Perry Paolantonio

I think all Nizos had Schneider-Kreuznach lenses. Maybe it was a modification?

one resistor per channel would probably work, but after talking to some EE friends, the recommendation was to keep them separate. I think this is a pretty good explanation of why: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/22291/why-exactly-cant-a-single-resistor-be-used-for-many-parallel-leds I mean, it'd probably be ok, but it's not that big a deal to have multiple resistors if I'm using an array for them. 5 extra minutes of soldering, pretty much. Yeah - the Arduino PWM pins are being used for this so you can vary the intensity of each color independently to either do pure R, G and B with a mono camera, or mix a pretty good white for a color camera or black and white film. -perry

this isn't going to win any beauty contests, but here's the first prototype of the LED array for my scanner: https://www.flickr.com/photos/friolator/16936609298/in/set-72157644369553789 This board holds 25 RGB LEDs, which allows color to be mixed from the Arduino. At the moment, each color is on full blast, though it's not truly white since each color has a slightly different voltage requirement. A bit more tweaking is needed, but not much. What you don't see is that the other half of the breadboard has another 11 LEDs wired up, so it's actually a 36-LED array. That should provide more than enough light in the final version. Also, these aren't diffuse LEDs, so they're not really useful in the scanner at the moment. this is just a proof of concept. And it only uses 7W of electricity (Compare that to a Spirit!). It'll be much prettier when it's done - a custom printed circuit board, surface mount LEDs, integrated resistor arrays and a single connector to the Arduino (probably coax with 9-pin connectors)

Machine vision cameras like this run several thousand dollars, usually. The test camera I'm using in the 35mm scanner (again, just for testing purposes) runs about $1000 including the frame grabber. We'll swap this out for a CameraLink frame grabber when the scanner is closer to being finished, and at that time, can use just about any Camera that has a cameralink interface. If you're willing to work with a used camera, they do come up on ebay from time to time. There are lots of low resolution ones there now, the good high end cameras are harder to come by and are more expensive.

gah. cursed edit time limit on this forum! I tried to edit my last post, but I'm too slow. that link is to the photo in my photostream, not in the imagica-specific photo set. these are all the scanner photos so far: https://www.flickr.com/photos/friolator/sets/72157644369553789/ Near the end you can see how the relays were all rewired using cat5 to breakout connectors on DIN rails. It's a really nice, neat way to do this. My original layouts re-used some of the old wiring, but I was having all kinds of problems. It just made more sense to rip it out and start all that from scratch. One of the things I decided to do was to make it possible to shut the scanner off from software using the Arduino and relays. That way if a slow scan went late after hours, I could program it to shut the whole machine down, or log in remotely and do it from home. -perry

Bummer. Mine are right inside the door: https://www.flickr.com/photos/friolator/14053271300/in/set-72157644369553789 (more photos of the scanner in various states in that photoset, too). The lens in it is the same as in your XE - a Nikkor 95mm printing lens, so about as sharp as they get. That lens is actually worth more than I paid for the scanner! -perry

Does yours have the shinto prayer cards inside too? I'm not superstitious, but I figured I should leave them there. Visions of the Brady Bunch in Hawaii... Damn straight! $12 on amazon. Definitely not suitable for actual work, but good enough for preliminary testing while the real thing is being built. I'm still debating whether I should do RGB + IR. Kind of leaning towards going for it - I mean, while I'm going to the trouble of building my own LED array, if I can squeeze a second matrix of IR emitters in there, then I can make dustmaps for restoration, too. -perry

The advantage of working with an existing transport is that all the engineering was done for me. I just have to hack together the pieces. So there are a ton of sensors on the scanner for different things: perf counting, film tension, gate position, etc. The arduino makes it pretty easy to read all these sensors and react accordingly. In the case of frame counting, there are two perf sensors that, when they're in the correct position, tell you it's safe to engage the registration pins. But I'm using one of them as a counter (essentially it's the same idea as your LED/photosensor on the projector shutter blades, only it's a proximity sensor that goes to the off state when the perf is in front of the sensor). So tracking frames is fairly straightforward, just by keeping a count of where I am and then dividing by the number of perfs per frame. Ebay. I was watching it for almost a year and decided to just go for it. The only downside of this model is that I can't use 2000' reels on it. But I'm going to remove the top cover to the scanner and mount some new reel hubs a little farther out, then connect them to the torque motors that keep film tension via a belt or chain drive. So basically, I'm just moving the center hub a few inches and letting the platters overhang the chassis a bit. I've got a couple of old 35mm analysis projectors someone gave me, with lots of rollers and similar parts I can scavenge for that. Cool. I looked at OpenCV, but decided to go with the software that works with the frame grabber, and I'm glad I did. It can do a fair bit of stuff with the image in the frame buffer while it's in memory, like flipping it, scaling, etc. That's pretty fast. I can also pass this off to ImageMagick in memory, where I would merge the three channels into an RGB image and then write it to disk. So theoretically, it should be reasonably quick. The current camera is limited to about 5fps, and I think right now the bottleneck is my transport speeds, which aren't very fast. I'm guessing that once everything is fine-tuned. it'll be able to do somewhere between 1 and 2 fps at full resolution, with pin registration With ImageMagick, I believe I can also do some stabilization, so I may have the gates enlarged to include more of the perfs than you currently see, to give me something to do optical pin registration on. That should speed things up and make it safer for archival film. -perry

Heh. You should see the shelf full of bits and pieces I took out of it. Really all that's left is the transport. The original design had a robotic platform under the scanner deck with the line sensor. Behind the film was a fibre optic snake that went down to the halogen lamp (just 24v projector bulbs!). The sensor and the light snake would sweep the film in sync with one another. There's a bit of diffusion between the lamp and the gate, but it's just photo diffusion material. for now I'm leaving it be to see how even my final lamphouse design is, but i've been looking at diffusers like the ones in the Edmund catalog if it's not good enough. I'm in the process of prototyping the LED array, and once the kinks are worked out, I'll get a PCB made for it and get it installed. Right now, for testing, I'm using a 24v LED MR16 bulb I bought from a RV supply house. Other than being sickly green, it's actually surprisingly even. So I'm kind of modeling my array after it, but mine will let me control the individual channels. -perry

Cool. When I'm done with it (hopefully in a few weeks), I'll post some footage of my 35mm scanner. It's an older Imagica scanner, with the guts removed. Using an Arduino Mega to control it, currently building a custom LED (RGB) lamphouse. It'll be slow, but will do multi-flash per color RGB scanning with a mono sensor. I'm using a cheap color machine vision camera right now (4.6k), but it's just for prototyping. Once it's done, I'll swap it out for a higher end camera. The camera's frame grabber board has a separate C++ library that gives you full control over most of its functionality, so I bought that from the manufacturer. As long as I use one of their CameraLink boards in the final version. it's just a swap-out replacement and will work with nearly any CameraLink camera. The control software is being built in RealStudio (currently Xojo, but I use an older version). I built a whole serial command and response system in the Arduino, and a library of transport functions that you can call from the application. Basically, I send it a serial message and it does what I tell it, then reports back. The scanner I'm basing this on had 5-phase stepper motors and motor drivers (big external boxes, but conceptually similar to the one you're using), so I'm controlling steppers for forward and reverse motion, lens focus, camera platform focus, and pin-registration/pressure plate. Kind of mind blowing what you can do with a $20 controller like the Mega. The plan is to get PCBs made for this once I'm satisfied it's working properly, then mount everything in a 1 rack unit box inside the chassis. It's taken far too long to get to this point, but it's nearly done and now it's becoming a lot more fun. What are you using to invert the negative and remove the orange cast? is that a filter in OpenCV? I'll be doing all the image processing in memory using ImageMagick, so that's not particularly hard to deal with, it'll just take some calibration to get it just right. Here's some early footage of mine, taken a few weeks ago, with the transport finally responding as expected to my commands: https://www.youtube.com/embed/YWuAcmAf2ww -perry

I agree with Mark. There must be something up with your scan, and you're not going to get very good results with one of these setups. What was wrong with your initial scan? Can you post some frame grabs? What kind of scanner was used? -perry

Since you're on Windows, making a ProRes file is a bit more complicated (reading ProRes isn't an issue, but making them is less straightforward than on a mac). Resolve, for instance, can't export a ProRes file because Blackmagic doesn't offer that as an option. If we're not scanning directly to ProRes (our scanner can do that, even though it's Windows based), we use ffmpeg to do conversions - not user friendly but it works. There are some limitations, however. Premiere might export it out, though - I'd be surprised if Adobe doesn't include this (you'd need to have Quicktime installed first, of course). Resolve (at least version 11) can import your files on Windows. We have two systems: the full version and a light version, and both will take the 5k file (though the Lite version will limit your output to UHD - you need the full version to round trip 5k->5k or to output true 4k. In resolve, just point it to the folder of DPX files, and it appears as if it was a single file. Just remember - these files *won't* play back with speeds near real time at that resolution, as DPX, off of your external drives. On the RAID in our Resolve system, 16bit 5k files play at about 5-6fps. This is just playback with no color correction or other effects - so the low speed is almost entirely due to disk speed. That's on a RAID that can easily move data at 1.5GB/second. If you're playing back off of an external drive I'd expect slower speeds. 5k ProRes 4444 might play back ok if you have a fast PC - the disk speed won't be as much of an issue, but ProRes is CPU-bound and 5k 4444 files requires a fairly hefty CPU to decode in real time. -perry

Memory isn't as much the problem as disk space is. Your 50' reel is just under 450GB as 5k, 16bit DPX. ~115MB/frame. So the main issue will be disk space, not RAM. As Phil said, it's not loading the whole movie into RAM, just a few frames at a time usually. 5k DPX won't play back smoothly off external portable drives, you'd need a RAID capable of over 3GB/second in order to play it in real time. The usual workflow for files this large is to make smaller proxy files (you could do this from After Effects, at something like 2k, where you'd need speed more on the order of 500MB/second for DPX, or just a fraction of that for something like ProRes) and edit/grade those proxies. Then when you're finished, relink the media in your timeline up to the 5k version, set up your final crop, and render out the final version at 4k. -perry

Hi Scott, I haven't used Premiere in years, but in After Effects, when you bring in an image sequence it shows up in your bin as if it's a single file. If you right click on the file there's an option labeled "Interpret Footage." there you can set the frame rate. You might see if there's something similar in Premiere - Adobe is usually pretty good about re-using features from application to application. If you can do this, then that's where you'd set your frame rate for the incoming DPX sequence, which will appear in the user interface as if it was any other movie format. If you bring that into a 24fps timeline, you'd have to either repeat frames (like a step print process would have done back in the day), or interpolate up to 24. I'd avoid interpolation, but that's just my preference. On the crop - your scans were done with overscan. They can be scanned directly at 4k with a slight crop just inside the frame lines, if that's what you want. Saves you a step and gets you smaller files to work with. Phil - you'd be surprised how much is actually on the film. 5k is not a format we scan to very often, except for archives that want to capture the full frame plus perfs and film edges, but there's subtle detail there that's lost in a 2k or HD scan. -perry

This is a Pro8 modified camera, so it doesn't use the standard battery socket - instead it's on the back, below the viewfinder: So there's a standard screw mount in the bottom. I wouldn't use a 3D printer to make the screw, instead I'd use it to make the handle/battery holder, and I'd re-use the cable from the existing battery pack (or pick up another) to go from the handle to the battery input. Or if I'm feeling really ambitious, maybe I'll carve one out of wood, if I can pack a bunch of thin cellphone/still camera style li-ion batteries in there.

They're using Li-Ion batteries now in their new packs, so I'm thinking I might design something that uses those instead. If I can find small, powerful enough cells, I was toying with making something like the battery pack the Beaulieu R16s have - in a handle on the bottom of the camera. I always hated the stubby little handle on the 4008 anyway, so it seems like putting a battery pack there and making it in the shape of a real handgrip might be a good idea. Probably a lot of work though. Maybe this is a good excuse to get that 3D printer I've been wanting!

I was referring to NAB 2014, a year ago, when I called it vaporware. Though, the target date they were talking about back then was the end of the year. The end of 2014 has come and gone, and there's still no real update from Blackmagic. And this is typical of the company, at least since about 2010 or so - more emphasis on marketing and trade show hype than meeting deadlines and delivering product as advertised. Will they release the scanner? Sure - and as I said in my previous post, maybe it'll be in a few weeks at NAB. It would make sense that if they don't release it they'll at least make some kind of announcement about it. I'll be surprised if it's not limited in some key ways, though. To me, it says a lot that the product pages are heavy on slick (and weirdly unrealistic) photos of the scanner in a loft apartment, and light on concrete specs - there's not even a tech specs page for the machine yet, but it's been a year since they announced it.

That's true. But as they say - you get what you pay for. The ScanStation works, out of the box. It's ridiculously reliable, and the quality is outstanding. Honestly, I saw the "demo" of the Cintel scanner at NAB last year and it is an attractive looking machine, design-wise. But it was vaporware as far as I could tell. Yeah, the computer was making the film go back and forth and there was a picture in the (incredibly minimal to the point of useless) demo application they had. I thought then that the end of 2014 date they promised seemed overly optimistic, and here we are just about in Q2 2015, with no sign of the scanner. Maybe NAB this year? Anyone's guess. We're still interested in this scanner for some very specific projects where quality isn't the main factor. I would keep my expectations for this scanner *extremely* low and I really don't expect this to have the kind of reliability and quality as the ScanStation. For what it's worth, I'm nearly done with the motion control software for our rebuilt 35mm scanner. I'm one person doing it in his spare time. It's not *that* hard to build something like this, especially if you're starting with an existing transport (that's where the really tough development work is). I would imagine the delay is that they've added new features after getting feedback from NAB and IBC last year. That's good and bad - good that they're probably listening. Bad in that it's blackmagic and odds are it won't work reliably out of the gate, if the past 5-6 years of their new product releases are any indication... -perry

The general rule is that if it's in your carry-on luggage, the intensity of the x-ray machines isn't enough to do serious damage. If it was in checked baggage, and was scanned, those are a lot stronger. I can't speak from experience on checked film, because I've never done it. But I've taken plenty of film (motion and still) through x-ray machines over the years and it's never been an issue. Most recently I took some Super 8 7207 to Italy and back, and there was no issue. I wouldn't be too concerned if it was in your carry-on baggage. -perry

And a modern sprocketless scanner would also have no problem with it, though you'd have to post-process the image to split it up. And frankly, I don't see an advantage to this. If you were to scan 8mm film on a sprocketless 16mm scanner, your image area for 8mm each frame is only 1/4 the size of a 16mm frame. That means you're getting a relatively low resolution scan. If you use a scanner that can reposition the sensor/lens assembly to fill the sensor with the 8mm frame you're going to get a better result, at higher resolutions. The bigger issue, though, is that 16mm film won't run through an 8mm camera because it has half the perfs needed, so the whole idea is kind of moot. -perry

The spacing and size are the same, but there are twice as many perfs in 8mm. So you couldn't use 16mm film in a regular 8 camera, because half the necessary perfs would be missing and the camera would be clawing at raw film. You can put 8mm (processed film) in a 16mm splicing block and it'll fit just fine because the spacing for every other perf of 8mm is the same as every perf in 16mm.

We do a fair bit of scanning for students at local film schools, including two art schools, where hand processing is pretty common. It's a very cool look if you're ok with the risk factor and the uncertainty. If you're looking for pristine, best to send it out, but if you want something a bit rough around the edges, doing it by hand can yield interesting results. I'd also recommend processing as negative, if you're planning to scan the film anyway.

FWIW, if the client asks us to do this, we'll do it for free. As David says, it's literally a 30 second fix for a 3 minute reel of film. Of course, if there were 75 reels of film we had to do this to, it would probably be a different story, but it would certainly not be very much money since it's out of sync by a consistent, fixed duration.

Correcting it is simple enough (but would cost significantly less than $1000!) I'm just trying to do some forensics here to figure out why it is the way it is. I've just never seen a track like this that was so far out of sync, but was so obviously recorded in-camera, which would have been in sync.

Well, that was my initial thought too - I did a ton of post-dubbing on a motorized Super 8 editor myself back in the day. But the thing is, there's no indication this happened. That is, there's no background music or anything someone might have added to the film. And the ambient sound is consistent with what's in the frame (for example, you can hear a television newscast in the track, and there's a television showing the news in the picture) -- sure, someone might have dubbed the sound in but it's not pertinent to the subject matter, and given the content of the film (a child's birthday party, where people are passing the mic around), it doesn't seem like someone would have gone to the trouble of post-dubbing *exactly* what was already recorded on the camera. At some points, you can see the cable from the mic stretching directly to the lower right side of the lens, suggesting it was plugged directly into the camera. Also, the mic is banged around a lot physically, and you hear all of those thumps, just way out of sync. Some sound editing machines for Super8 let you bounce from stripe to stripe, which could introduce a slight delay (maybe a frame or so), but in this case, there's only sound recorded on the main stripe, not the balance stripe so it seems unlikely that that happened. And they'd have had to make 8 or 9 roundtrips between stripes to get it that far out. I've verified on another device (a sound-enabled viewer) that the sound is out of sync on the film. I just can't figure out how it got that way.