Perry Paolantonio

This notion of "film is X resolution" is something I've been chewing on for some time. I've come to the conclusion that tying a resolution to a film gauge is totally bogus. There are a few issues at play here: 1) Film is analog. There are no pixels, so assigning a pixel value to the film doesn't make any sense. Apples and Oranges, basically. Because the grain on the film is what makes up the image, more pixels sampling that grain means more sharply resolved grain, means a truer representation of the image that's on the film. This is especially the case when projected large. Would you rather capture your audio at 22kHz or 96kHz? it's the same idea. Does it mean you're going to get a sharper image if you scan at 4k vs 2k? not necessarily. Factors like camera optics and film stock are what will determine the sharpness of the image. But a higher resolution scan does mean that you're going to be starting from a better place in terms of your digital pipeline, though, because you're getting a better digital representation of the film that way. 2) If you scan a film at 2k and view it at 2k, and you scan the same film at 4k and view it at 4k will you see a difference? If you're the correct distance from the screen for the room you're in, you shouldn't. But if you're close to the screen it's a totally different story. Given that most people want monstrous screens in their homes, this is an actual scenario that happens all the time. Just look at HD on an 80" screen from 6 feet away. It's pretty terrible. Step back 10 feet and it looks like HD again. More pixel density means better clarity when viewing from close up. 3) Saying an nth generation print is equivalent to a specific reduction in digital resolution again doesn't make any sense. Is there generation loss? Of course. But to equate it to a resolution like 2k or 2.5k is pretty arbitrary. There are too many factors involved to make such a blanket statement, such as the sharpness of the original film and the fineness of the grain in that film, and the fineness of the grain in the intermediate and print stocks. The quality of the lab work matters too. And if there was a digital intermediate done at 2k, with a filmout, then you've hobbled the resulting print somewhat due to the lower resolution. Any intermediate format should be higher resolution or higher quality (optically that means finer grained than the OCN, digitally it means more pixels) than the source, so as not to reduce the quality of the image. This applies to the audio world too, and to digital still photo work for print, and for a host of other things where the original is being manipulated a lot before being output to another format. 4) If one wants to show a film at 4k and one scans that film at 2k, then the only way to get it to 4k is to scale it up. This is a process that requires creating something that wasn't there before (2k to 4k means 4x the amount of data). Sure, 2k to 4k will look better than SD to HD, but you're still going to see marked softness, no matter how good the scaling algorithm is. Why not just scan at the higher resolution and scale down if you need to (no ill effects going in that direction), and have that 4k version in your back pocket for when you need a 4k master? Number of pixels is only one factor here, and it is overblown somewhat, partly because it's used by the industry as a shorthand for "quality." Dynamic range, color reproduction, etc are arguably more important. But pixel count is actually an important measure of quality in many scenarios, and it has to be factored in. Considering the future of the project after the immediate needs is important, and in most cases the logical conclusion to be drawn is that you're going to get better results with more pixels in the mix... -perry

Another vote for the ACL here. It's more comfortable than the NPR for handheld, as it's essentially a kind of prototype for what Aaton would eventually make (same engineers). Ergonomically speaking, it's a very similar design, meant to be comfortable on the shoulder. Quick-release mags, and the lens mounts are super flexible. C-mount is built in, and there's a larger screw-ring around that for holding a variety of adapters for PL, Arri, Cannon, Nikon, Arri B. It's quiet and they can be had quite cheaply. They seem to sell for under $2000 fairly regularly, usually with a case and a few mags. You definitely want an ACL II or a "1.5" (which is basically an ACL 1 with a heavy-duty motor and a couple other minor features - important since you can pull a 400' reel with that motor). Get French-made mags if you can. they're better. Super 16 is nice, but in my opinion a little overrated these days. Since *most* people are not blowing up to 35mm anymore, and because modern film stocks and scanners are so much better what was available 20, 30 years ago, you can shoot on a normal 16mm camera and still get a widescreen scan that looks great. You're not gaining a whole lot from that extra bit of real estate on the film (you're getting something, just not enough to be worth it, IMHO), like you were when you needed to avoid golfball sized grain on a blowup. Super16 cameras are more expensive, but more importantly, everyone wants the lenses for their digital cameras so the market for good used glass is kind of ridiculous right now.

A flat scan of a timed print should have elevated black levels and reduced white levels, as well as lower contrast overall. If the scanner is properly calibrated, the bulk of what you need to do in post is to bring black down to black and white up to white. The point of a flat scan is to not do any grading during the scan process. It's about trying to capture the image that's on the film, in digital form, without permanently baking in color correction choices like you would in a traditional telecine transfer. The whole idea is that these days you can do that in a second pass in Resolve or most edit systems, so the scan itself is about making sure you retain that flexibility for later color correction.

We scan directly to ProRes 422 HQ and 4444 HQ (XQ was added recently, but I haven't had a chance to test it out since none of our macs in the office are new enough). ProRes works fine on Windows as long as you have Quicktime installed and a reasonably quick system. I've played back ProRes 4444 HQ on a Windows machine in the Quicktime player on an i5 4-core with 8GB RAM with no issues. Obviously faster is better. Most windows editing tools will work with it. We also scan to DPX or TIFF, but they're massive and clunky and unless you really need them for some reason, ProRes is a lot easier in most respects (Smaller files, quicker copy times, easier playback, etc) -perry

That sure looks like a tap issue to me...

That's what I was thinking it was, too.

While DPX files have some metadata fields for the frame rate, this is often ignored by many applications. It doesn't really matter though, since DPX is just a folder full of images and every appliction I've ever used that works with DPX has some provision for specifying the frame rate for playback. For what it's worth though, you're going to have a hell of a time working with files at 18fps, because most software doesn't support that frame rate. You could work with it at 24, which would be supported by more applications, and then when you're done, render out your finished edit to DPX. then you have a frame rate agnostic file set. From there you can make whatever format you want, at 18fps without motion artifacts, in something like a Quicktime or H.264 file. 18fps will play back fine on computers, but not so much on televisions or anything tied to broadcast standards, without pulling it up to 24fps first.

If the quadrant you're seeing is a sharp, easily defined line, then odds are it's the sensor. Some sensors break the image into quadrants, and aligning them can be tricky. It's typically something that's done as part of the scanner calibration, at the factory when it's purchased, or on the user end when the machine is used. If the dark quadrant isn't clearly defined, then it could be something else - something in the scanner's gate, or on the lens, or even on the light source. Can you post a couple high res frames?

If you transfer the film to 720p, your actual image area in the scan is 960x720, more or less. If you were to think of the scan in terms of megapixels, that's about .6MP -- if you were to scan to 1080p, your image area would be about 1.5MP. If you were to scan to 2k, which is only slightly larger than the 1080p HD size (204xx1556 vs 1920x1080), you're getting more than double the resolution of a 1080p scan, and about 5x the resolution of a 720p scan. Even if you only ever want it at 720p, you're going to get a better image by scanning larger (2k, for example) and then scaling down. Also, when you scan a 4:3 image to a 16:9 format, the operator of the scanner has to make the call about how it's cropped. Let's say you have a hair in the gate, or you shot on multiple formats and the gate position varied reel to reel - the operator of the scanner would need to zoom in a bit more than you may want, in order to make sure you get clean edges. By scanning at 2k, and doing a full aperture or even slightly overscanned image, you put that creative control back in your hands, and can reposition or crop as you see fit. It's a minor detail, but it's something that comes up a lot, especially with footage shot on multiple cameras where the gates will often vary in position a bit. Lastly, if you ever wanted a 1080p or higher version, you'd need to scale your 720p transfer up, which is never desirable. Always better to scale down, if you have to scale at all.

Yeah, as long as the frame mapping is 1:1, the end result would be the same, but with an extra step involved, assuming that ultimately you want it to be the correct speed within a 25fps container.

In a word, don't. Have it transferred at 18fps, and then for the material you want to edit, pull up to your target frame rate. If the question is, as it seems, about how to transfer directly to 25fps, I wouldn't recommend that. We're working on a massive collection of 16mm home movies right now, shot at 16fps over 35 years. It's all being transferred to 16fps files. Once that's done, there's a 1:1 mapping of the film to a digital file, with no baked-in interpolation to worry about. For viewing on a computer, this is ideal. If the client wants to make a DVD or Blu-ray, he understands that the files will need to be pulled up to a standard broadcast frame rate to do so. Also - why a 16:9 aspect ratio for Super 8 (unless it's Max8)? At minimum, I'd recommend 2k, because that gives you a scan that matches the aspect ratio of the film, and is large enough that if you wanted to crop a 16:9 image out of it, you have a bit of compositional wiggle room. -perry

Er, not everyone thinks it's "clearer, better looking." Frankly I find high frame rate footage to be unwatchably weird looking.

I think that was just a typo. It's 23.976.

Latest update from Tangent that i saw was that they haven't finalized deals with resellers yet. I'm sure the usual suspects will have it - B&H and the like. It's meant to be entry level, so I'd expect it to come in at less than half the cost of their full-featured trackball panel, which does a lot more than the Ripple. Looks like a nice choice though. They say it's shipping in April and they'll be demoing it at NAB.

I don't have any experience with the Avid panel myself, but people like them. Also look at Tangent's Element panels, which are modular, so you can add them as you need to expand. They're more expensive up front, but very nicely built. They're also coming out with a new panel, the Ripple, in April. It's entry level and less expensive than the Element, but it gives you three trackballs and three sets of rings, which covers a lot of what you'd do with a panel. I use a JLCooper Eclipse with Resolve 11, and I love it. Very responsive, most functions we need to deal with are mapped to the panel, and it's nicely laid out. Grading with a panel is a completely different experience than using the mouse. Completely. You have no idea until you do it, how much of a pain it is to do this kind of work with the usual interfaces. It's absolutely worth getting one if you're going to do any serious grading.

Um, unless you're dealing with lots of high bandwidth material. Like we do. Every day. I don't find Resolve to be nearly as onerous as some software we use, such as PFClean, which is totally overwrought in its project management. We use Resolve a lot like we used to use FCP - make a quick project, drop a file in, render it out. It's one of the quickest ways to get a DPX sequence into Quicktime that I'm aware of.

Um, we use ProRes all the time in Resolve on Windows. You can't write to it out of the box from most software, but it plays back just fine. I'm talking 2k files, in 4444, 4k is a bit dicier on our system, but that's largely because of the spec of our machine. When we upgraded from the old hardware, ProRes 4444 playback improved dramatically. It's not a format we use daily (we mostly do DPX), but ProRes definitely is not incompatible with Windows. On the file creation side, our Lasergraphics scanner can create 2k ProRes 4444 HQ or XQ files faster than real time (30fps), or 4k files at 15fps (and that speed limit is not a function of ProRes, it's of the sensor, which is limited to 15fps in 4k mode). The ScanStation's control software runs on Windows 7, and the ProRes file creation is done in software, NOT in the scanner itself. The output file format is created after all GPU processing is done (scaling, color correction, etc), and before the file is written to disk. We have not seen any incompatibilities with the ProRes files made from our scanner. They open up perfectly in Mac-based software and in Windows applications that support Quicktime, and they are completely compliant. No gamma shifts, none of the stuff that you see if you use something like ffmpeg and don't know what you're doing... -perry

I'm fairly certain the cleaning solvents and printer plastic won't be the best of friends! But really, each roller is just a shaft with a couple nice ball bearings inside a tube that fits the PTR roller. It's kind of amazing they're charging that much money. I could see a few hundred bucks, sure.

First, I wouldn't recommend scanning Super 8 to HD unless your film was shot with a modified Max8 camera. Normal super 8 is basically 4:3, but HD is always 16:9. So for an HD scan you get an image area (once pillarboxed) of about 1440x1080. If you do a 2k scan you get just over double the resolution, in a file that matches the aspect ratio of the film. You can still make an HD file from this, but you have better flexibility if you want to crop it to 16:9 full frame because you're starting with a file that's bigger than 1920x1080. Second, Negative is more delicate than reversal. Also, even the slightest dust on the film will be much more apparent with neg, because it shows up as white when the image is inverted. Third, every lab is different in terms of how and why they charge what they do. Minimums are usually there because setup takes time, and doing a setup for one reel can mean that you wind up losing money. Our scanner takes a grand total of 30 seconds to thread up and load, and it scans at 30fps, so we can complete the scan quickly. As such, we don't charge minimums - lots of our clients are students who bring us one or two rolls at a time. I take that back- the minimum is one roll, so effectively, no minimum unless you're dealing with a short end or something. We use a Lasergraphics Scanstation archival scanner for 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm up to 5k. If the film has no head or tail leader (you should ask your processing lab to do this by requesting that they prep and clean for video transfer - best to do it in the lab to minimize dust exposure), we charge a nominal setup fee to add that. We need at least 10' of leader on each end of the film to thread up the scanner. -perry

Whoa. That's nuts.

I would assume the exact opposite. Flat scans will freak out people who don't know why they're getting something that looks like that. My guess is that it'll be the digital equivalent of a one-light workprint. But then, we're all guessing here...

I think I used to run that Lipsner when you guys were on Babcock St and I worked there! Heard back from Kodak this morning. Again, no pricing. I don't think they've figured it out yet. Interestingly, the guy who emailed me is from their UK office, so I'm thinking this thing might have been made there? "we are going to supply the solvent in 5 litre quantities in Europe. We are still outlining our sales strategy for US but will come back to you shortly." -perry

Yeah, I think that's this: http://www.flashscan8.us/ptr-based-benchtop-film-cleaner/ Seems pretty steep for 4 sets of ball bearing hubs on rods... I've got to think the PTRs themselves are less expensive than kodak, but I haven't been able to get pricing from him.

I've seen the results of that process and it's not pretty. It looked like standard issue degrain/regrain. Maybe it's not, but the end result looked like that. Any grain removal/replacement is a bad idea, in my opinion. That's not the way to clean up film, unless you really don't care about image quality and really hate seeing any dust on the image. There are much better ways to do a clean scan. -perry

I'm talking about just the PTRs themselves - not the whole machine. It looks like they sell a couple cleaning systems: one cleaning machine specific to small gauge film, and one that uses 4 PTRs in between a pair of rewinds. The PTR rollers are standardized, so they should fit any machine that takes them, and they sell 1.5 and 3" rollers. I can't imagine 4 rollers costing that much, especially when they say they're only good for 3-4 months. I've heard similar things about Kodak's, but we've used them for years on end. With proper care they last a really long time. I don't believe the short lifespan unless these are really terrible. They're made by FXSYS, which I know nothing about, other than that they either bought the IP or are formerly SanLabs people. SanLabs made a pretty cool film cleaning system called the Prista, which was much more compact than Lipsner Smith cleaners - I think it was actually a little bigger than one of those small refrigerators. Hard to come by though - not a lot of them out there.