Perry Paolantonio

...if it ain't broke, I guess. I used to work for a print shop that was originally founded in the 1800s. The equipment ran off of a common belt-drive system. Each device (printers, terrifying paper cutters, etc) had a belt going up to a spinning shaft that ran the length of the shop. That shaft was always spinning. You engaged a gigantic clutch lever to turn on the thing you were working with, then disengaged it to shut that machine down. No safety measures, either. At some point in the 1950s, they disconnected the paddle wheel down at the river that spun the main drive shaft, and connected an electric motor to it, inside the building. It was still running when I worked there in the 1980s, and those printers and paper cutters were better than the modern ones they had! -perry

Hi Steve, The Xantus (and other Teranex models) are designed to deal with the type of material that Rob describes: footage that originated as 24p but was encapulated in a 29.97i video signal (HD or SD). The way the machine works is to take an SDI or HDSDI video input, and if it detects pulldown, it removes it. In this way, any processing it may do internally (up/down conversions, noise reduction, aspect ratio conversion, etc). is all done on a progressive image, which gets you a better result and is easier to do. Then on the output side, the Teranex will let you either reconstruct the pulldown as it was, clean it if it's broken, or on some models just remove it and output a 24p signal. We bought ours several years ago to deal with the middle situation. What a lot of people don't realize is that if they transfer a film or 24p content to 29.97i with 3:2 pulldown, and *then* edit it further, they're breaking the pulldown pattern. The teranex detects and fixes these breaks in real time, and can then output a clean 29.97i signal with unbroken cadence. And it does an amazing job of it. We had masters that were impossible to make into progressive DVDs because of broken cadence (the encoder just couldn't keep up with the cadence breaks), but capturing it through the Teranex fixed it. You may be able to create a 24p output from the 30p footage, but I think it would depend on the model and the options installed. Also, it would either need to interpolate or simply drop frames to go from 30->24, so there will likely be some artifacting. @David Mullen: We still get a lot of HDCAM masters for Blu-ray that have 3:2 pulldown. Sometimes they're just several years old, sometimes they're made by facilities still doing telecine work to this format. But it's out there, in large numbers, even in HD. -perry

It depends on the sprocket damage. Our ScanStation can handle quite a bit of damage, but continuously missing sprockets for multiple feet might require special treatment. Usually, with scanners that digitally stabilize the film, using splicing tape to create perfs where they're missing, doesn't always help because the placement is always a bit off. Sometimes this can throw off the perf detection. But really, you won't know until you try. Any scanner that uses a sprocket drive probably won't be able to run the film reliably, if at all, so your only real choice in this case is a sprocketless, archival scanner. We'd probably approach this by scanning through as if nothing was wrong, using perf detection. If the machine freaks out at that section, we'd turn the perf detection off, which results in a much less stable image overall - but you'd probably be able to capture the frames, and then post-stabilize that section to get things back into place after the scan is complete. We've run some pretty damaged film through the ScanStation, and I'm continually surprised by what it can handle. -perry

@Dean: In most cases with reversal film there isn't a ton of color correction to do. Scanners like the ScanStation will automatically deal with certain issues such as fading, while scanning. The overall process, however, is a bit different than traditional telecine, where you do the color correction as part of the transfer process, and you transfer directly to the final target deliverable (tape or files, typically). With data scanning, you get a very high resolution, lower-contrast master scan that's designed to preserve the full dynamic range of what's on the film. The idea is that you can bring this into a color correction system later and really fine-tune it if you want. That said, we've found that in most cases with home movies, very little color correction is needed later. Mostly it's just about tweaking the black point and the highlights, and everything pretty much falls into place (there are exceptions, but this is usually the case). We do a lot of home movie transfers on the ScanStation, and most people opt for 2k or 4k scans to a format that's more convenient than DPX sequences (something like ProRes 4444 Quicktime files), with a simultaneous scan to an HD or 2k H.264 scan with those basic color corrections applied during the scan. This is suitable for viewing on most computers, and for upload to YouTube, Vimeo, etc. The ProRes version becomes your master copy, and there's more than enough color data there to tweak as you'd see fit, in most edit systems, SpeedGrade, Resolve Lite, etc. -perry

Most of our West Coast clients use Spectra or Fotokem for 16mm processing. Both are excellent labs. -perry

A lot of places still bill for this sort of thing hourly, because that's the way it's always been done. But modern scanners aren't constrained by real-time, they often work faster (or slower) than real time, so charging by the hour doesn't necessarily make sense. But it doesn't mean it's wrong - it's just how they calculate their cost. I would agree that it makes sense to scan at 4k, by the way. Things are clearly heading in that direction on the consumer side, and it's just a matter of time before even bigger screens start to hit the market, so if you scan at a lower resolution you're looking at scaling up to 4k in the next few years. If you scan at 4k now, you're scaling down to HD, but that's preferable and will always look better than a blow-up. -perry

Shop around. There are lots of places doing 2k and higher scans these days, and some are still charging rates from 10 years ago. Many are not. You'd be surprised at the variations in pricing from place to place. Also - are you talking about 1 hour of footage, or 1 hour of labor? I ask because different places calculate the cost in different ways. Places that are more telecine-centric will tend to charge by running time, places that do more data scanning tend to charge by foot (and hourly for services like restoration and grading). For example, we charge per foot for scanning, hourly for grading, but the rates vary depending on things like resolution and file format. -perry

My understanding is that the fix from Lasergraphics will likely do what you're suggesting. That was my suggestion to them as well - use the perf for vertical registration, the film edges for left/right. But just to be clear: this is only an issue in Super 8. We scan a ton of 16mm and regular 8 and have never seen this happen, on both pin registered cameras and those without registration pins, on those formats. The variability of perf position is unique to this format, and is really only an issue on specific cameras. For most Super 8 scans, we get rock steady images on with the perf used for both vertical and horizontal registration. -perry

My point though, is that there are about 1000 ways to arrive at "a video on the web." One can't make a judgement call about many factors in something like this, based solely on what is seen on a web site. For example: 1) Image stabilization - we don't know what tools or settings were used. If there was interpolation, there will be grain decimation and softness (and possibly sharpening to compensate for softness), for example. 2) Was the video exported from the grading system in the same format that went in, or was it converted to something like H.264 before uploading to YouTube and Vimeo. If it was converted to H.264, for example, what encoder was used? what were the bit rate settings? the prefiltering filtering settings? Brickwall filtration on or off? How aggressive? 3) Was the uploaded file at 2k resolution, or was it a scaled down version? Those are just three. But every single one of those has the potential to affect the grain, the sharpness (or softness), the color, etc. With so many variables between source file and destination, nobody can make an accurate judgement call on the quality of the material at the beginning of the process, based on the end product. This is an ongoing problem with this kind of thing - unfortunately, to truly evaluate the quality of a scan at high resolution like this, you have to look at the original files, not at highly compressed (and I'd expect the YouTube files are probably between 50-100x smaller than the source) web versions. But those files are too big for most people to download and play in a meaningful way, which makes this tough. There are just too many variables in the mix to reach any conclusions about what came out of the camera. -perry

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I can say without a doubt that the perforations in Super 8 are not precisely placed in the exact location (perf to perf) relative to the edge of the frame -- at least in film from Kodak. This is, however, within the SMPTE Spec (according to Kodak, I haven't read the document myself). They went back and looked at their perfs and determined that they're within spec. The camera and scanner combined are almost too precise (for now) for the film. The reason that the stabilization had to be used is precisely because of a imprecise perfs (definitely a perf problem), exposed by this very precision in the other equipment in the chain. But because the perfs are "in spec" according to Kodak, they claim there's no problem. That means it's left to others to deal with. And stabilization will be done at scan-time in the near future, at least with the ScanStation. A fix for this is in progress and that will eliminate the need for a post-scan stabilization pass, since it will steady the image while scanning. This is *only* a problem for Super 8, by the way, and only on specific cameras. 8mm, 16mm, 35mm and other formats that do pin registration (physical or optical) do not have this issue. -perry

No grain removal was done at the scan stage. Basically nobody should ever evaluate the quality of a film's grain based on YouTube or Vimeo. They're highly destructive file formats that cram a ton of data into a small file for easy transport to a variety of devices. Something (many things) have to give in that process, and grain, which is inherently random and difficult for compression algorithms to deal with, is one of the first. I don't know exactly what steps Friedemann took after getting the scan from us, but I can say definitively that if you look at the original scan, the grain is sharply resolved and looks fantastic.

The grain is there. You can't tell by looking at a YouTube or Vimeo clip, because they totally destroy it in an effort to make the film more efficient for encoding for final display.

The registration in this version is misleading, and you shouldn't go by the sprocket hole in this case. Here's the deal: Kodak's perforations are not perfect for Super 8 - their placement relative to the edge of the frame varies from perf to perf. It's a 5-perf cycle, resulting in a kind of sawtooth pattern. In a scanner like the ScanStation, which uses the perfs to digitally register the frames, the picture zig-zags back and forth while the perf is held perfectly still. You *don't* see that in the video above, because Friedemann has further stabilized it in software. That's likely the result of the slight rocking of the image that you see from time to time in this example. It's because of this post-scan stabilization that you see the perf wiggling back and forth. The scanner actually holds it perfectly steady, and the image moves instead. This perf placement problem is specific to Super 8 - you don't see this problem on 16, 8mm, 35, etc. Kodak, for their part, say it's within SMPTE specs, and basically don't seem interested in tightening up the tolerances. That leaves it up to the scanner manufacturers to deal with the problem. It's worth noting that this is not a problem with most Super 8 cameras, only the ones that produce exceptionally steady images like the Logmar. That's why nobody has ever really complained about this before, because it's only in recent years that the camera and scanner quality for Super 8 has gotten to the point where this underlying issue is exposed. It'll get worked out, so that post-scan stabilization isn't necessary, and when it does, we'll post some examples. Lasergraphics is working on a fix for this, which we hope to have soon. We've been working closely with them, to generate test footage to help come up with a workable solution. -perry

What Rob said. A true 2k scan should be 2k, not "almost 2k"

The hard part is going to be finding a place with a 16mm film recorder. I'm fairly certain the one at Metropolis in NY can do 16mm - Jack Rizzo told me a couple years ago that theirs uses an Oxberry movement, so it's a bit more modular than most recorders, which are usually 35mm only. For a filmout, I'd definitely recommend scanning at 4k, though - you want all the resolution you can get on the digital side of the equation.

^ What David said.

If you want to show it on HD, then yes you'd pillarbox. But why limit yourself to that format in the transfer? If you're going to the trouble of transferring and conforming A/B rolls, you might as well do it at a higher resolution now, even if the immediate need is just for HD. That way you have a higher res version in your back pocket already, should you need it in the future... As for the pillarboxing/stretching: If you scale the 4:3 scan down to HD and pillarbox, you're making a 16:9 image, but the picture area is a 4:3 window in the center. The black just pads it out to 1920x1080, and becomes part of the HD picture. If you show that on an HDTV it wouldn't stretch because as far as the TV is concerned, that's full frame 16:9, even if about 25% of the frame is actually the black pillarboxing.

"Supervised Transfer" and an hourly rate suggests it's a telecine or telecine-based system, like the Spirit: real-time with color correction done at the time of transfer. This is different from data scanning, where you're just capturing the film flat to DPX or some other file format, for color correction later. With data scanning, the client isn't usually present for this part of the process because it's slow and uninteresting and doesn't involve any creative decision making. The Avid is their edit system, not their film transfer system. Presumably, the supervised transfer (On the Spirit) would include conforming the A/B rolls into the final, contiguous film, but it may depend on their setup and whether your cut neg has any optical effects (fades, dissolves, etc). I can't say for sure but I'm guessing they're charging for the transfer and color grade in the first part, and then the ingest/conform/layback in the second. The fact that it's 4:3, at least in my mind, would completely eliminate 1080p transfers from consideration because you'd have to pillarbox the image and ultimately, you're not getting a very high res transfer that way. If you ever wanted to make, say, a 2k DCP, you'd have to scale up significantly, which is something to avoid if possible. In the past few years, it's become much more affordable to scan at high resolution on scanners that have much better resolution and registration than the Spirit, so it's worth looking into. It's not something you need to do in a supervised way so you could send that part out, and then work with a local colorist to do the grading. That's something we do for a lot of clients who aren't local, and I know many other scanning services do the same. With the recent proliferation of Resolve systems out there, most of our clients either do their own grading and conforming, or they bring it to someone local to them. In fact, a lot of people are doing 4k scans with us, grading at 4k in Resolve, and outputting to HD or 2k (but hanging onto the 4k graded scan for when they need it - an inevitability, what with consumers starting to get their hands on 4k hardware in significant numbers). -perry

Is the original footage 4:3 or are you shooting Super 16? In the case of S16, you're not gaining a ton by going to 2k. But with 4:3 there's a compelling argument for scanning at 2k vs HD. With a 4:3 HD scan, you're getting an image area of 1440x1080, but with a 2k scan, 2048x1556. That's more than double the resolution. If the source is Super 16, you're getting more with 2k, but not double. Everything Dirk says is correct as well, though these days a 2k scan shouldn't really cost too much more than HD. We also do a special price for A/B rolls, because the easiest way to handle them is to scan each roll straight through, and then edit out the slug in a nonlinear edit or grading system later (rather than assembling during the scan). So we charge full price for the A roll and a discounted rate for the B roll. We do this a lot at 2k and 4k for 16mm, actually. -perry

hah - posts crossed. This, of course, assumes two things: 1) that you're using a sprocket-based transfer system 2) that the system in use is capable of zooming out enough to include the area between the perforations Neither of these things is an issue on a modern scanner, but your mileage may vary if you're talking about older telecine-based transfers. -perry

According to Wikipedia it's 11.66mm x 6.15mm -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_mm_film#Ultra_16_mm Though I'm not sure this is an absolute, given that Ultra16 isn't an official standard.

Er.. your Aatons and Arris are professional cameras, built to a different standard than consumer gear. They cost tens of thousands of dollars new, compared to a few hundred for a S8 camera - cameras that were mass produced and used a lot of plastic. Even your Scoopic and R16 could be classed as low-end professional cameras, so you'd expect better build quality than most Super 8 cameras.

You're talking about 30-40 year old cameras in many cases, and in a consumer format, no less. These were probably never regularly serviced when used by their original owners (except in rare circumstances, i'd think). Electronics that old could be subject to a bunch of issues: solder joints that come undone, blown capacitors, frayed wires and short circuits. Not to mention corrosion from batteries left in the camera for years on end... Mechanically, there can be issues as well. There are moving parts in these cameras and in anything with moving parts, things are bound to break sooner or later. Especially when the parts are mostly plastic... "Belts" (usually just tiny rubber bands) don't last forever either, and those are often problematic in older cameras. Super 8 cameras, with a few exceptions (I'd say Beaulieu, Canon, Nikon, Nizo, Bauer and a few others) weren't usually built for the long haul. I'm not sure I'd classify Elmo as "excellent" - they were good cameras (I still have a working one that was in my attic for 20 years and fired right up last time I used it), but you know - these things are old!

Another quick update: The PCB arrived this morning for the RGB+IR lamphouse. This one is a bit big, but fits the Imagica. I am toying with tweaking the design (seems every time I finish a design I learn some more tricks that could minimize the size. Now I'm obsessed with shrinking it!). In any case, this will use SMD components, which I'm about to learn how to work with for the first time. Should be fun. I'm hoping to have it fully assembled in the next couple of days. https://www.flickr.com/photos/friolator/17037539117/in/set-72157644369553789

Very possible that it's a match. Phil Vigeant from Pro8mm told me that their modified camera uses a battery that outputs 3.6V and 7.2V -perry