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Perry Paolantonio

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Everything posted by Perry Paolantonio

  1. Perry Paolantonio
    Andreis, "Non-profit" (at least in the US) has a legal meaning - that the entity doesn't exist for the purpose of making a profit. It exists (in this case) to promote filmmaking. But that doesn't mean that it won't charge enough to cover its costs, and that includes employees, rent, chemistry, equipment, etc. I own a for-profit scanning/grading/restoration business about 4 hours drive north of New York. I honestly don't see this lab as a threat, even if they're offering scanning services. There are plenty of facilities like ours (Cinelab is one) that charge reasonable rates and offer a broader depth of services than what Mono No Aware is looking to do and people will use those professional facilities when they realize they've outgrown MNA. Here, at least, even the film schools are shooting less film these days. The school I went to here in Boston still does some. We just had a class from my alma mater in the office last week to scan some film and get a color correction demo, and in talking with the students, most were really interested in shooting film but were doing a lot of their work digitally simply due to time and budget constraints. Anything that gets more people into film will help for-profit businesses and professional services. What Mono No Aware's aim is, from what I can tell, is to do just that. Not to replace the services offered by professional labs. At least, that's how it looks from here. -perry
  2. Perry Paolantonio
    We almost always recommend scanning from elements as close to the original as possible. You should get a sharper image that way because you're skipping generational loss. That being said, it's often more work to do a scan from the original neg, because things like optical effects might need to be recreated, color correction will almost certainly be shot by shot, and you're more likely to pick up annoying white dust specs when working off of negative. The original lab notes and timing info may be useful for determining general color correction settings, or for figuring out where there should be fades, for example. but the actual numbers for the printer lights are probably useless as they would have been specific to the lab (and possibly even the printer) that they were run through. The cost/benefit analysis is something that only you can determine. I would do as David suggests and get a comparison of the same shot from both elements and see what looks best. It's going to be more work to recreate things, but it's not that hard, and you may find that you get a much better end result because you're working from something closer to the camera original. -perry
  3. Perry Paolantonio
    The bicycle example is the only one I could draw on from my own experience. I will say (though I can't name the manufacturer) that these really are among the highest end bikes one can buy and the tolerances are down to the .1mm range. I agree with the idea that we don't need a new camera. I never said otherwise - with so many great cameras out there for short money (arri, aaton, eclair), why on earth would one need a new 16mm camera? What I'm taking issue with is Tyler's insistence that it's impossible to do it in China. That is a gross generalization. Clearly the Chinese are not incapable of building precision parts. Are they going to go out on their own and build a 16mm camera? Not likely, because there is no real market for it. But neither is anyone else, of course. My problem is with the insistence that they're not capable of doing the work, which I think is a pretty bold thing to insist is true, when talking about a country of nearly 1.5 billion people. Is there a factory that make all the components needed under one roof? Not likely. (Arri didn't do this either, by Tyler's own admission earlier in this tread) But to say that the only thing China can make is plastic and electronics? I mean, they have satellites, rockets, nuclear reactors and bombs, but are incapable of producing a lowly 16mm camera? My issue is more with the racism than anything else.
  4. Perry Paolantonio
    I'm not talking about the kind of bike you'd buy at Wal-mart. I'm talking about bikes that are as finely tuned as any high end mechanical film transport would be. Maybe the pieces aren't as small, but it's still a machine that has to perform well under a variety of situations, with high precision, and there's no tolerance for error when you're spending as much on a bike as you would on a small car. I'm not talking about large factories making mass produced parts. I'm talking about small custom manufacturers making small custom quantities for other small custom manufacturers. This exists. My friend goes to China and Hong Kong every few months to meet with these manufacturers. If it wasn't cost effective, do you think they'd keep doing it? It costs a lot of money to send two people from the US to China for a week, several times a year. That means they're saving enough money by doing some of the work there, that it makes economic sense. And they wouldn't do it if the parts they were getting were inferior. Sigh, here we go with the argument fallacies again. In this case, an appeal to ignorance. I'm not in the manufacturing business, so I can't say who would be able to do this, if anyone. Could there be one? Maybe. I don't know. And I'm betting you don't either. China is a big place. With a *lot* of people and a lot of manufacturing. You say you've tried to have stuff built there, but I mean - are you coming from a manufacturing background? Did you try a few vendors via email and then give up? From everything I know about doing business in Asia (admittedly not much), it's much more of a face-to-face culture than we have here, even with the internet making it easier to hook up customers to vendors. If you're doing something seriously and demand precision, you'd better be prepared to go there and inspect and meet the people who will be doing the work in person. Is that what you did? Sorry to come across as a troll here, but you're speaking in these broad generalizations ("China is only good at making plastic and electronics") that are not only ludicrous, but they're bordering on racism.
  5. Perry Paolantonio
    These are small batches. I'm not talking about a bike manufacturer that turns out hundreds of units per day. More like hundreds per year. Also, these are custom frames. Each one is a bit different. The geometry of every frame varies according to the needs, body size, shape and weight of the rider.
  6. Perry Paolantonio
    Wow. That's quite a generalization. One example off the top of my head: a lot of high end bike parts are made there. I'm friends with the director of operations for a US based custom bike manufacturer that outsources some of its precision parts to China. We're talking manufacturing with tolerances within a tenth of a millimeter, that have to fit the rest of the parts when they get shipped back here. They've been using Chinese manufacturers for years for this. I'm not talking about cheap bikes either - these are frames (no wheels, no components) that start at $5000-$8000, and are used by elite racers.
  7. Perry Paolantonio
    They came out of nowhere, and within about a year, turned that into a deal for Kodak. I'm sure they were paid well for what they did for Kodak.
  8. Perry Paolantonio
    Please re-read my post. If that's too much effort, here's the recap: They made a capable camera that produces really nice images. They got people excited. They parlayed that into a deal with kodak where they designed the guts of a camera that Kodak is likely to sell a lot of. = Success Oh, wait. That's exactly what I wrote the first time.
  9. Perry Paolantonio
    I don't see how you can call that a failure. 1) It produces some pretty stunning Super 8 footage 2) It generated a lot of excitement about Super 8 that led to... 3) Logmar designed the guts of Kodak's new camera, for which I would imagine they did pretty well for themselves. I'd say they played that pretty masterfully, actually. -perry
  10. Perry Paolantonio
    The Northlight is a bit better in terms of image quality. The XE has the same basic sensor as the northlight, but both are painfully slow to use. Takes about a week to scan a feature at 4k on our Northlight. I think the Imagica is a bit faster than that. If something goes wrong on the Imagica you have to deal with RTI, and good luck with that. I assume you're talking about the one on ebay that's been listed for the past 3 years? Down to about $16k now. It's because when it comes down to it, they're so slow and funky to operate that it's often not worth it.
  11. 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...
  12. Perry Paolantonio
    The proportions of that box are interesting - very much like S8 Sound carts, which were more vertical than the standard square silent carts.
  13. Perry Paolantonio
    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.
  14. Perry Paolantonio
    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.
  15. Perry Paolantonio
    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.
  16. Perry Paolantonio
    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.
  17. Perry Paolantonio
    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
  18. Perry Paolantonio
    Have you priced it recently? Scanning is not what it cost 10 or even 5 years ago.
  19. Perry Paolantonio
    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).
  20. Perry Paolantonio
    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?
  21. Perry Paolantonio
    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.
  22. Perry Paolantonio
    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...
  23. Perry Paolantonio
    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
  24. Perry Paolantonio
    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
  25. Perry Paolantonio
    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.
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