Perry Paolantonio

Huh. I've never seen this format. Neat. I don't know about the archivist, but the first place I'd look is in the "Advanced" settings. When you load the film there's a button to show advanced formats (really just uncommon formats). There might be something in there. If not, then this could probably be done with some creative editing, though it would limit the resolution of each frame to 1/4 of the resolution of a full frame, so probably not ideal. You might ask Lasergraphics support as well. If they don't already support it they might add support for this, but they would need to have a film they can keep for testing on their end. If you've got spare film it might be worth a try.

I understand what you're saying, but I guess my point was that I consider that such a basic feature it should simply be considered part of the scanner. I mean, a pin-registered scanner is going to get you basically the same result (at least for non-shrunken film), but it's doing it mechanically. It's just assumed that your image should be stable. That's part of why I don't consider the Filmfabriek, MovieStuff, etc to be serious machines. Sure, but we're talking about kodacolor, which existed for a few years, 100 years ago. It is, by definition, archival film. The odds of it surviving another 20 years without serious shrinkage issues are slimmer now than they were 20 years ago. So the right approach is to get the data captured as best you can and then deal with the color in software. You can apply the same logic from your statement "I always advise my customers not to throw away their films after scanning them, because scanning technology has greatly improved in the last 15 years" to a software based solution, and given that the film will likely not be in the same condition 15-20 years from now, because the software to do this may very well improve over time.

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.