the film hard. Just enough pressure to feel the film running through your fingers inside the wipe, and constant changing of position on that wipe, and you're good.

writing software to do this is something we've messed with as well. It's not difficult in theory, but the biggest problem is that due to shrinkage and warping, the vertical lenticules get out of whack and you wind up with rainbow moire effects. To do it right involves a fair bit of image processing to compensate for all of that first, before applying color to the three channels. It's doable, but a lot of work. We hired someone a while back to write some code for us to do this, and it kind of worked but only if the film was absolutely pristine and flat, which is almost never the case with 100 year old film...

HDR on the scanity is only for Black and White film, not color.

Pec Pads, and never less than 99% pure isopropyl. You can buy it on Amazon by the gallon or in quart sized bottles and it's not expensive. 91% has too much water in it and that can damage the film. It also takes longer to evaporate because of the higher water content. Pec Pads aren't the cheapest but they work well and you can get a fair bit of film through one if you're careful about how you fold it, and how wide the film is you're cleaning (for 8mm a single pad can do a 50' roll if you're careful). As soon as it starts to look dirty, you need to move the film to another part of the pad. Before we got our cleaner we did all our cleaning by hand this way. It just takes a little longer but works well.

Both types can do color timing (though I don't think it was as common with optical), and some optical effects like fades and dissolves. But contact printers are faster, running at speeds many times faster than real time. Optical printers did get pretty sophisticated, and faster, near the end. And some labs used them to do things like zero-cut printing (vs A/B roll). But with optical you have lenses between the source and the print stock and that's always going to result in a softer image than you'd get with a contact print.

haha. yeah they're scratching the hell out of that film. That is all so wrong it's not even funny. wow.

I've got a Vieworks VN-16MC I'd be willing to sell - 14.5k with 9x pixelshift, 5k without. monochrome. Cameralink, with capture board and cabling. It has nothing to do with CCD vs CMOS. They're "cheap" because they're 10+ years old. But they are great cameras.

You are not going to find something with reasonable quality for less money. It cannot happen unless you build your own from scratch, which can take years and will probably end up costing you as much in the end and may not end up being as good as the properly made commercial options. Nobody is going to build a scanner that's in the price range you're looking for that has any quality because it can't be done without losing your shirt. Can you buy a < $400 4k camera? sure you can. Will it look as good as a $5k 4k camera? it will not. because ...physics. a 4k camera with good quality and good optics is going to start at about $6000. That's just the camera and lens. You need to design, manufacture and assemble a platform to put it all on. You need motors, motor controllers, software to be written for those controllers. You need custom designed LEDs, drivers to run those LEDs. You need a way to make the light as flat and even as possible, and even then you need software to compensate for the inevitable hot spots and dead pixels. You need power supplies for all of this. You also need rollers, which you can't just buy off the shelf, so those have to be designed and manufactured. And then the worst part - the part that takes the longest - you need software to run it all. Sure, there's software that comes with some cameras. But it's hardly user friendly and it's not designed for film scanning, so it doesn't do things like light up the LEDs at the right time and automate the movement of the film to the next frame, or detect that a new frame is in position and trigger the camera. At least not without significant effort and cobbling together of parts to make it go. This is not simple stuff. The market is maybe hundreds of customers, tops. And that market seems to want everything to be as cheap as possible, while simultaneously expecting it to look great and work properly all the time. Best of luck with that.

This isn't really a big deal, to be honest, and certainly isn't a sign that the people who scanned it are incompetent as is being implied here. We see this a lot - mostly with double perf film like Rob says. You spot check the film to ensure you have the right wind, but sometimes the heads and tails are flipped from the rest of the film, because someone added new titles or leader and did it backwards, or cut a shot out and then spliced it back in with the wrong wind. You can't look at every inch of the film before you scan it, and if someone flipped something, there's nothing you can really do about it if they used cement splices. It's trivially easy to digitally flip a shot in any edit system - you literally click a button and it's done. This is something you just fix in post. Sometimes it's best not to guess either. There are times it's intentional (we do a lot of film for artists and have seen some, um, nonstandard thing). I can't tell you how many films we see where they ran out of black slug and used whatever random old print was kicking around as filler. The filmmaker knew it was temporary but that was 40 years ago and it never got replaced. These things happen.

My point is that you shouldn't do this in the scanner. It's not saving you any time. If you're only scanning 1/3 of the frames in a film in order to make thumbnails, you still need to move from the beginning of the film to the end. That is, all frames have to pass through the scanner even if all frames aren't being scanned. The time it takes to shuttle from frame one to frame 5 on a scanner like the scanstation is longer than the time it takes to simply scan frames 1-5, because the scanner has to stop, switch to shuttle mode, shuttle, take an image to make sure it's in the right place, adjust if not, then take the image. rinse. repeat. All that takes more time -by a lot- than just scanning straight through. You can do what you want (grab every X frames) in software on the resulting scan of every frame. then you have both things.

I haven't used velvet on film since I was in college - we were told to run all film through some (dry) before projecting - and I never liked that process. It always felt wrong to me, for some reason. Pec Pads aren't too expensive. We get them from Amazon, and I think the last time we bought a 4-pack of 100 of them was over year ago. You can get a fair bit of film through different parts of one pad if you're careful about how you fold it. Though I've never tried them, pec pads really aren't much different than medical-grade lint free wipes. Might be worth experimenting with them on some test film, because you can probably get those cheaper in bulk.

The ScanStation does. The majority of the scans we do include a second MP4 access copy in HD with a one-light grade. The file h is more or less blu-ray spec and will just play on most televisions off a USB thumb drive, at its native frame rate (much nicer than making optical discs and having to do frc and all that). We would never scan to MP4 only unless the purpose of the project was to create a digital reference library of a film collection. It'd be a waste of the client's money to pay us to do a scan to such a lousy format. But it's great for just seeing what you have. I get your point, but as Dan Baxter said, it's kind of weird when the scanner has to go past every frame anyway. Why not just capture them all and make a low res access copy you can watch, which will tell you far more about the film than a page of thumbnail images? That is kind of what he Filmic is made for. About 6-7 years ago at NAB, MWA partnered with a company that used a modified version of the MWA Spinner to output essentially what you're showing - it was designed to evaluate the film: it looked for defects, it generated thumbnail images, it figured out shrinkage percentages, etc. I forget what the software was called but it was basically an add-on to the MWA Spinner and I think the company that made it (the software) was also German. The result was a PDF report, I think. Of course, one could generate similar reports from other software working on full scans of the film. That's something that could be done in software.

Super 8 needs to be horizontally stabilized using the film edge, to simulate the spring loaded edge guide in the camera. The perf isn't really good for much with S8 for either Vertical or Horizontal. For Vertical, the pulldown claw is on the frame or two *below* the taking frame in the camera. That means if you're using the perf next to the frame you're going to see some light vertical jitter. Nothing you can really do about this unless the gate in the scanner is long enough to see two perfs away and use that as a reference for the gate in the frame. No scanner I'm aware of does this, as there would be major compromises on image resolution in order to pull this off. We recommend people get a slight overscan of Super 8 because you can use stabilization software to lock onto the frame lines that way, which will get it pretty solid if you do it right. For Horizontal you *can* get it very stable, simply by using the edge of the film to compensate for weave caused by the weird sawtooth perf positioning in Super 8.