Perry Paolantonio

Er, not at all. Where on earth do you get the idea it's complicated? Have you actually used it? It's rare to find software on a device like this that's so simple to use and yet gives you as many features as their software does. Seriously, it's pretty great. The ScanStation is smaller than most 35mm scanners. Our Northlight weighs 1200lbs, for crying out loud! Robino, we're not in LA, but I can pretty much guarantee our rates are lower than anyone else you've gotten quotes from out there. We do a ton of work for people on the west coast. R8, S8, 16, S16 and 35mm on a Lasergraphics 5k scanner and up to 6k 35mm on a Northlight. 2, 3 or 4 perf. Most jobs are turned around within 1-2 days, depending on our schedule when elements arrive. With advance notice we can often accommodate same day turnaround. No crazy fees for things like file copies or reel changes, and any setup fees are minimal. Look outside LA - there are lots of competitively priced scanning services these days that are just a fedex shipment away...

The proportions of that box are interesting - very much like S8 Sound carts, which were more vertical than the standard square silent carts.

I don't really know that model (I've got a 4008, but it's got a totally different lens). I do know someone who has a 5008 that was dropped once, and has never been the same, focus-wise, ever since. Is it possible something like this happened and knocked the lens out of whack internally? I can't see how the filter would affect focus (I mean, beyond a slight softening because you've introduced *something* between the back lens element and the gate. It may affect the image in some ways, but I don't think it would alter the focus.

My first guess would be to make sure you've got the viewfinder diopter set correctly. If that's off, your focus will be totally off.

There's no way we could really come up with accurate pricing until we have the scanner (if we get it at all). I don't think that for the time being most people will be asking for 10k files, but it is a great way to oversample for 4k or even 8k output, much like we do now with 4k scans for 2k output (Super2k, we call it). As for our systems, we're building out the infrastructure now to handle much higher data rate footage than we can currently work with. This week, in fact, I'm testing and performance tuning a centralized SAN that's on a 40Gbps backbone - that's 5 Gigabytes/second throughput on the network. The drives in the SAN (currently 48TB, but with space for up to 168TB more) will probably be the bottleneck, likely topping out at about 2GB/second.

We are looking into this scanner, waiting to hear back from Lasergraphics on some pricing and technical questions. That said, I believe it's priced similarly to the previous Director Scanner, which is pretty expensive (several hundred thousand dollars). I don't think you're going to see a lot of these out there any time soon, because I'm not even sure they're shipping them yet, The primary advantage of the Director would be HDR, but that's really only going to be useful on underexposed reversal, or on some B/W prints. It's also pretty slow, which means the cost to scan on this is likely going to be much higher than on a faster machine like the ScanStation, Xena, etc. HDR doesn't get you much on negative or print. I honestly wouldn't expect to start seeing these scanners appear in the wild until sometime next year at the earliest.

What you're saying is basically: "scan at the resolution you need now." What I'm saying is "scan at the resolution you think you might need in the future." Yes, there is a small increase in costs to scanning at a higher resolution than you might need right now, but the benefits far outweigh the costs: 1) If you scan at 4k (for example), and you need HD now, you have all you need for a master up through 4k. 2) If you scan at 4k and you need HD, you get a better image because you're oversampling and then scaling down, than if you scan natively at HD 3) The cost to scan at HD now, and then rescan at 4k later is substantially more than simply doing it at 4k now. 4) The cost to store an HD scan vs a 4k scan is negligible. Hard drives cost less than HDCAM SR tapes, for example, so it's actually cheaper than ever to have multiple copies. You don't need to store them in a paid storage facility if you're smart about it: make 3-4 copies on drives and store them in reasonable conditions in different physical locations. Occasionally copy these files to new drives. Or use LTO tape, which is also reasonably inexpensive. -perry

Have you priced it recently? Scanning is not what it cost 10 or even 5 years ago.

If you scan a Super 8 film at 480 and view it on an HD screen, you're blowing that image up 4x from the original (scan) size. You are introducing artifacts when you do this. The scaling algorithm has to make up image where there was no image before. If you scan the film to HD, the same film will look substantially better than the 480 version. If you scan at 2k, 4k, 8k, whatever, and you scale down, it will look substantially better than the 480 version. Try this sometime. It's a simple formula: If you view the 480 scan on an NTSC screen it's going to look good. If you view the HD scan on on HD screen it's going to look good. if you view the 480 scan on an HD screen it's going to look soft. If you view it on a 4k screen, it's going to be incredibly soft. But again, it all comes back to the erroneous comparison between digital resolution (x by y pixel counts) and optical resolution. Trying to assign a pixel count to a film gauge basically makes no sense when you factor in all the viewing variables (screen resolutions, projection sizes, etc) and all of the variables that went into making the film (lens quality, camera quality, operator skill, exposure settings, etc).

I would point out once again that there is a difference between digital resolution and optical resolution. The question should not be "is a higher resolution scan getting me more information from the film frame?" Instead the question of digital resolution (the size of your output file) should be "what do I need?" Upscaling is never good and should be avoided. There's nothing inherently wrong with 3656 as a scan size. But if someone needs it to be 4096, they will have to scale it up to that size, and that's going to mean the image will be slightly softer. It's never a bad thing to scan larger than you need, because you don't have this same effect when you downsample (unless the downsample factor is very small, then you might see some artifacting). This is why modern film scanners allow you to scan the film directly to the size you want (up to the limits of the sensor) without having to scale the image up. Treating digital resolution (The number of pixels in the image) with optical resolution (the ability of an optical system - lens, film, camera, operator) as if they're the same doesn't make sense because they're two different things. Yes, there are limits to what a given film stock, lens and camera combination can capture. But if you scan a film at a lower res than you need, and then scale it up, you're making it worse by softening it. Why do that?

Our Northlight works like this - Academy is 3656, Super is 4096 (at 4k. It can scan up to 6k). The ScanStation, and I presume the Xena, as well as most modern scanners, have more flexibility. On our ScanStation, the sensor itself is about 5.1k, but it's always overscanning so that it can do optical pin registration before writing the files to disk. That means your actual frame area is 4k and that lets the operator specify the amount of overscan to dial in exactly what the client wants.

Delivery format should be based on what's required. We typically deliver files in 4-5 different formats (usually some kind of uncompressed, ProRes or Avid DNxHR, and in different resolutions like 4k, HD, etc -- all depending on what the client requires). There's no one-size fits all delivery format, it should be based on what the next person in the post pipeline needs. If you're working in DPX at this point I wouldn't even worry too much about it, since there will always be a way to make it when you're done. If I had to choose a pretty universally acceptable containerized format, it'd most likely be ProRes, either 4444 or 422 HQ. Not sure what you mean - 16bit files have less software support than 10bit, since 10bit files have been the industry standard for a long time and are much more economical in terms of file size and convenience. 16bit really is a pain to work with, and a lot of applications don't handle it. Those that do, require massive amounts of disk space and speed to do so... Not necessarily, but usually, at least when you're talking about DPX. You can have monochrome and YUV DPX files too...

H.264 is only suitable for final delivery. I wouldn't use it for editing, or frankly anywhere in the post production pipeline with the exception of client approval files. While your files are smaller, that size comes at a hefty price - lots of compression (intra-frame), compromised color space, and an inter-frame compression scheme that makes editing pretty funky. If you need a file format that's easy to work with, make ProRes proxy files from your DPX sequences. In most cases, that will be good enough for final delivery (if you're in the HQ family of ProRes codecs), but if not, you could always relink the media later with your DPX files, assuming the software you're using supports that format. TIFF is not widely used in the film/video world. Some archives like it, but DPX is pretty much the standard. That said, working with 16bit DPX or TIFF files is madness. The files are tremendous and if you're coming from negative, you're not gaining anything over 10bit log. Those 16bit files are linear, both the TIFF and DPX. Stick with 10bit log DPX if you want an uncompressed RGB format, and you'll be fine. -perry

Theoretically, it would probably work. But you're almost certainly going to damage your negative and you're probably not going to get a very good transfer this way. Negative isn't meant to be projected. It's more delicate than reversal or print film, and the slightest dust on it will be immediately apparent on the resulting transfer. You shouldn't even unspool your negative when you get it back from the lab, or you're going to pick up dust and potential scratches. Seriously - film is a dust magnet. The film should go from the lab directly to the transfer system for best results. Look around, there are deals to be had for scanning on proper hardware that won't damage your film and will get you a nice image. Most places offer student discounts as well, including us. -perry

The ScanStation can handle mag audio at 18 or 24fps. Sound quality is a function of the camera, the condition of the film and the fact that the mag stripe on these small gauges is about 1/4 the size of the tape used in cassette tapes. That is, there's very little tape there, and the audio quality in this format was always substantially worse than most other magnetic tape formats, including cassettes. That said, it's possible to get reasonable sound off of them, even on very old film. Here's some Regular 8 film with a post-striped mag track (not Super 8, this is earlier - probably from the 1960s) that we scanned recently: Obviously the sound track isn't fantastic, but given that it's more than 50 years old and it's less than 1/8" wide, I'd say not bad.

I don't know how wide the Spirit can go, maybe Rob Houllahan does (he's got one)? With many modern scanners, the camera/film positioning can be varied. Older units had fixed camera positions, like our Northlight. So the framing is what it is (you can only widen it by physically widening the gate, which means machining it to be larger, and even then, there are limits. On a scanner like our Lasergraphics, the scanner is always scanning the film pretty much from edge to edge, and then cropping/scaling downwards. So you can do a very large overscan, or a small one, depending on what the job requires. -perry

FF = Full Frame (as in, not matted to a widescreen projection aspect ratio; very common) I/N probably means Internegative. A and B Wind refers to the orientation of the emulsion Leader shouldn't be what you're looking at. It's often re-used and reprinted by the lab and is rarely as clean as the film itself. Dust and scratches are baked into subsequent printings of standard leaders, kind of like multi-generation photocopies. no cleaning or wet gate will deal with that, because they're printed-in scratches, not actual scratches in the film. That said, wet gate is not a panacea. It's good for some things in specific situations, as described above. But it won't deal with very deep scratches. it primarily does its thing on light scratches, and only on the base side of the film.

We don't do restoration on the flat files - if you do, then when you color correct you might expose defects in the restoration fixes that weren't visible in the flat scan. Restoration should come last, after you've finalized all your color correction. You *can* do it, but you'll probably have to go back after grading to re-do stuff, so I don't recommend it.

As others have mentioned, wet gate is only useful if you're dealing with base scratches *and* the scanner uses a collimated light source. Modern scanners with diffuse LED light sources perform the same function as a wet gate, because the light is bouncing all over the place and doesn't refract in base scratches in the same way a focused light source would. What kind of scanner was used, just out of curiosity? Are you scanning original negatives, or an intermediate? If it's an intermediate, it's possible the dust was on the original neg, and then transferred to the intermediate. Thus, it's baked in and is part of the picture now. No amount of cleaning would take that off. If it's the original neg and an ultrasonic cleaning didn't get it, then digital is the way to go. PFClean will do it, but it's a bit of a nightmare to work with, and is pretty crash prone. If you only have a few spots here and there, you might be able to do it in Resolve, using the built-in dustbusting tools. All manual, but they do work. I wouldn't do a super dusty film that way, but it's free, and the only caveat is that you need to be working from a DPX sequence to use those tools. It won't work on Quicktime files or other containerized media. Regarding the question about Overscanning - that's more of a personal preference thing. If you're using a pin-registered (optically or mechanically) scanner, you're going to get a very stable image. If you're not, the film may bob or weave a bit in the gate. If you want to stabilize it, having the frame lines and perfs visible can help you to do that in post, by giving you a consistent reference point. One thing to bear in mind with overscanning, though, is that if you get a 2k scan that's overscanned, you should ask the lab to make sure they give you a slightly bigger scan, so that your frame area is still 2k. If not, it'll be slightly smaller. In most cases this doesn't really matter much, but if you need to have 2k or 4k, you will probably want to scan at 2.3k or 4.3k, respectively (or something around that size, depending on the amount of overscan you want). -perry

This camp is confused - it's mixing up optical resolution and digital resolution. They are different things, with different meanings entirely. Optical resolution is about how much detail can be resolved (sharply represented) on the film. It's a function of the camera's transport, the quality of the lens, the focus of said lens, and the film stock being used. It's typically measured using line pairs in a test pattern. As line pairs get closer together, eventually they will appear to merge together. This is your optical resolution limit. Digital resolution is two numbers: X and Y: Your horizontal and vertical pixel dimensions. Nothing more. That's it. If you plan to project it at 4k, or show it on some other 4k digital media, the only logical option is to scan at that resolution (or higher, though that's not so easy to find), so that you avoid digitally scaling the image up. Whenever you scale an image up, you lose quality. You are making up image data that was not there before, and the upscale, no matter how good the algorithm, will always be softer than the same film scanned directly to that higher resolution. It's never really a problem to scale an image down, it'll look as sharp (or in some cases sharper) than the high res scan.

I suspect this was the case.

That's correct - the color mask is removed when scanning so you get a positive image, no orange mask. Some scanners only do DPX, some can scan directly to other formats as well (such as ProRes 4444), which can be easier to work with if you're not set up with super-fast RAIDs needed for 4k DPX. -perry

If you look at a negative, the image is reversed (blacks are white, white is black, and in the case of color, there is an overall orange cast to the film. If you print this to a CRI, which is reversal film (a positive film stock), you get what looks like a duplicate of the negative, for the most part: it's orange, the image is inverted so white is black and black is white. It was used as an intermediate to avoid beating up the camera original negatives in repeated printings. Pretty common format in the 70s and 80s. However, it can fade, and our experience has been hit or miss. On one film we scanned recently, the film elements we were given consisted of two complete 5-reel CRIs on 35mm. They were made at different labs and stored in different locations for quite some time. One is much more faded than the other, and the same scanning parameters give drastically different results. Maybe. Depends on the extent of the fading. The only way to know for sure is to run some scan tests to take a look at what you have. And remember, for older films it's not uncommon for the reels that originated at different labs to get mixed together, so it may be that one reel looks fine and another doesn't because at some point they were independent of one another and have their own separate issues. Not necessarily. Quality of processing, storage conditions, how many times the film was used to make prints -- all that stuff plays into fading. A CRI is ok, certainly better than a print, but not as good as the original neg. You're at least one generation away from the original with a CRI, so it will be slightly softer, and it may have more damage from having been printed. Then again, it may not be. There's really no hard and fast rule - you want to get as close to the original as you can, but if you have A/B roll negative, you're typically looking at a lot more work on the conforming/grading side but it should give you the sharpest results. A CRI is generally going to be easier to color correct because it will already have been timed by the lab when it was struck. Or at least, that's the theory. In reality, even CRIs may still need extensive scene by scene color correction. Send a message to Tim Tyler, and he'll get it straightened out. -perry

Depends on the scanner. Speed really isn't the issue as much as tension. We can run pretty delicate film on our scanner at 30FPS with no problems - cut neg, shrunken film, film with splices made of bandaids (not kidding. it has happened). to the OP: it's also possible that it's a CRI, which is actually a positive film, but with an image that looks like a negative (just to confuse matters). It's a duplicate negative, basically. CRIs went out of fashion a while back but were pretty popular in the 70s/80s. Unfortunately, they have their own problems and tend to be less stable than camera originals, so they're more susceptible to fading.

Angle of incidence = angle of reflection. So, make sure your light is angled such that it won't reflect back into the lens. The lenticules make that harder, because it's not a flat surface, but it should be doable, especially if you light from one of the long ends of the lenticules. I'd start by lighting from where the camera is, at a lowish angle, away from the lens. If you're shooting this in a copystand type of arrangement, then it should be even easier. Also, a polarizing filter should help cut the reflection down if that doesn't work.