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Perry Paolantonio

Basic Member
  • Posts

    887
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Profile Information

  • Occupation
    Other
  • Location
    Boston, MA
  • My Gear
    Lasergraphics ScanStation 6.5k, 70mm 14k Sasquatch Archival scanner, Eclair ACL II, Pro8mm modded Max8 Beaulieu 4008
  • Specialties
    14k/70mm, 6.5k, 4k, UHD, 2k 8mm-35mm Film Scanning, Film Restoration

Contact Methods

  • Website URL
    http://www.gammaraydigital.com

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  1. You use the computer that it comes with because it's a complex setup and they make sure it works before it leaves their factory. The computer isn't "proprietary." It's just a Windows 10 (maybe 11 now) machine with an Intel CPU, an ASUS motherboard, off-the-shelf GPUs, etc. But the hardware they support is chosen by and tested by Lasergraphics, and it just works. Different versions of the scanner have different computer setups - our 6.5k uses a camera with an ethernet interface (20GbE I think). They provide a Mellanox NIC to connect the camera to, and it has a specific driver version that works. We prefer to use Mellanox cards for our high speed network as well, but we can't on that machine because the driver for our NIC would interfere with the one they supply for the camera. So you use the computer they give you, and you can make minor modifications (add a RAID card, or another NIC, or whatever). In our case we put it in a larger enclosure that could hold an internal RAID, and installed an Intel NIC for the high speed network.
  2. Did you read the bankruptcy filing? Because if you didn't, you should. Sorry - misread your original post and thought you said you don't think it was a scam. Not enough coffee in me.
  3. The standard ScanStation gate looks like the bottom part of what's in the pictures, and I think the gates re the same on the ScanStation and Archivist, but not 100% sure on that. The hinged pressure plate is added onto the standard gate. It's also worth noting that the gates have some electronics in them, if only to identify themselves to a machine -- so you can't just go build your own gate and expect the machine to recognize it, it wouldn't know it's there without that identifier. The Director gates are shorter but similar in design.
  4. Did you read the bankruptcy filing? Because if you didn't, you should.
  5. I wouldn't take this as a sign the industry is in trouble. If you read the bankruptcy filing it sure as hell looks like he was running quite a scam. Over the past two years he paid himself $1.4M yet the company apparently has no assets. At all. over 200 people ordered stuff that wasn't delivered - parts and whole scanners apparently, and some of those orders go back to 2022 from what I've read on various forums.
  6. I saw the parts list for a Universal build. Someone posted it on facebook. the machine consists mostly of screws and springs and off the shelf bits. Inexplicably, several copper roofing nails too. The bankruptcy filing lists IP and patents as having a value of about $100. I don't think there's a single thing in this machine that's especially innovative or special, or patentable.
  7. It's more than a "piece of metal," it's a precision machined part consisting of several pieces. You get the gate, which is a metal frame with mirrors inside to reflect the light, its polished skid plate, and a pressure-plate that closes down on top of the film. There's also a set of flat rollers that help to flatten the film a bit before it gets to the gate. It's expensive yes, but people with them have reported good results. I've been looking at modding ours to take a pressure plate like the one I built for our 70mm scanner but haven't really had time yet. These are some photos I took of it at NAB last year.
  8. We have a Lipsner Excel 1100 - non immersion cleaner that uses isopropyl alcohol. Works well. it's not as good as an ultrasonic cleaner for really caked on gunk but it gets most stuff off the film in one pass. Two for really bad film usually does the trick. It's cheap to run and doesn't use any nasty solvents. We just vent it to the outside through a standard clothes dryer vent cap. But we only use that for 16mm and 35mm that's in decent shape. The rest we do by hand (8mm/S8 and the more delicate 16mm and 35mm)
  9. I believe it's in the $50-$60k range. it's a nice machine. those rollers were also used on the Lipsner-Smith machines and yes, they're basically paint rollers. The reason this machine has such a complex threading system is that it's not full immersion, so there needs to be enough exposure to air to allow the film to dry before it hits the takeup roller. On the Lipsner machines the film went through a heated air knife to dry the film.
  10. it takes about 10 seconds between reels to clean the dust off the roller with some packing tape. It takes about 5 minutes to wash them, which we do periodically, but not after every job. PTRs are not silicone. And they're not rubber. They're made of urethane. You can't make a blanket statement about them compared to phone cases or rollers in other environments. Different materials. And yes, alcohol will ruin rubber over time too.
  11. It's multi-spectral in the sense that they're using many narrow-band light sources to compose the image. think 16-18 exposures per frame, each with light with a different spectral range. I'll be honest, the credibility of the person behind this is shot as far as I'm concerned, since she was the one who was responsible for that ridiculous scanner comparison paper from a few years ago that was riddled with basic factual and methodological errors. This whole Multispectral scanning thing sound like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, if you ask me. it's aimed at archivists, not at people who need to work with the film in a day-to-day way. The theory is that it's a better representation of the color on the film. But when you think a scanner can't scan a specific hand-tinted print color because you set up the scanner incorrectly, and you "prove" this by taking a picture of the film with your cell phone and you see the color, but you assume that's because the $500 phone has a better imager than the $500,000 scanner, then you start a company to solve this "problem," you're clearly not operating on the same wavelength as the rest of us. pun intended.
  12. Blu-rays are made from whatever sources are available. If there's no limit to the budget, and original elements (neg) are available, that's what gets scanned, graded, restored, and put on the disc. Smaller labels may only have what is already transferred, so that's what they use. Print is almost never a first choice though sometimes that's all that's left. Film prints were never meant to be scanned or viewed digitally, they were engineered to be seen in a darkened room, and designed to take advantage of the way the human vision system adjusts to that darkness. Digital sensors are not eyes, so scans of prints never look as good as scans of camera original material or in some cases, earlier generation intermediates.
  13. That machine has been on ebay for years. FWIW, we sold our complete and fully functional Northlight 1 about a year and a half ago for $5000. Sadly the freight company dropped and destroyed it at the destination. It's a good scanner, not worth more than about $5k these days. Scan speed is measured in Seconds per Frame, not frames per second. Even a Northlight II, which is faster, is painfully slow. Like 12-18 hours to scan a single reel. They also require a 240V circuit, and they generate a ton of heat so you have to plan on ventilation to the outside to suck that all away from the machine, or it'll run even slower until it stops running entirely. The sensors are also prone to collecting dust, which shows up as streaks on the film so you have to be vigilant about cleaning all that with every reel change. And they don't like splices at all. We had many overnight scans fail partway because it was being fussy about a tape splice. My understanding is that Filmlight no longer sells these. The old Northlight product pages are on the site but they're no longer listed under Products. You have to google to find those pages.
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