Perry Paolantonio

hmm. we've had some really weird issues with our server the past few days. Let me look into it. It should be there, but I'm not sure why it's getting that error.

If I had to hazard a guess - I'm thinking they scanned the film as 16mm, then used software to separate the two halves, then the two stacked images that resulted from that. You could do this in something like AVISynth, or Open CV or something like that. But the way to do this correctly if you're going to go that route, is to make your intermediate files into an image sequence. Then you can bring that into Resolve or some other NLE and define the frame rate that it would be output to. That's kind of the only way I could see winding up with really weird frame rates. The more convoluted the process the more likely you wind up with a wacky result!

It is not, at least, not on the ScanStation. The ScanStation can scan unslit 8mm - you install the 16mm gate, but you select Double 8mm when loading the film. It repositions the camera accordingly, and only scans down one side of the film. Then you move the film from the takeup side over to the feed side, and run the other half. The frame rate thing is weird. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that whoever is using this machine has no idea what they're doing, or maybe it's a ScanStation Personal and that machine can't do this and they had to come up with some weird workarounds (I don't know, but it could be the case. We have the full ScanStation and it does do this. It was a request I personally made with Lasergraphics years ago, that they implemented). Setting the frame rate honestly couldn't be simpler - as Rob pointed out, there's a pulldown with all the available frame rates. So unless they're doing something weird like not scanning directly to the format you want and then doing some kind of post-scan frame rate conversion outside the ScanStation, I don't really see why they can't just scan it at 24. Do you mean that your resulting file has both the forward and backward image? If so, unless you asked for that, that's being done wrong. I believe there's also an option to do that (you would use the Ultra Pan 8 setting, which would scan one frame that's the entire width of the 16mm film. In that case you'd see forward and backward frames, but the resolution of each of the frames would be about half of the resolution you'd get if you loaded it as double 8mm (because the camera/lens position is different for D8mm). There is no need. We scan unslit double 8mm and do so all the time. Works great on the ScanStation, and the end result is the same as scanning slit 8mm. Costs the same as scanning regular slit 8mm as well.

I don't think there are very many of these in daily use anymore but I could be wrong. We've got one we haven't turned on in some time - (it's for sale!). Beautiful machine, but slow beyond belief. A modern scanner doesn't need to be real time, but it's a big difference between 4fps and 4spf (seconds per frame)...

Ain't that the truth. You need to figure out a mechanism to move the film through the machine (motors, rollers, sensors, hardware to mount it on, controllers to orchestrate everything) You need to come up with a stable light source, Ideally one that's matched to the type of film you're scanning (pos or neg) and a way to trigger that light source at the right time and intensity. You need to select the correct camera and optics to ensure you're getting a good match for the resolution of the film at the distance your camera is from the gate. Yes, you can get cheap 4k cameras. They're cheap for a reason. Lenses really matter here too. You need to write software to interface with items 1, 2, and 3, and also deal with processing the images once they're captured (either exporting to a file that you deal with later, or handling all the color science stuff in the scanner. We've been working for 3 years on a scanner for in-house use that is very near completion. Max res is 14k and it'll do large formats from 35mm through 15p IMAX - 1-3fps at max res, 16bit sequential RGB, faster for smaller gauges down to about 8k. Building this was not a simple process, even though all the parts are available off the shelf. I am currently neck deep in the software side of this machine, and while it's coming along, every day brings up something we hadn't considered, or that we didn't quite anticipate. Yes, building one is an order of magnitude easier than it was 20 years ago. But building it right is hard.

A while back, we ended up doing a blog post on this, in part because of the issue you raise, but also because some other ScanStation 6.5k owners were saying they'd do 6.5k of the *frame* -- that'd mean they're scaling up from the native 4.8k (for the full aperture of the frame) for 16mm. And that would be dishonest. Also, all kids of wrong if you're doing archival scans. https://www.gammaraydigital.com/blog/lasergraphics-scanstation-65k-maximum-resolutions @Daniel D. Teoli Jr. - what Frank is saying here is that some people think they're getting a 4k scan of the image when they order a 4k scan with full overscan. The resulting file is 4k, but because of the stuff outside the (film) frame, the frame is actually much smaller. In the case of the link above, with the ScanStation 6.5k and standard 16mm film, you get 4.8k for the film frame, within a 6.5k file. That means about 74% of the width of the file is the film frame, the rest is the stuff outside the frame. If you were to do a 4k scan (a 4k *file* that is), the full aperture area would be about 3k.

If they're still charging $1M for it (they were last I checked), then I'd say it's about $750,000 overpriced. Honestly - it's not that good a machine. We've had several scans we graded and restored that were scanned elsewhere on the Scanity, and there's less dynamic range than the ScanStation 6.5k and the image weaves all over the place.

Right. The light should be tuned to the type of film (pos or neg, for example) or at least, it has be be dealt with in the image processing before the files are written out. I think a lot of people don’t realize that all Bayer sensors are monochrome, they just have a physical mask over the pixels that separates the mono photo sites by color. The exact same sensor without the Bayer mask is a mono camera. With over sampling any negative side effects of the Bayer mask in a color camera basically go away, effectively making it a lower resolution RGB camera. Exactly as you say.

CMOS != Bayer sensor. CMOS, like CCD, is just a method of capturing photons. Both can be Bayer, both can be mono, both can be RGB. the likelihood that this is a mono camera with sequential RGB is vanishingly small. They’d be screaming that from the rooftops if that was the case because of the world’s (largely) irrational fear of Bayer masks. It would be a marketing coup.

I watched the videos and I don't see it changing multiple colors. It's continuous motion and moving fairly fast. I'd be very surprised if this is sequential RGB. What camera is in the one you bought? The exact model.

I suppose you can say it's a "wet gate" since the film is wet when it goes through the gate... "also triple flash monochrome' -- can you elaborate here? nothing in the specs on this scanner talks about this, at least not in the PDF on their web site. Are you talking about HDR or are you talking about a monochrome camera that uses Red, Green, Blue lights to create color images, like the Lasergraphics Director or the Arriscan? Or is it doing some kind of trick like the Scanity's "HDR" that uses the R,G,B photosites to do HDR for B/W film (but not color) in a single pass. I'm not something sure that would work with a bayer sensor, but maybe? FWIW, one of our best customers is a pretty well known film archive. They bought one of these, but only use it to capture quick and dirty transfers as access copies and to evaluate the condition of films. Then they send the films to us for scanning. It's not a substitute for a scanner that has better optics, better cameras, better mechanical design, better software. It'll certainly do the job better than a Retro Scan or Cintel, but not as good as a ScanStation or other similar machines. With a few exceptions (<cough> Scanity <cough>) there's a reason scanners are as expensive as they are - you get what you pay for.

When we have something we'd like to show, we will. We're not interested in marketing or selling the scanner. this is for in-house use.

We're still working on the 14k scanner. It's for 35mm and 70mm (and some oddball archival formats) though. We could probably scan 16mm on it, but the resolution would be limited due to the optical system, and we'd probably get more out of the 6.5k ScanStation, which has more range for the camera/lens system to fill the sensor frame than we do. We don't have scan samples, because no streaming format does them justice. It's more hassle than it's worth to have to explain away the compression from streaming, and there are too many variables in the playback system to make that a worthwhile test. That being said, film is just a series of still images isn't it? stills are a pretty good way to show off the scanner.

If you look at it on vimeo, he details the full setup in the description

Why no sync? I mean, the camera won't hold sync for long, but we've had clients do sync sound with R8. We scanned this for a client a few years ago: This is very true. While the frame size might be slightly smaller for R8, the design of the Super 8 system is kind of crap. It was about convenience, not quality. We are regularly blown away by how good old R8 film looks - stable and generally much more crisp than Super 8.

Of course. That said, I can't hear the difference between 44.1 and 48, but I know audio mastering engineers who can. However, we're not talking about straight recording and then listening to that recording. Just like with film scanning, you're capturing it and then further manipulating it. And for that, more samples are critical. With an image, you may be doing a lot more than resizing. Let's say you want to do grain reduction (shudder), you're going to get better results if you have better definition of the grain, therefore you're less likely to affect the underlying image this way. Or if you're doing restoration work - the algorithms will work better with sharper images. We've been doing digital restoration for 15 years and I can tell you that the quality of the restoration work increases with resolution. We just get better results. The point most people miss is that while the film/lens/camera system can only resolve so much, and that's true, that doesn't mean there's some hard and fast pixel count that corresponds to a given film gauge. That's a gross oversimplification of the problem. For one thing, pixel count is only one small factor in the overall image (I can make you a pretty crappy 8k image that's still 8k, but doesn't look as sharp as 4k). The quality of the optical system in the scanner, the quality of the sensor, noise in the sensor, the quality of the scanner's light source, post-scan image processing, and dozens of other factors play into the quality of a scan. And the scan is not the final step in the post production workflow, yet it's treated that way. You're never scanning the film and then looking at it immediately, you're always doing more to it afterwards: Grading, compositing, restoring, etc. Does 8k television make sense? Probably not, unless you're one of those people with a 10 foot screen and you're sitting 4 feet from it. Then, the pixel density makes a difference. But the reality is that display resolutions keep increasing, so if nothing else, film scans should keep up, if only to avoid upsampling later to fit those higher resolutions. But there are plenty of good reasons to scan at a higher res than you think might be necessary.

As I see it there are three reasons to scan at higher resolutions than you need: 1) Oversampling, nyquist, etc. 2) Increased fidelity. Don't think about the picture on the film, think about the film. Most people can't hear the difference between 44.1kHz audio sampling adn 48kHz. Yet every self respecting audio mastering house will work at 96k or higher. Why? Because audio is analog (and so is film), and more samples gets you closer to the original analog signal. Do you need it immediately? maybe not. But 10, 20 years from now, it may come in very handy. And if the film doesn't exist anymore, it'd be pretty foolish not to have scanned at the highest resolution you could, at the time. 3) It's only a matter of time before 8k becomes a theatrical reality and possibly even takes over home theater (I think that's debatable, but who knows). If you scan at 4k, you have to do a lot of upsampling to get it to 8k. If you scan at 8k, you already have that ready to go when needed. i"m not saying everyone needs to do this, but these are totally reasonable arguments for scanning at higher resolutions. People need to think beyond their immediate needs, especially as the costs to do this kind of scanning comes down. A couple years ago, doing a 4k feature film scan for $5000 was unthinkable. Yet, we do it all the time. Times change, resolutions increase, costs come down, computers get faster and will be able to handle it easily soon enough.

There's plenty more on film than you think, and it depends on your goal. If the goal is digital preservation, higher resolution is always better. The whole point is to resolve the grain, because the grain is the picture. You may not be able to resolve more than the lens on the camera and lens were able to when the film was shot, but that's not really the point. In order to have the most to work with, especially with film that's degrading fast and won't be around in 10 more years, you want the highest resolution you can get. The idea is to future proof the scan as much as possible so when crazy algorithms for restoration are available in 10 years you have a suitable source to work with. Also, oversampling is important. if you need an 8k scan for display on an 8k screen, you need to scan at a higher res to downsample to that 8k for best results. To Daniel's question: There are a few scanners out there that can do those resolutions (Lasergraphics Director 10k, some of the GoldenEye scanners, and a couple others I think). We're building a scanner right now that will do 14k for 70mm and roughly 10k for 35mm. Our ScanStation has a 6.5k sensor in it. That said, 8k on a cell phone is nothing in comparison to the data rates required to do a proper film scan. You're comparing apples and oranges (a cell phone is capturing crappy 8-bit highly compressed files, but a film scanner is capturing uncompressed). The bandwidth requirements are beyond what even the most high end computers can handle right now, so any scanner with resolutions like that is going to be limited to a few frames per second tops and any post work is going to be done on lower res proxies.

That depends on the transfer system. Modern sprocketless scanners can often scan damaged film. We do it all the time on our 6.5k ScanStation. I just searched for the manual for that machine, and it says it uses an AC power source. So finding a plug shouldn't be too hard. Can you post a photo of the socket on the machine? The manual didn't have an image of it.

I don't know the situation with these sites, but I would suggest maybe not being so judgmental about it. For one thing - maintaining a web site is much more than paying $15/year for a domain. You also have to pay for web hosting, and you have to keep the site updated, even if it's static and no longer working. And getting that data into a usable form isn't always straightforward. Often sites like this are a labor of love and life gets in the way. I speak from experience - In 1996 I started postforum.com, which was one of the biggest forums for mac-based nonlinear edit systems for quite some time. It never made any money but it consumed a lot of my time. Eventually the forums were overrun with spammers and I couldn't keep up. Multiple revisions of the forum software didn't help, and it was ported to three different forum packages over the years (each port took months to pull off because the data was all in different formats). Social media took over and traffic plummeted. In the end, I had to shut the site down, which was tough because there was a ton of information there. The site had over 25,000 non-spammer users (and in the end almost as many spamer accounts), and about 4000 regulars. there were over 180,000 posts when I finally pulled the plug and made it read-only. That lasted for several years, but then the site began experiencing all kinds of hacks because of security vulnerabilities in the (by then defunct) forum software. Ultimately my web host told me to either fix it or shut it down. Since most of the data on it was way out of data at that point (I mean, who still uses Media 100 QX systems on Mac OS 9?) Keeping a web site up and running, especially one that's even remotely interactive (even if it's in read-only mode) is a lot of work and still needs to be patched and updated as the underlying OS is updated or security vulnerabilities are discovered, so it's not a simple matter of paying a few bucks a year to leave it visible. Respectfully, I'd say give the site's maintainers a break.

Right. FRS is their restoration software. You'd want to see the film with and without wet gate and with no FRS and no color correction. Basically, run the film through with no wet gate and capture it. back it up, turn on wet gate and do it again. Don't change any settings on the scanner. that's the only way to test what the wet gate is doing. Once you introduce other software you're muddying the waters. Dust removal and noise reduction can affect scratches too, so they need to be turned off.

Again, that's not the wet gate doing that. Look at the colors. Wet gate will not affect color. This image has been processed post-scan, and there's no way to know what else has been done to it. Post a video of the film run through the wet gate *ONLY* with no post-scan processing of any kind (color correction, noise reduction, restoration), and then you can make a comparison. But you're comparing apples to oranges here. I can scan a dirty film on our ScanStation with and without threading through PTR rollers, then run it through Resolve to color correct and Phoenix to clean it up. But I can't say the PTR rollers are responsible for the difference. That is effectively what you're saying here, only it's a "wet gate" not a PTR roller. All that system will do is clean some of the gunk off the film before it gets to the gate.

The second video has been altered (the color is totally different). it has probably gone through their software scratch removal as well as some level of color balancing. It's not the wet gate that's doing that, it's software.

This keeps coming up in threads I'm on. The Film Fabriek is not really wet gate. It's only a wet gate in that the film is damp when it passes in front of the camera, yes. But it's basically a cleaning thing, not a scratch concealment thing because of the solvent they're using. Wetgate works by filling in BASE (not emulsion) scratches with a solvent that's got the same refractive index as the acetate itself. **IF** and only if the light source is collimated. In this case, the photons are focused into a linear beam, and when the light hits the scratch it will bounce off of the edges like light in a prism. If the scratch is filled with a solvent that has the same refractive index as the base, then the light will pass straight through. Alcohol is not that solvent. What it will do is clean the film a bit before it goes through the gate and then evaporates, but not much more than that. If the light source is sufficiently diffuse, the scratch doesn't really appear in the first place because the photons are scattered all over the place and don't refract off the scratch so there's not much point in a wet gate on a modern scanner. It makes a ton of sense on film printers, or any scanner where the light is focused through a lens before it hits the film. That's not how most scanners made in the past 20 years work though.

DOTS doesn't really exist yet. it's in development. I think the OP is looking at the problem the wrong way. We are reliant upon commercial tech companies to provide us with the formats to make and store images. There's no getting around that, and film was no different. These companies are going to change things constantly, and they're going to try to outdo each other with newer and better formats. Film definitely has long term advantages, and as David Mullen suggests - B/W separations are the current best format for long term storage (but this is wildly expensive both to make and to store and maintain - you can't just stick it on a shelf in a basement, you need climate-controlled storage and the ongoing costs - facilities, electrical, maintenance, labor - are enormous). With digital media, the only sane solution right now is to migrate, migrate, migrate, and build lots of redundancy into whatever strategy you use for storage. If you're looking to store a film, I would start with hard drives, which give you quick and easy access in the near-term, but will fail eventually. Multiple copies, in multiple locations, helps with this problem. But don't expect these drives to be good for more than 5 years, to be safe. They probably will, but don't count on it. Migrate the files every few years to new drives. As a more long term backup - maybe 8-10 years - the current best format is LTO. It's robust, it's ubiquitous and the development of it is an open book, with a well defined roadmap going out many years. It's designed by a consortium of companies, so it's not subject to the whims of one manufacturer. Major enterprise-level backup systems (banks, medical, government, defense, etc) rely on LTO, so it's not going anywhere any time soon. Amazon Glacier is LTO. Stay a generation behind what's current, and it's reasonably priced. Aside from the immediate problems of specific media (a given hard drive or LTO tape) failing, you have the larger issue of changes in the underlying technology that's used to power those devices. For example - SCSI was the only way to connect drives, printers and other peripherals for decades. Now it's all but dead as an interface to computers (the protocols live on in iSCSI and SAS, but that's software, basically). If you put stuff on a SCSI drive 20 years ago, it's going to be very hard to get the files off of that drive now (if the drive still spins up), and much harder 5 years from now. The same will happen with SATA, and USB, and all other interconnect formats. It's in the interest of the tech companies developing these formats to constantly move you to something new, to sell more product. So the best way to look at digital archiving is to see it as a constantly evolving process, and just roll with it - move your data to new formats. Keep checksums to ensure there's no corruption. Keep multiple copies in different locations on different formats, so if one goes bad you have a viable replacement. Trying to find a digital equivalent to film, where you can stick it on a shelf and more or less forget about it for a few decades, will lead to disaster and disappointment in the future.