Perry Paolantonio

Most archives require some amount of overscan. Some want the full overscan the scanner sees (basically out to the film edge), others just want to see past the frame line. They do that to ensure everything was captured. For some projects we will export out a secondary file (usually MP4/H264, HD so 16:9 with the film cropped, pillarboxed and given a basic one-light grade). Lasergraphics scanners do this simultaneously, so you can output a high res uncropped flat scan and a cropped, one-light MP4 access copy side by side. Actually you can do as many as you want, but it can really slow things down if you do more than the basics. Otherwise you just crop in post and spit out whatever secondary file you need.

I assumed it was military. Could be wrong.

haha. These are Robert's films. Didn't know he was here! Hi, Robert.

Very cool. A few years ago a local filmmaker contacted us, trying to sell me some 70mm gear, including an "IMAX" camera. I went over to look at what he had (was not going to buy the camera but did want other stuff). I ended up leaving there with a trunk full of his film. He had it all in trash cans and said he hadn't taken the time to put it out on the street. probably a dozen reels of 10 perf 70mm ektachrome that he shot of the northern lights from several locations - Alaska, Norway, etc. One of these days we'll scan it but for now it's nice to have for testing my 70mm scanner as I build it. The camera was a heavily modified 10p military camera that he had completely rebuilt with new speed controls, a vacuum system to flatten the film, etc. He showed it to me and it was super cool, but well beyond my budget.

Then use an 8mm keyed slot. it's a difference of like 0.1mm between that and 5/16" so they're effectively interchangeable in a relatively low-precision situation like this. It should work and they're readily available anywhere you can get mechanical stuff. Even Amazon.

I'm surprised you have a hard time finding these things, Mark. Here in the states they're all over the place. We have a giant box of them (which we keep for spare parts, mostly bought at auction for next to nothing, or given to us). There are tons of these things on ebay, though they often ask too much for them. @Gillian Donaldson-Selby: The shaft is a standard 5/16 keyed shaft (11/64" key I think). You can buy a length of this shaft at McMaster-Carr for not much money and it can be cut to length with a hack saw with minimal effort. It looks like the key itself sits outside the collar (which you can also get at McMaster if you need to replace that. But you're going to have to pull it the whole thing apart to confirm how it attaches on the inside and if you need anything else. The good news is that these things are pretty simple and all use standard shaft sizes so making it work shouldn't be hard. You might need to bust out a file to ease the edges though, and for getting the key into the keyway, you'll want a vise that you can use to squeeze it in at the exact location. Not difficult to do at all and even a cheap benchtop vise will work fine for this.

I had no idea that's how those worked. What a wacky setup! Honestly, this is not something you're going to find off the shelf software for because such a thing does not exist. The software that runs film scanners is custom built for the scanner, or it's some kind of janky setup that uses the camera manufacturer's generic software, triggered by the movement of the film (like a perf reader or similar). Custom software for this is definitely more trouble than it's worth, given the age and relatively low quality of that scanner. If you were going to go that route, you're diving into the deep end and you may as well gut it and start over. I would check out the Kinograph forums (kinograph.cc) to see some examples of DIY scanners. There's more there than just info about the actual Kinograph project (which has been in development for some time).

Lenticular color isn't about resolution. Never was. It was a pre-Kodachrome color process that required a special filter on the camera lens to split R/G/B channels that the lenticular lenses baked into the film. It would "encode" as three-channel greyscale color information. On projection the same lens was used on the projector to "decode" the color. Because it's basically 1/3 the resolution of normal film, yes, the resolution is lower, but I think it's a pretty fascinating format. The filter was so thick you had an effective ASA of something like 10 or 15. Basically you could only shoot it in mid-day sunlight to have any hope of getting an image! Some older telecine machines were modified to accept the lens and could do an ok job of decoding the color. See this film from Eastman House: We are working on some software to do the color decoding but it's a huge challenge because this film is 100+ years old now, and is warped. Any software that deals with this will have to detect shrinkage and warping, and straighten out the vertical lines (which is hard, if not impossible, to do when the film is dark). The film gets scanned at the highest resolution you can go, then has to be scaled down to a lower res to have any hope of concealing the lines somewhat. We've taken a few stabs at this over the years but now that I'm better with the color processing tools we use in some of the software I've written, I want to take another crack at it. Just need to find the time. It's not a format that has come up enough to justify the effort, unfortunately. When we do get it from a customer, it's usually just a couple hundred feet at most.

So sorry, Tyler. I completely forgot to mention the part about how I get deep discounts wherever I shop, that nobody else does. One of the perks of being me, I suppose. Try harder next time, man. Let me share a little secret: You can still buy that Mobo/CPU/RAM bundle for the same price at the same retailer I mentioned in my post yesterday: https://www.microcenter.com/product/5007290/amd-ryzen-5-7500x3d,-msi-b850m-vc-pro-wifi-am5,-gskill-flare-x5-series-16gb-ddr5-6000,-computer-build-bundle Micro Center has 31 stores across the US, in most regions and major metro areas, from the East coast to the West. There's even one near you. And they ship! But because you probably still don't believe me, or at some point this sale will end and that link might not work, here is the receipt, as promised.: (I know you'll try to "get" me on some weird invented technicality, so just to head that off... In the invoice they split the RAM from the CPU/Motherboard, but it's a bundle despite the split SKUs. Add the bundle in the link above to your cart and you'll see it appear as two items at full price, and it'll show you the bundle savings): When I told my kid this morning that some guy online didn't believe that I bought the computer that he picked up with me this weekend, he asked "is that guy living in a simulation?" (which I think is 11-year-old for "what's up with him?") Gotta admit, as utterly infuriating as these conversations have become, your compulsion to argue easily provable facts is fascinating.

FWIW, I had to build a simple PC to upgrade the host for our microfilm scanner this weekend. I paid $480 for the parts from microcenter. The specs are: $350: AMD Ryzen 5 7500X3D / MSI PRO B850M-VC WIFI6E / GSkill 16GB DDR5 RAM Bundle $25 (open box): Coolermaster mATX enclosure $25: Coolermaster CPU Cooler $45: Thermaltake 600W PSU $6.99: Inland keyboard We already had a mouse and monitor from the old machine but wanted a better keyboard. I also had a spare 250GB SSD drive for the OS so I just used that. I installed Windows 10 on it since it will run offline. It only has the onboard GPU, and that's sharing the 16GB RAM, I believe. So, this would be a pretty sub-optimal spec for anything related to video, you'd think. Total assembly time was about an hour. Took about another hour to install windows, all necessary drivers, and all available Windows 10 updates, and then to delete all the crap from Windows I don't need on the machine. This PC is not spec'd for Resolve, that's not the intent here - it's built for another purpose entirely. But just for kicks I installed Resolve 20 Studio on it. I loaded up a 4k ProRes 4444 file from the system SSD, so reasonably quick but no speed demon. ProRes will require a decent amount of CPU to decode on Windows, making it a good test. I rendered it out to both an HD ProRes 422HQ and an H.264 MP4 file so the only processing I was doing was a scaling operation on export, in addition to the compression. Both rendered at about realtime. This is a sub-$500 PC. My point is (well points are): It doesn't have to be a crazy high end machine to get reasonable enough performance for simple tasks This is probably a machine that with a couple tweaks (modest GPU, more RAM, faster system drive), could do a fair bit more This is likely a machine that would work for Daniel's needs, with software that's more industry standard and usable than what he's currently working with. It can be built in a relatively short amount of time, on a tight budget. If you don't know how to build a machine like this, find someone who you know who does, have them help you, buy them some beer. We had been thinking of getting a used MacPro rack to replace our Linux resolve system but now that Windows can render ProRes, and seeing how it performed on this dinky little box, I'm more confident than ever that we should just build a moderately fast Ryzen machine on a gaming motherboard and let Resolve have at it. Tyler: if you'd like, I can include the receipts.

Yes. Why would we tie up our color room with restoration? Those are different tasks done by different people and often have to be done at the same time.

It says right in the receipt I posted. you can look for yourself. Phoenix doesn't require a high end GPU because it's CPU bound. Thus, we got the 4070. It's all you need. Unless you're running Nucoda on that same machine, there is no advantage to a faster GPU in Phoenix.

Picking nits here because in the end it doesn't really matter that much as long as the software is taking full advantage of the hardware. Before about 2020/2021 Phoenix DVO plugins were not doing that. They were mostly all single-threaded and required the highest end Xeons at the fastest speed possible because only one core would be in use at any given time, and it would take forever to get anything done. When we first switched to Phoenix most DVO plugins were very slow. If you looked at the task manager, you'd see one core running at about 90% with all the rest flatlined at zero. It would jump around from core to core with each new instance of the plugin (which means at each shot when the current task finished and the next one was assigned a core), but it did not run on all cores concurrently and it was painfully slow. At the time DigitalVision's recommendation was fewer cores, higher clock speed. With time they began taking advantage of machines with many cores, and now recommend Threadrippers, which is why we built the system we did. And it runs rings around the old plugins. We saw improvements with software updates as they came out, on the same hardware (which has not changed since that system was built). So whether it's true preemptive multithreading, or whether it's just taking advantage of the available cores in ways it didn't previously, is neither here nor there. The point is that the software can take advantage of the cores that are there and your assertion that it will do better on a single-core high clock system is bunk. Here is the formula they gave me: Multiply the number of CPUs by the clock speed and you get a number. Do the same for another CPU. Buy the CPU where the result of that calculation is higher. In some cases yes, a low clock/more core machine will be faster than a high clock/fewer core machine. But most modern CPUs are at least 6 cores at this point, and 3-4GHz clocks are fairly commonplace. an 8-core CPU from the same family as a 6-core CPU, where both are running at the same clock speed, is going to be faster for applications that take advantage of it. And FWIW, I do know what multi-threading is, having written several applications that take advantage of it. It is not necessarily the fastest way to do things and in some cases can be slower than simply maxing out the system's available resources. do I really have to do this? Here's the receipt from NewEgg. You are correct on the approximate cost of the hardware. But you are bringing in monitors, which don't belong in an apples-to-apples comparison of hardware because you're going to use the same monitors regardless of the underlying computer. Don't muddy the water here to try to create cover for yourself. I know what my budget was for the Phoenix system we built, and I know what we paid. But here goes: The GPU is an RTX4070 and cost about $550 from Microcenter. The enclosure was a rackmount case we already had, but would have been $150 if I had to buy it. The heatsink/fan setup was as barebones as you can get, I don't believe in all these stupid fancy cooling systems, which are unnecessary unless you're overclocking, which we aren't. The cache is an internal RAID-0 6Gbps SATAIII drives that can easily handle 4k DPX (which is what we use for our cache files in Phoenix). They run off of a Highpoint RocketRaid because you don't need anything fancy to do RAID-0. It would hsve cost $150 but we already had it. We recycled the drives, so maybe that would have been a few hundred bucks more to pick up a stash of older 6gbps SATA drives on ebay. it's a scratch disk, no point in spending a fortune on that. The NIC is one we had, but would have been about $45 used, the only way to get this model at the time (Mellanox ConnectX III 40Gbps) So all in, yeah maybe a shade over $5k even if you bought the stuff we already had, but nowhere near the $8000 you're suggesting.

Then I'm very confused. What is the spec of the machine you built? Above you mentioned the ASUS motherboard so I looked for an equivalent for the same CPU (Threadripper 9000). What is in your system? Phoenix is very much multi-threaded. Here are all 32 cores on our machine running dryclean right now: This machine was built about 3 years ago and cost under $5000 at the time. It was roughly half the price of an equivalent HP or Dell workstation. We only run Phoenix on that machine, and we are able to do most tasks at just under real time, which is more than fast enough. Most Phoenix DVO plugins have been multi-threaded for years. Some are not but one of the things they've been consistently improving, since about 2022, is multi-threading. They recommended we get a CPU with as many cores as possible, in fact. I wasn't comparing anything to modern hardware. My point is that Supermicro makes motherboards so well that one from 27 years ago still fires up and works perfectly. ASUS's build quality is not the same and I wouldn't expect a machine they make to last. If you're having as many problems as you're having, I would tend to blame the motherboard, RAM, or driver issues for the fault. But that's a process of elimination that takes time to figure out.

The Supermicro H13SRA-TF was out months before the ASUS board you're using. While it doesn't have Gen5 NVME slots, it does have PCIe Gen 4 NVME, which, except in some very unusual circumstances, is more than you'd need. That motherboard has 2 x8 Gen5 PCIe 5.0 slots and 2 x16 PCIe 5.0 slots, dual 10GbE LAN, space for 1TB DDR5 RAM, multiple USB 3.2 A and C ports, etc. And most importantly, it's not an ASUS, it's a Supermicro, so it's going to be solid, reliable and basically bulletproof. We have a Windows NT 4.0 machine here that we fire up occasionally, built on a Supermicro motherboard. It was built in 1999. it will never die and it's rock solid. All of our custom-built workstations are built on Supermicro motherboards. The only ones that aren't (including a couple ASUS machines) are ones that don't do heavy lifting - like database servers. The only thing the Supermicro doesn't do that your ASUS does is PCIe 5.0 NVME. Support for that is more of a flex than a practical reality. Even the ASUS site for that motherboard has an asterisk next to that spec telling you you're not going to see those speeds.