Perry Paolantonio

A feature can be done, but it's a lot more expensive now than it used to be. We scanned and restored a Super 8 zombie film last year. It was shot in the 1980s, but they went back and did a 2k scan and restoration. It looks really good considering it's Super 8. Of course, it's not a practical format for long form work, nor is it cost-effective. Better off shooting 16, or if you can get your hands on a camera, 2-perf 35mm. -perry

MPEG files don't store each frame as a complete frame. This is a big part of how they're able to be so much smaller than a frame-based file format like ProRes or Uncompressed. Basically, the footage is broken up into Groups Of Pictures (GOPs), which consist of a complete frame, then intermediate frames that tell the decoder what has changed since the last complete frame. Sometimes the structure uses fixed GOP sizes, sometimes it's variable. There are also intermediate frames that are pretty much complete frames, but don't sit on the boundary between GOPs (but they're there to deal with big changes in the image, such as scene changes. In any case, you can only make a non-destructive cut at the boundary between GOPs. If you need to cut at a different frame, then the GOP containing that frame has to be split into two GOPs, with a new boundary placed at that frame. That requires re-encoding the picture data for up to a couple seconds worth of footage. This is a file format that was never designed to be edited. It was meant for final presentation. What the guy from MP4Tools was telling you is basically the same thing I'm saying.

That's a late-1990s era telecine. Pretty good for its day, but way outdated by todays standards. Any machine that's designed to output to video, that is, a telecine, is going to have to either pull up or speed up your 16fps film. There's no way around that because it's inherently tied to the output side, which requires that the signal conform to broadcast standards. Of course, it could be rebuilt - the people who make the Xena scanner sell kits for this, but it's not very common. The other scanner, the Nikon, must be custom built. Nikon never made a motion picture scanner as far as I'm aware. It's probably an Oxberry or similar optical printer, with a scanner on it in place of a film camera. Those are fairly common, very slow, but can be high quality. It all depends on the specs of the sensor or scanner. There's nothing inherently wrong with that type of scanner - I'm rebuilding an ancient Imagica scanner in my spare time, using the transport and mechanicals but replacing the entire lighting and imaging system with much more modern hardware that's a hell of a lot faster (but still slow) and much more capable. But a lot depends on how it was done and the quality of the optics and sensor. The lens in my Imagica alone sells for like $3500 on the used market (a 95mm Nikkor printing lens), and is worth more than I paid for the whole scanner. Optics and sensors matter, so on any custom scanner, it'd be important to know that it's all high quality. MP4Tools is just cutting an MPEG file (AVC is MPEG4), which you can do with command line file manipulation tools if you know what you're doing. But it has to be done at the boundary between GOPs, which is less than ideal. If it's able to cut at any arbitrary frame, then it's re-encoding that GOP where the cut is. That's just the nature of that type of file, and it's one of the reasons those types of files shouldn't be edited directly, but should be converted to something like ProRes or DNxHD or some other intermediate frame-based file format for editing. If you cut a ProRes file in a tool such as Final Cut Pro, and then export out to exactly the same file format, it's doing the edit non-destructively, just copying the bits from one file into another with no recompression. You're generating another file, but it's not particularly big. Other tools, even on Windows, can do this as well. I thought you were talking about cropping the frame - there is no format where you could do a crop "in-place" without making a new file or recompressing, other than with image sequences, and even then your software has to support it. I doubt most tools that give you much of a GUI will do this, but there are definitely command line tools such as GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick that can do it.

Whoever is doing the scan should ask what you want. If they're using old equipment (limited to broadcast standard frame rates such as 25 and 29.97) you would have no choice but to get the repeat frames you're seeing, unless you wanted the film run much faster than it should be (that is, running your 16fps film through the machine at 25 or 29.97fps). Our scanner, like the Xena I believe, can scan the film at its native frame rate to a container format like Quicktime or AVI. With those formats, as long as you're not interpolating new frames or doubling frames to pull it up to a higher frame rate, changing the frame rate of the film is a simple matter of bringing into software that can do that (such as Adobe After Effects, among many others), and telling it what frame rate to treat the file as. If, however, the pullup was done in the scan, it's harder to back out of that. It can be done with AVISynth scripts, but it's kind of a pain. What film scanner did they use? If it's designed to go to a video format, you should move along to a service that can scan it frame by frame. With any container format, you would read from one file and write to another. With an image sequence, you could theoretically read from one file and then write back to that file, but why would you want to do that since what you're doing is destructive. Better to keep the full version of the film around, just in case, and do your cropping upon export to another copy. That way you have both. Hard drives are cheap! There's no way to know the exact frame rate of the film by looking at it. There's no metadata in the film to tell you, and you can only go by the way it looks, or what the client says. As a general rule though, it's usually a safe assumption that footage shot by the same person would have been shot at the same frame rate. Otherwise they'd have to constantly fiddle with playback speed on their projector for each reel. We typically assume 16fps for old 16mm, 18fps for 8mm and Super 8. If it was shot by a professional, 24 is usually a good guess (or 25 outside North America, Japan and Brazil). Regardless, it can be changed, whether it's an image sequence or a container format, as long as each frame of film is in its own frame in the scan. The size of the sprocket holes has no relationship to the frame rate. With Super8 for example, you could shoot 18 or 24 as standard speeds. most people did 18 for home movies because you got more running time. But it's the same film either way. The smallest diameter is typically for Regular 8 film. Super 8 uses a larger diameter. Even though the film is identical in width, the sprocket size and placement are different. On the ScanStation the hubs are removable and we swap them out depending on the reel type. On other scanners it may use an adapter to fit various reels. I just can't see how it could give quality results without the expertise in colour, software, mechanics, and general R&D that the big boys have. The quality of the camera, the quality of the sensor, the quality of the optics and the precision of the machining all come into play here. I don't have any experience with this scanner so I can't say for sure but it's a tiny little camera in there, which means it's probably a tiny and inexpensive little sensor. The camera that's in our ScanStation, and most of the cameras available for the Xena, cost much more than the entire Retro8 scanner. And that's because they're much higher quality cameras.

You would not want to vary the exposure frame by frame. Our ScanStation can do this as an option, but we never use it. You have to remember that you're not talking about a single image, but thousands of images shown one after another. In that context, variations in exposure from one frame to the next, to compensate for variations in exposure on the film, can result in odd flickering and other artifacts. The correct way to do this is to set an exposure for the film based on the film's base. A Flat scan will get you a scan where black is elevated and white is reduced, and your midtones are low contrast. From this, you can pretty easily color correct it back to the way it should be. It's done this way for flexibility - if you color correct while scanning, you bake that correction in, and in some cases that's irreversible. So the process is two-steps: Scan then Grade. Depends on the scanner. I can only speak for our ScanStation, which uses the perforations as registration points, aligning the frames to a fixed position in the final scan. It is arguably more accurate than a mechanical pin, since it can handle variable levels of shrinkage. Variations of Digital ICE exist on some scanners. None of them can do 8mm, as far as I know. The Lasergraphics Director, for example, has this as an option, but that's for 16mm and 35mm only. We do our restoration work in an additional pass after the scan. It can be done manually or automatically, but the best results are generally obtained with a combination of the two. Bear in mind that motion picture restoration is expensive. The software to do this kind of work starts at about $6000, on the low end. Cropping depends on the scanner, but most can overscan the frame. Ours can overscan almost to the edges of the film. LZW compressed TIFFs are unusual in film scanning. Frankly, TIFFs are unusual in film scanning. We can scan to them, but they're either 8-bit (don't scan to 8 bit) or 16bit (massive and clunky files). A better format is DPX, which was designed for motion picture scanning, is uncompressed, and can be either 10 or 16bit. Or ProRes, which can be 10 or 12 bits, and is much more convenient to work with in editing software. Very much so. It depends somewhat on your ultimate goals, but a modern film scanner that adjusts its optics so that the entire frame fills the sensor (rather than just using a small area of the sensor for smaller gauges) will get you outstanding results. We regularly scan 8mm home movies at 4k. Bear in mind that 4k television is here, and 8k isn't far off. The more you have to scale an image up to fit the larger screen, the worse it will look. So if you scan to HD, you're getting an image area of about 1440x1080. To make that 4k, you have to scale it up 8x, which will dramatically soften the image. If you scan at 4k, you don't do any scaling at all. For lower resolutions, you lose nothing by scaling down. But you *do* want to avoid scaling up because that forces you to make up image data that wasn't there before. Also, DPI has nothing to do with pixels. That's a number that's applicable to the print world, so it shouldn't be confused. The notion that there's a limited amount of data on the film is based on studies done at a time when the available scanners were limited to 4k. It was assumed that 4k worked for 35mm, 2k for 16mm and HDish resolutions for 8mm. That was because the scanners worked that way at the time, and because the thinking was that you would want the grain to remain the same size on the display medium for 8mm as for 35mm. Think of it this way: If you're a scientist looking at something tiny, do you want a magnifier or a microscope? You're going to resolve more detail with a microscope, and that's the equivalent of a higher resolution scan. The more detail on the film you can resolve, the more faithful a representation of the image you'll get.

This is demonstrably false. See the link to Backblaze's data on consumer vs enterprise drive reliability. Spending money on expensive drives in a RAID is basically a waste *IF* that RAID has redundancy built in like Raid5 or 6. A 2TB WD Red (NAS) Pro drive is $144 A 2TB WD Black drive is $109 (prices from MicroCenter.com) The MTBF on the NAS drive is 1 million hours. I couldn't find published data on the MTBF for the black drive, but let's say for the sake of argument that it's 20% of the NAS drive (which I bet is way lower than the actual amount). That means the MTBF on the cheap drive is going to be 22 years. You will not be using that drive for anywhere close to that time frame, because the tech will have changed within 3-5 years. So if you populate an 8-disk raid with overpriced NAS drives, you're looking at $1152 for the disks. You can make the same RAID with for nearly $300 less with cheaper drives. You would have to replace three of them to have broken even when compared to the same RAID with NAS drives installed. The main thing you get with the more expensive drives is a better warranty and tweaked firmware (that doesn't really do enough to justify the doubling in price). I can't remember the last time we got a new drive as a replacement for a warranty swap. Every manufacturer has sent us a refurb when we've tried that, and a lot of those failed as well. I gave up on warranties for drives long ago. The cheaper drives also have energy saving features, which you'd want to turn off, because that can affect performance. Most RAID controllers can do this. Our current longest-running RAID is a 16-drive NAS that's been in operation since 2010. There have only been a handful of failed drives in that time (maybe 3-4). All the disks in there are cheap Seagate 2TB drives at 5400RPM, in a RAID 6. Replacing a failed drive is as simple as popping it out and putting in a new one. Rebuilding happens automatically, so I'm not sure how that's more complicated than a RAID 10 (I don't have much experience with RAID 10, because we've had such good luck with RAID 5 and 6 setups over the years). While the specs and the firmware tweaks may in fact benefit users of RAIDs, in those more expensive drives, the benefit is marginal, and often can be matched by simply adding an additional disk to the array. When you're using cheap disks, this is more cost effective than having 8x really expensive drives.

Actually, I don't think there is a sprocketless version of the director. There is a pinless optical registration option like on the ScanStation, but the transport itself is sprocketed, so you should be sure that the film isn't too badly shrunken. For film from this era, it could go either way, and will depend largely on how the film has been stored over the years. We've seen film from the 1960s that was in worse shape than film from the 1920s... Also, depending on how the film was exposed, you may not need multi-flash HDR (which is much more expensive than a straight single-flash scan). The ScanStation has roughly 12-13 stops of dynamic range, but the Director will do a better job of pulling really deep detail out of the shadows when it's in HDR mode. If the footage isn't underexposed, you'll get a lot of good detail on a single flash scanner with the kind of range the ScanStation has. -perry

It *is* about 3:2 pulldown but it's got nothing to do with drop frame timecode. There's no such thing as drop frame timecode at 23.98, it's always non-drop. Similarly, you can have 29.97fps with non-drop and that's ok too.

We use internal RAIDs in most of our machines. For reference, we mostly work with DPX sequences at 2k and 4k. Some machines have different requirements than others, but as a general rule, here's how we do it: 1) Inexpensive dedicated RAID card. A SATA 3Gbps PCIe card can be had for next to nothing these days, and with 8 drives on it, you can easily play 2k at realtime (assuming 30fps or less), or 4k at slightly less than realtime. Again - DPX, which is about 10x the bandwidth of an equivalent resolution ProRes file. This can be made faster with a 6Gbps RAID card, but it's not necessary if you're primarily dealing with compressed formats. Just about any drive you buy today is going to be 6Gbps, which will work fine with both 3 and 6Gbps cards. 2) The RAID is typically a RAID 5, or if there's room for additional drives, a RAID 6. RAID5 is fine in most cases. Never RAID 0. 3) Cheap hard drives. Spending a lot of money on super fast drives is a waste. There's simply no point. We usually buy whatever is on sale at the time, so we have a variety of discs across a dozen machines. Stick with the same size/brand/speed in each RAID, though over time you will find that you can't get the exact models, and putting in a rough equivalent is just fine. Lately we've been buying WD Green drives at 5400RPM. The notion that they have to be fast is false, unless you're only using one drive at a time. Once you put them in a RAID with 6-8 other drives, most of the benefit of faster RPMs goes away and the bottleneck becomes your RAID card, not the disk speed. Remember, we're talking about DPX sequences here, so for anything that's compressed, such as ProRes, the specs above are overkill. FWIW, as I type this, I'm capturing an HD film to a single 7200RPM drive as a ProRes 422HQ file (1080p/23.98). We've been doing this for the past 16 years on probably 15-20 different machines over that time, from SCSI to IDE to SATA and SAS. You have to expect that drives *will* fail, which is why we don't use RAID 0. With RAID5 you get most of the performance benefit of a RAID 0, with some built-in redundancy. If one dies, you can pop in a replacement and rebuild, while running the RAID in degraded mode if you need to. We usually do rebuilds overnight. For some machines, like where we store client projects semi-long term, we use RAID 6, which allows for two disks to fail before you lose data. We keep a stack of spare drives on the shelf just in case. Over the past year, we've had to replace 3 disks. All total we have about 60 drives in various RAIDs throughout the office, so that's not bad. And the cost of those replacement drives is far less than the cost of expensive 10k drives or "enterprise" drives. We don't use SSDs for RAIDs because it's not cost effective. We do use them for system drives, and they make a world of difference in OS responsiveness and boot times. For system drives, keep a clone of your system disk handy so if/when it fails you can just swap it out and keep going. Don't store anything on the system disk that wouldn't be on the clone (that is, don't put stuff in your personal documents folder that's inside your user account folder, keep them in a folder on the RAID. That way the system disk can fail and it won't matter when you pop in the clone. We have 11 machines with SSD system drives in them, some of which have been running for 3+ years. We've had one fail in that time. If you have a recent PC or Mac, doing the RAID in software isn't as much of a problem as it was back in the day, when those CPU cycles couldn't be spared. I personally like having a dedicated RAID card because it has other features (like sending you an email or sounding an alarm when a drive fails). And if you don't believe me that those more expensive drives aren't worth it, check this out: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/enterprise-drive-reliability/

Ahh, ok. That makes sense! Usually 23.976 is abbreviated as 23.98 (but they're not the same thing, and on long form material, that extra .004 makes a difference for audio sync!). Since we primarily deal with film and with tapes that have already been made, I'm not too familiar with how the camera manufacturers do that. If they're really abbreviating 23.976 as 24, that seems like a really bad idea!

No it doesn't. It just plays at a different speed. Every frame is the same size.

The right way to approach this is to work backwards from the deliverables format. If it's DCP, then 24. If it's broadcast, or if you want to make a DVD, then 23.976. 23.976 exists because it's the only way to encapsulate a 24fps progressive image inside a 29.97 interlaced package (NTSC), which is done using 3:2 pulldown. This pulldown can be undone if the cadence isn't broken, and a progressive image displayed even if it exists inside an interlaced stream. This is how it works on DVD, and on 1080i (in most cases). We usually recommend 23.976 because it's easier to get to more formats from there (NTSC, Progressive DVD, Progressive Blu-ray, 25fps). Changing to 24fps isn't particularly hard, but most of the common delivery formats work natively with 23.976, and only a couple (DCP, Blu-ray) support hard 24fps. And Blu-ray also supports 23.976

The Bolex and the K3 will only take 100' loads. You'd have to spool down your 400 footers onto daylight spools (which you'll need to find yourself), and you have to do that in a completely dark room. An actual darkroom. If $1000 is the high end, why not look at an Eclair ACL or similar? They pop up on ebay from time to time, and they're very nice. Lots of good cameras out there can be had for short money that will take 400' loads, are silent, run at sync speed so you can do sound if you want, and some (like the Eclair) will let you do high speed (70ish fps) shooting for slow motion. That seems like it'd be a benefit for a surf movie. I like the eclair because it's comfortable to hold on your shoulder. Aatons are similar, newer, more electronics, and more refined. They're also generally a bit more expensive and the older models tended to be a bit fussier. Arri SRs abound on ebay. They're solid workhorses, but not particularly comfortable to put on your shoulder, so I don't like them as much. You can get any of those for under $2000, some pop up in the $1000 range as well, depending on options. All of those cameras take quick-change magazines, so you can pre-load your film and swap it out in a hurry. Shooting on a beach, this would help minimize the chances of getting sand in the camera, which is much more likely to happen if you have to stop and rethread a new reel every 2-3 minutes. On 35mm, look at 2-perf techniscope. The cameras come up sometimes. Basically you get twice as many frames per foot, in a widescreen aspect ratio. It's a very cool format, and makes a lot of sense given the quality of today's film scanners. Some folks here have run the numbers and it's on par with shooting 16mm. The cameras can be rented, but again, they do sometimes show up on ebay.

ProRes has several flavors, each with different levels of compression. They're all compressed to some degree. but then again, so are most (if not all) of the HD and SD tape formats, even the ones most people consider to be "uncompressed." TIFF is a nightmare to work with and I'm not aware of anyone using it regularly for editing or even grading at the professional level. It's always linear, so to get the full color bandwidth you have to work with 16bit TIFFs. There is no 10bit TIFF standard, only 8bit, which would be inadvisable because the vast majority of the color data would be missing. DPX is at least more widely supported by some editing systems, but even then you still have to have massive disk arrays to hold and move that much data. It's not a common format at all for editing, just for grading and restoration, and for VFX work. Few edit systems really handle it well. On the other hand, containerized formats like Quicktime, make it simple to keep audio and video together and in sync, and to work with files that are much more reasonable in size.

What you're describing as noise definitely isn't something that's inherent to the ProRes format, which frankly is one of the best available codecs. That had to have been in the transfer somewhere. I've been using Quicktime almost since it was released, and for years before ProRes came out, we had to use Uncompressed 10bit files, which were massive for HD. For 2k and 4k, they're just totally impractical. ProRes has been around for at least 10 years, I think, and in its HQ form, it's equivalent to 10bit uncompressed files, at roughly 1/10 the size. It became (past tense) the standard because of this and because playing it on both Mac and Windows has been possible for some time. There are indeed issues with some applications and how they handle things, but those are mostly a thing of the past. We have been using ProRes for years as our primary containerized media format, and it has vastly simplified and sped up work around here, without sacrificing quality. We are about 90% Windows here. I can see what you mean in that removing media layers from the equation makes the signal path simpler. But I have to disagree about the workflow argument. We do a ton of work with DPX. Our ScanStation can scan to this format directly, and our Northlight can only make DPX files. We use DPX in Resolve as our main media format, and we use DPX in our restoration system as well. But it's an utter nightmare to work with, especially with long-form projects. Just to give you an idea: We are currently wrapping up a feature film project. We scanned it on the northlight at 4k, we graded it, we are doing the restoration right now. Deliverables to the client are the original log scans (DPX), the graded files (DPX), the graded & restored files (DPX), as well as about a dozen variations in Quicktime (HD, 4k, 23.98, 24, 25fps, a couple different aspect ratio mattes, etc). Each version of the film in DPX is just under 5TB. To copy one reel of the film to a hard drive (7200RPM SATA 6gbps disk in a dock) takes 2-3 hours. We then remove that drive and move it to the next workstation (say, from resolve to the restoration system). That then gets copied to the RAID in the restoration system. 2-3 more hours. Now we've spent an entire work day moving the files from one machine to another, before we get any work done. To do the entire film is a couple days of just copying files, renders aside. When we're done, one reels of film (as DPX) will fit on one LTO5 tape. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to fit all of the ProRes versions (10-12 files) on one, maybe two LTOs, depending on what they decide to order. DPX is a wildly impractical format. The only way it works smoothly is if you have a massive and incredibly fast centralized storage system that uses something like 10-40GB Ethernet, Infiniband or FibreChannel. That's expensive stuff (though we're working on a cheap 20-40Gbps Infiniband SAN that I hope to get wrapped up in June). It's also clunky, because you really can't do this over standard networking protocols like SMB, which would be the easiest way to go. Instead you have to use iSCSI, which isn't complicated, but it means only one workstation can access the files at any given time, unless you've spent tens of thousands of dollars on an enterprise-level SAN with proper management software.

You really can't compare Super 8 to 16mm on a lot of levels. For one, it's usually more expensive per foot to shoot Super 8. Good lenses are available for some super 8 cameras but they're harder to find than good lenses for 16mm cameras. Super8 is inherently less stable than 16mm and that goes a long way towards getting a sharp image. If you want the Super 8 look, then go for it, but it's not going to look the same as the 16mm unless you're shooting with something like the Logmar, which is pin-registered and has a pressure plate. Max8 doesn't really buy you that much, in my opinion. I have a Max8 Beaulieu and it's fun to play with, but the amount of extra film you're exposing is so small that if you just frame it with regular Super 8 and scan on a really good scanner, then crop it in post, I'm not sure it's worth the extra effort for that an extra millimeter on the neg. -perry

Scratch Play can do it and that's free (and 64bit). Apparently, it's just a matter of changing some metadata (the fourcc code) in the file, and then you can do it in Quicktime player as well. But it's a little kludgy and kind of a pain. There doesn't seem to be any technical reason why it won't work, but Apple didn't update Quicktime 7 player to support it without this little hack.

It's the same as in Quicktime 7 on the mac. Quicktime X is 64bit so the playback performance of higher resolution files is better there, but that's not available on Windows. QT7 is 32bit, so it's got some limitations. It's the same engine as in Quicktime 7 on the mac, less the ability to make ProRes files.

Can you define "noise?" -- there's no noise in the analog sense (random high frequency information) in a ProRes file. I seriously doubt that ProRes compression was visible unless you were using a lower quality (more compressed) flavor like LT or Proxy. ProRes HQ or higher is indistinguishable from uncompressed, including DPX.

Putting on my pedantic hat here: DPX isn't a "codec" in the sense ProRes is. [Edit: Gah! Rob beat me to it!] That said, If the film is color negative, there is basically no difference between 10bit DPX Log files and 16bit linear. That's just the nature of log-encoded data. You don't really gain anything from the extra bits unless you're working with linear-encoded files. ProRes is generally linear (it can be log though), so if you're comparing 10bit linear DPX to 12 bit linear ProRes, then yes, you're getting a bit more with a 12 bit file, but not that much. To the OP: we scan 16mm directly to ProRes or DPX, no charge for conversion because it's output by the scanner directly to either (or both) formats. There's definitely a lot more convenience with ProRes, but if I was planning on a filmout, I'd stick with DPX to avoid the compression applied by the ProRes codec. It's minimal (really minimal), but it's there. Hard drives are cheap, so there's really no reason not to scan to an uncompressed format like DPX if you want that. It's easy enough to make a set of proxy files in ProRes at a lower res, to go along with a DPX sequence for editing, and then simply relink with the DPX sequence later in the editing or grading tool of your choice. Best of both worlds..

I played with the Ripple a bit at NAB this week. For $350 it's well worth it for most people who are just getting into grading, or need something compact, either for on-set use or because a full panel takes up too much real estate. Obviously it's missing a lot of functionality you'd have on a full Tangent Element setup, but it's 1/10 the price ($350 vx $3300). So there will be tradeoffs. The device appears to software as if it was an Element tk, so anything that supports that panel should work with the Ripple. The trackballs feel basically the same as the Element Tk, but the rings are different. Still, it's a nice unit for the price. Doesn't feel as cheap as you might expect. I've never used the Wave, but I've read reports from people who have that the Ripple feels less "plasticy" than the Wave. Even though it's plastic.

David is correct, though it does depend a lot on how you expose the film. Traditionally, one would underexpose reversal just a hair to get nice rich blacks. We've found that with reversal that's overexposed by half a stop to a stop, the results in the scan are much nicer than reversal that's underexposed. If this is something you're willing to do, it's worth a try. Generally speaking, there's just a lot more latitude available to negative, and more flexibility in grading because of that. It's a completely different look though, compared to reversal film.

Any scanner and most telecines can do this. Matting is typically done "soft" not in the gate. I've sat in on plenty of client sessions on a Shadow where we did 1.85 and 1.66 transfers with black letterbox or pillarbox bars, respectively. There's nothing special about this because the actual matte is done by the in-line color correction system, or in hardware on the telecine (but not usually by the gate, except maybe on older systems). If the goal is to output a 1.66:1 FILE, then you probably want it done on a modern film scanner, not a telecine. Telecines are designed to output a Video signal, and that means that ultimately, the signal coming out the back of the machine has to conform to standard video resolutions and frame rates (and will depend on the options installed on that machine). A file-based film scanner could care less what the resolution is. We can scan you a file that 16 pixels high by 4096 wide if you want. Not that you'd do that, but my point is that it's not a big deal to make a custom file. The bigger issue might be bringing it into software that's expecting standard resolutions. But it's certainly doable and we do it all the time. -perry

The only difference between ProRes 4444XQ and ProRes 4444HQ is bit rate. Both are RGB, but XQ uses less compression than HQ, and in theory that will help with HDR images where there might be more high frequency information that the HQ compression would lop off. The downside is that you can't easily play XQ files on Windows (you have to modify some bits in the Quicktime Header first to trick Quicktime into handling it), and the files are much bigger. On the mac, it only works in Mavericks or newer. I'm not convinced the gain is worth it for day to day use, to be honest. ProRes 4444HQ is a great format, and works in any application that supports ProRes.

That's the gist of it, but of course the reality is that if you want to really fine tune it you need someone who knows what they're doing, and you need to do it on a system with proper monitors, calibrated, in a room that's got the right lighting and surround color, etc. etc. But to get a flat scan into the ballpark of what it looked like in the camera viewfinder, you can pretty much do it just by looking at the scopes.