Perry Paolantonio

There is significantly more than realtime stabilization that makes it a far superior machine. The HDS+ is simply not in the same class as the scanstation/archivist machines. But the fact that you need to do stabilization afterwards means you've got a lot of extra work for yourself and that adds up. We will often scan 8000-10,000 feet of film in a day, and at the end of the day we're copying those files to the customer's drive and getting it ready to ship. If we had to do stabilization, we'd be tying up a couple Resolve or Phoenix stations to do that. (And resolve's stabilization isn't that reliable. We have had film that was given to us from another scanner, and we had to break it up and do the stabilization scene by scene because resolve would freak out at the scene breaks, or when the film went completely black or white. ) It's been a while since I used Diamant but when I did it was really pretty slow. How does it handle scene breaks when stabilizing? Do you need to run a scene break detection pass first? How long does that take? The software Lasergraphics wrote for all of their scanners (it's shared with the Director on down to the Archivist), is incredibly stable and reliable. It is updated frequently, and as I said above, if you have an issue they not only address it quickly, they often send you a build of the software within days - sometimes hours. Most companies you'd have to wait until their next quarterly release for the fix. I have not personally done a side-by-side comparison with the HDS+, so I can't speak to the picture quality, but I'm willing to be the ScanStation/Archivist produce a much better image. The bad things about Lasergraphics scanners are being repeated by a select few disgruntled users, and even some people who don't own the machine and are just repeating what they've heard from others. The fact is, if you talk to most owners, they may have some issues with how the company handles certain things, but they are happy with their machines. I'm in regular contact with at least a dozen ScanStation and Director owners/operators, and only one or two have issues. Of those only one has issues with the picture quality, and even at that, only some of the time. The support from Lasergraphics is excellent. It costs money, yes. But this has been addressed above. The support costs are in keeping with industry standard rates. The fact that you can get software fixes within 24-48 hours is remarkable, and can't really be stressed enough. Try to request that with just about any other manufacturer of high end gear, they'll probably laugh at you.

One does not need a cleanroom (though you need a clean room) to prevent dust on the film. Open air scanners are only susceptible to dust in dusty environments. In a normal office setting that's kept clean, the film will be clean. We have not seen dust as an issue on our ScanStation or Northlight scanners. If you're seeing dust issues you should look into adding some humidifiers to your workspace to help prevent it.

again with the assumptions... Our experience has been that most archives are not interested in doing their own scans. Or that those who do purchase a scanner eventually give up and have someone else do it for them. In theory, having a scanner in house is a nice idea. In practice, it requires a skilled operator, and most small archives don't have a budget to hire someone to do that work. Once the person who knows how to use it moves on to another job, the institutional knowledge is gone. This is a recurring issue. I can think of two organizations locally where this is the case. If one doesn't know this then one doesn't belong in the business of scanning films. If nothing else curiosity about what the settings do should lead one to figure it out. The effects are immediate and obvious, on the preview image in the ScanStation. I think the problem here is that you're assuming that anyone can/should be able to read a manual and know how to scan a film. That isn't the case any more than handing someone a wrench will make them a competent mechanic. Or giving someone a word processor will make them a novelist. or really any other tool of any trade out there.

Sorry - I misread your comment as "why would people tell you". In any case, my point stands. The information came from Arri and is clearly now out of date. But they'r still more expensive than Lasergraphics on support.

You're not stating facts. You're implying there's a fundamental issue with the machine without backing that up. I'm in touch with quite a few Lasergraphics owners on a regular basis and have not heard of something that fits your vague description. Please don't say there is a definitive problem, then when asked to elaborate tell me to ask around. What is the precise issue that's being seen? You haven't explained it. Not "People" -- Arri. The last time I talked to them the support contract was a bit under $50k. Regardless, it's still more expensive than Lasergraphics even at today's cost. I believe that was at NAB in 2019 though it may have been 2018. I asked them, they told me directly. But for what it's worth, the pricing you're showing is on par or more expensive than what Lasergraphics charges, though they structure what you get differently. €7700 is more than we pay Lasergraphics for a similar level of support as the lowest price Arri contract, I can tell you that. I don't know who Gencom is - a VAR? Galileo Digital is the worldwide sales agent for Lasergraphics, but the support contracts are sold direct through Lasergraphics, even though it's Galileo who gives you the pricing. When we buy upgrades or new product, we pay Galileo. When we renew our support contract, we pay Lasergraphics directly. Maybe Galileo subcontracts to some regions, in which case the markup is coming from that subcontractor? I have no idea.

The stand and tabletop/integrated lightbox are niceties. The Personal and the Archivist fit on a stable, sturdy table. You bring your own stand, in order to save on costs - both shipping and manufacturing. The tabletop/lightbox is another thing you don't really need. None of the other high end scanners have them. I like it because it gives you a place to splice film that breaks while scanning (bad splices or whatever), but it's not strictly necessary. The rail-based camera and lens system are there to facilitate scanning multiple gauges while maximizing the sensor in the camera. Without them, smaller gauges are a crop of the largest gauge. This is how most scanners worked up until the ScanStation. This is also a complex and expensive bit of kit so removing it and simplifying the machine brings its cost down quite a bit. I never said a good manual isn't necessary. In fact I said quite the opposite. The system is proprietary, and it's modular. If something in the camera system breaks, they send you a new one, and you replace it in the field. They give you detailed step-by-step instructions. I have personally performed half a dozen upgrades on our system and have the documentation from Lasergraphics to show how to do each one. Similarly, we have had one hardware failure in the 8 years of owning the machine, and when that happened, we were given step by step instructions for how to remove the module and re-install the new one when it arrived. There are not user serviceable parts inside. The circuit boards are proprietary, as is the firmware that runs on them. Even if you knew what to do, you couldn't go buy a part from some supplier and just replace it yourself (including the camera, as there is Lasergraphics-specific firmware on them to tune the camera to their specifications). Maybe the stepper/servos, and some mechanical bits you could get. Everything else you're going to have to get from Lasergraphics, and you're going to get instructions on how to install those things when you do. This is no different than what you'd experience with Arri (who, by the way, charges $50k/ year for ongoing support on their scanners), or DigitalVision, or DFT or any of the other scanner manufacturers.

Still frame. You focus as part of the setup routine for a scan. The lens stage is moved when focusing, like in an enlarger for still images. It couldn't possibly happen while the film is in motion.

Any professional software or hardware involves ongoing annual support contracts. We pay for support for our Restoration software, for our Scanner, for our SAN software, for the programming environment I use for in-house apps. There are annual support contracts (or software subscriptions, these days) for most professional applications. This is the way. Yes, Resolve support is free. But again, you get what you pay for. We've had so many issues with Blackmagic hardware and software over the years that they simply gave up on I can't even count. I certainly can't say the same for any of the other very expensive software we've purchased for which we keep up annual support contracts. If we need help we get it, and typically very quickly. Lasergraphics, DigitalVision, Arri, none of them are there to provide free product to anyone who asks for it. They wouldn't be here if they did that. There are a bazillion ongoing costs in running a business. We're a relatively small company and we don't do free scanning for people, even though we're asked all the time. A company that has to maintain a development and support team, offices, manufacturing, shipping and receiving departments, and much more, has to charge for ongoing service. We're not talking about a product with hundreds of thousands of users, we're talking about a product with hundreds of users. There's a big difference. With scale you get things like online communities that self-support, taking some of that load off. One cannot compare a company making expensive, niche hardware with one making commodity software and expect the same thing from them.

Rule #1 of the internet. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

The scanner uses a statistical analysis method for focusing. It samples the image at a variety of camera positions (we're talking tiny variations in distance to the film). The position with the sharpest edges wins. It works like a charm. There's no need to do anything other than auto-focus with the Lasergraphics scanners.

First I've heard of this. Please elaborate on what the problem is, and why it requires an on-site visit. It was never marketed as an upgradeable machine, beyond trade-in for a full scanstation, which was designed to be modular from the beginning. This is from the original press release when they announced the machine: "As their scanning needs increase, customers can trade-in their Personal for a Lasergraphics ScanStation or Director film scanner." So let me get this straight: Would you buy a car without electric windows, or power steering, or nice leather seats, and then when you decide you want those things you complain you can't bring it to the dealer had have it upgraded? Best of luck with that. They're going to offer you a few bucks on a trade-in for a new car. This was never marketed as an upgradeable system. It was relatively inexpensive because they removed a bunch of features (metal platters, the huge steel stand, the Corian table with integrated lightboxes, the complex rail-based camera/lens system, etc), with an option to trade it in for a full ScanStation. I think it was pretty clear from the get go that this was the way they were selling these, and all your pearl clutching about it not being upgradeable makes no sense to me. The Archivist is marketed towards Archives. Archives have a high turnover and their operators may be trained in general archive duties and not film specifically. It should have a user manual. There needs to be some base level understanding of what film is and how you focus an image on it, before you start scanning. No self-respecting archive should allow someone who is that unfamiliar with film to be handling their collection. It's not Lasergraphics' job to teach you how to do that. It's something you should know, or be taught by someone who does. Could it be in a manual? Yes. But I'd rather Lasergraphics (which has a fairly small engineering team) spend their time on improvements and bug fixes. What would I like in a manual? A comprehensive explanation of what each feature does and to some degree, what's happening under the hood. I want the nuts and bolts explanations so I can use my knowledge of how this stuff works to maximize the quality of our scans. Right now it's more of the "To open a File go to File/Open" style manual, which is basically useless.

I hesitate to dive into this, but as usual the info Dan is providing is partial and not completely accurate. We have been a customer since the ScanStation was released in 2013. In fact, we have the first commercially shipped ScanStation, so we know the thing inside and out. 1) Lasergraphics support has been superlative. Yes, you have to pay for a support contract. Yes, it's expensive. But you also get fixes to bugs you find, sometimes the same or next day. A major component of any scanning system is the software, and anyone who has worked in the software industry knows there will be bugs. It's unavoidable. With most software companies, you have to wait until the next version for a fix to become available, but Lasergraphics will give you an interim version to get you around the issue you're having. This is practically unheard of in the software world. 2) The cost of the scanner has risen. But I mean, what hasn't in the past 8 years? Also, the "original" scanner was a very different beast than the current model so you can't compare them. Our original ScanStation was 2k, no HDR, and a bunch of other features weren't added yet. The newest versions have a 6.5k camera, HDR, and a host of other features (some of which came from our interactions with their support team, and those of other users). 3) The documentation is abysmal, yes. There is a lot of room for improvement here. This language is common. Our Northlight 1 uses the same terminology. So did our old DigitalVision DVNR. Is it the most intuitive? No, but it's fairly standard. And you know what? if you don't know what a setting does, just ask. If I saw a setting that said "filter/aperture correction" and didn't know what that meant, I'd surely ask what it does and how it works. Learning is a two-way street. If this is not intuitive to someone working in film scanning, then that person should be looking for another line of work. This is how you focus film in projection, or in optical printing, and not knowing something that basic shows a lack of understanding of the medium that is well beyond the scope of the documentation. This is not a machine you buy at Walmart, it's specialty hardware that requires some understanding of the formats you're dealing with. I appreciate a good manual, believe me. I helped to write the original manual for the Media 100, which did what you're suggesting (down to explaining how to read the internal WFM/Vectorscope). But that was designed from the beginning to be a tool for the masses, this is not. There needs to be some expectation that you know what you're doing before you start doing it. If you don't, you're doing a disservice to your customers. If you're an archive then an archivist who has an understanding of film should be the one trained on it, not just someone who happened to be walking down the hall the day it was being installed. The training, by the way, is only on Zoom because of the pandemic. They typically travel to the location, set up the machine for you and teach you in person how to use it. And you have basically unlimited contact with Lasergraphics tech support and the sales agent, if you have questions. They have gone to bat for us countless times when we had feature requests and we're extremely satisfied with most aspects of their customer service. If there are issues with the machine, they can log into it remotely and recalibrate and tweak all kinds of stuff. Are there things about their support that could use improvement? Sure. But that's the case with any company. Try getting support out of blackmagic, once they hit a wall and can't figure out your problem. The bottom line here is that you get what you pay for.

I agree with Andrew. Leave this for what it is, which is a pretty good machine. If you're interested in selling it, let me know. Or trading - I've got actual film scanners if you want to fiddle around with making your own. What sound heads does this have? I wouldn't mod this one, to be honest. it's probably more hassle than it's worth, and it would be a shame to damage this machine if it's in working order. There's a lot more involved than you may think to building your own, so if you're going to do it, start with an actual film transport and work from there. It'll be a lot easier (he said from ongoing, painful experience)

That's going to depend on the lab and how they do it, and also your location. I would just shop it around. If you don't need to be present in the room you'll save a lot of money doing an unsupervised grade, because clients in the room slow everything down. The presence of a client in the color room makes the job of the colorist a lot harder (it's not just about color at that point, it's about customer service, providing coffee, chatting, trying 10 different variations, etc). Color correction costs have really come *way* down since DaVinci Resolve went from a couple hundred grand to basically free. There are a lot of very good colorists out there who work freelance and have high quality monitoring without the overhead of a fancy studio, so you just have to look around.

A day rate of $3500 is not normal in 2021, outside of A-list post houses. A short shouldn't cost you more than $1-$2k for color correction and file export, unless there are issues that require a lot of work. We do feature films all the time for under $5k, but we only work with film-originated material that we scan in house, so we can control the whole process. A 20 minute film does not take many days to grade unless you start getting really fussy, or you're doing a lot of tracking/matting/relighting in post.

FWIW, 5 figures for a 20 minute short sounds insane, unless your footage is a complete mess or you need to do something really complicated with it. Did you get actual quotes, or was that just what someone told you? I would shop it around and see. The cost of color correction has come *way* down because it no longer requires half a million dollars worth of hardware to do. That doesn't mean everyone's a colorist, but it's made it possible for very talented freelancers to get into the game at reasonable rates. A basic pass at a 20 minute film shouldn't take an experienced colorist more than an hour or so, and then you take it from there, if you want to tweak and adjust. Definitely look around for reasonable pricing on that.

There are optical readers for the old 35mm/16mm fullcoat mag dubbers. I'd be happy to sell you an MTE dual-head dubber if you're interested, crazy cheap but you'd have to arrange for shipping out of Boston (freight, and it's bulky). But, needs a lot of work because we disassembled it, when we were planning to make it into a film scanner. You'd need to source an optical reader for it though, as we only have mag heads for that unit.

we are doing the perf detection in CPU. On a 14k image detecting the perfs and calculating the offset takes us less than 20ms. Granted we’re not scanning at 30fps. For that you’d need GPU almost certainly. Or you’d do it on the frame grabbers FPGA. Digital registration should improve with resolution. We’ve done some tests with the northlight (mech pin) and scanstation and found the scanstation was more stable. With faster scans they may have to simplify the file more than with a slower scanner, and that might lead to less accuracy. I’ll post some tests done on our scanner in a few weeks using opencv.

Lasergraphics (as far as I know) has never used a laser perf detector. The original director was mechanically pin registered but the current one is sprocketless. The scanstation has been sprocketless and has done optical perfection detection from the beginning. Which I know because we have the first scanstation they shipped. Open CV is what you’re looking for. It’s free, fast and designed specifically to do things like object detection. Lasergraphics software is custom. I don’t know what they use under the hood for perf detection but that kind of thing is available in APIs from frame grabbers, could be implemented in an fpga or could be done in software in their app.

No. it uses the perfs in the captured image for registration, though it doesn't require the *entire* perf. For formats like 35mm only the inside edges of the perfs are visible. See: https://www.gammaraydigital.com/blog/lasergraphics-scanstation-65k-maximum-resolutions for examples of what the scanner "sees" in full overscan with all the common gauges, on the 6.5k sensor. It's all done on the image. frame registration is a trivially easy process using machine vision when you have something like perforations, which are well defined, to use as reference points. They might do this on the frame grabber in an FPGA, or they might do it in CPU or GPU, I have no idea. Even on 14k images like we're working with now, the time it takes to convert a full res image to greyscale, find the perfs, align the perfs to a fixed location on the X/Y axis with rotation, and then apply that translation to the actual image, is just a few milliseconds on a decent CPU. They might be doing this on the GPU, if the image is already there (that would just make sense), but I think they're mostly using the GPU to accelerate scaling, and applying color corrections, because that's faster than CPU, usually.

This is not entirely correct. The second flash isn't for the "darks" it's or the densest area of the film, which for negative means the highlights. You get much more to work with in the highlights with HDR, with a gentler roll-off on the high end, in our experience. We recommend HDR regardless of the film - camera original pos or neg, or even print. We've seen benefits to HDR with all of these formats, despite the accepted "common knowledge" that it's not a benefit with print. (for example: if you have a faded color print that's gone magenta, and you do a single and two-flash scan of it, then bring those files into Resolve and line the frames up, switching between them you'll see more color is there (you can see the trace on a vectorscope get bigger in the HDR scan), which aids in recovering the fade. It's not perfect, but it's a better starting point than single flash scans. Arriscan is 2-flash. The original scanner took two images of each frame, the XT uses the Alexa sensor's dual-gain feature, which acts like a two-flash HDR scan in one image. As far as I'm aware the only widely used commercially made scanner that does 3-flash is the Director. Xena might do this too, but I'm not sure. Rob will tell us. Registration isn't really a huge concern. If you can see the perfs, you can register two frames to a very high degree of accuracy, probably more accurate than mechanical pins, which is what the ScanStation does. As a continuous motion scanner, it takes two images of each frame while the frame is in the gate, but the frame is never at the same position for those two. They are aligned after the images are scanned, and that's how they're able to do 2-flash HDR. As you might imagine, it halves the running speed of an SDR scan because the frame can only be in the gate for so long.

Nothing about this will be fast. Big, yes. Fast? nope.

We're implementing it on our 70mm scanner, kind of just because we get it for free with some of the libraries we're coding with, so why not? But if we add HDR to the scanner (which will likely happen in a few months), it'll be nice to have a 32bit container to put it in . I can't even comprehend what working with 14k files like that is going to entail, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there!

Thanks, feel free to link to it! We posted this originally because there are some ScanStation services that are (or maybe were, not sure) offering 6.5k scans of the film frame, which means they're scaling up. We had to explain to several customers that those other services weren't able to do something we couldn't do (we certainly could, but won't), they were just doing something you shouldn't do! Make sure the Aspect Ratio pulldown is set to Unlocked manually enter the desired output file size (say, 4096x3112) Change the Aspect Ratio pulldown to "Locked to Image Size" Drag a corner of the marquee around the image to the crop you want This will automatically scale the image to the output file size you manually entered, maintaining that aspect ratio. There is a trick, too - the default editing tool for the scanner will scale things to fit based on Lasergraphics best guess at what you want. For more control, and to see the actual resolution, hold down the Ctrl key when you click the Edit button. This enables a hidden checkbox (which long ago was there by default but it was deemed too confusing by lasergraphics) called "Track film/file size". If you check this box and follow the steps above, when you get to the last step (dragging the size of the marquee), the image size fields will change with the scale of the marquee. So if you want to maintain the max resolution of the file but add some overscan, for example, you'd do this: Load the film in 6.5k mode (assuming 16mm) Hold down Ctrl while clicking the Edit button under the Output Presets Make sure the Aspect Ratio is set to Unlocked Change the preset to Full Aperture Change the Aspect Ratio to "Locked to Image Size" Now when you drag the marquee around, the full aperture of the frame will be the max supported for the mode you're loaded into (4.8k for 6.5k mode) and going larger on the marquee means you're just adding some stuff to the outside of that.

Ok, should be up and running now. Sorry about that - looks like the permissions on the site got all messed up but I've given it a swift kick and now it's back.