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Perry Paolantonio

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Posts posted by Perry Paolantonio

  1.  

     

    Seems to me that if I was to do a low budget or micro budget feature on film, I would budget/borrow $50k to buy a scanner like Perry mentioned for the term of the project and sell it at the end. Even if you just get 50% of your money back you probably come out way ahead vs. scanning all those dailies. Maybe even scan some friends films at the same time for a little extra money.

     

    Here's the thing. If you're paying $25k to scan your dailies, you're either doing the work in the wrong place, or you're talking about insane amounts of film.

     

    A little over 20 years ago, I made a 16mm documentary from raw stock to finished print. It was only a 12 minute film. I worked some deals on the stock, had free access to cameras through my school, and happened to work at the lab, so I got heavily discounted processing, timing and printing. I had to pay full price for my optical track, because the lab didn't do that in-house. that 12 minute film cost me a grand total of about $3000 over the course of a year, and that's with discounts and upgrades to my Mac LCIII to handle 16bit sound so I could do my own audio mix ($500 for a 500MB hard drive!). Had I paid full price for processing, rented sync sound cameras and tape decks, and had I paid for a facility to do my mix, I would have been into it for well over $5000, most likely.

     

    Film --the whole process of making one-- has always been an expensive proposition. The only way to do it on a shoestring is to work deals, and frankly, most businesses in the industry are willing to do that, if you're reasonable about expectations and willing to be flexible.

     

    The good news, at least in terms of DI and scanning, is that the insanely specialized hardware to do this is becoming much more inexpensive, and that's allowing services like ours to offer very reasonably priced scans. I haven't heard of anyone working in 16mm doing a $25K scan job in a while, unless you're talking major productions like some television shows or bigger-budget features.

     

    -perry

  2. Bear in mind that with cameras like the R10, Logmar, Beaulieu, Leicina, some Canons (and even the lowly Quarz) that have very steady transports, you'll either have to use a scanner like the ScanStation or do post-scan stabilization, assuming you use a scanner that does optical pin-registration. To my knowledge, the ScanStation is now the only one that properly handles Kodak's messed up perf placement on Super 8, which causes jerky back and forth motion on film shot on high end cameras, when the scanner uses the perfs to digitally pin-register the scan.

     

    You can see an illustration of the perf issue here:

     

     

    ...basically, they're not consistently placed, relative to the edge of the film, but the problem only really shows up when the film is shot in a pin-registered camera like the Logmar, or a camera with a very stable transport, like the others mentioned above. That, in combination with a pin-registered scanner results in an annoyingly jittery image that requires post-scan stabilization, and that can have negative effects on the image quality if not done correctly (blur, pixel interpolation, etc).

     

    The footage above was actually scanned on our ScanStation a while back. It's from one of the very early prototype Logmar cameras. Lasergraphics recently released a recent fix to address this problem in their scanner - the perf is still used for vertical registration but now the edges of the film are used for horizontal, and that all but eliminates the jitter problem. Now, you see the opposite effect, which is more representative of what's actually happening on the film: the film is steady (left to right), but the perf jitters back and forth in the pattern seen above). I don't think the Kinetta, Flashscan or others that use optical registration are doing this, so your mileage may vary with those machines.

     

    -perry

  3. I rendered it out of Avid at h.264, with best rendering option and multiple pass setting.

     

    In a word ...Don't.

     

    Feed the site the highest quality you can, even if that means you have to wait overnight to upload. H.264 is highly compressed even at high bit rates, and is strips out a lot of color information as well. Doesn't matter if *that* file looks good on your computer because Vimeo, Youtube and whoever will recompress it further, to their specs, after you've uploaded it. Think of it is as a photocopy of a photocopy. Generation loss and all that.

     

    Try uploading something like a ProRes 422 file (even regular ProRes 422 should give you an improvement, with a little file size savings over HQ). Also, higher resolution matters here. If you can upload 2k, you get better HD when they recompress it. Same with YouTube.

     

    -perry

  4. The next step up from Moviestuff would be the new Blackmagic Cintel that runs around $30,000.

     

    ...but doesn't actually exist in the wild except for a few slick photos of the models who apparently run these machines. It's been close to a year and a half since they were first announced at NAB 2014, with no sign of them. As of today, vaporware, pretty much.

     

    Lasergraphics has a stripped down version of The ScanStation now that starts at about $50k, I believe. limited in several ways but I'm sure more feature packed than the Cintel or Moviestuff units.

     

    -perry

  5. Take a look at the date on this thread - 10 years ago almost to the day! Things have changed a bit in the past decade, so it seems unfair to criticize someone for something they said back then...

     

    That said, while scanning motion picture film on a flatbed is doable, it's a needlessly tedious process. There are much better ways to handle this kind of thing in 2015 using simple, cheap motion control systems, LED lighting and industrial machine vision cameras, scanning frame by frame, and avoiding the need for all all that post-scan processing work.

     

    Also, telecine for 8mm and 16mm films is basically done at this point. There are several scanners on the market now that can do 2k or higher resolution scans for small gauge film, and all do an excellent job. Anyone using a telecine for this is pretty much limited to HD at the most, unless it's heavily modified, and even then, it's subject to all the limits of that kind of a system.

  6. A lot of the films we work on for North American DVD and Blu-ray release are film-originated. Most were converted to 25fps for broadcast in Europe or other PAL regions. The films themselves were typically made at 24, but the best available masters are frequently at 25.

     

    It's something we've become pretty adept at dealing with over the years, because we never know what we're going to get. A month ago we got 4 films that were all at 25 (but were originally shot at 24). Last week, three more for the same client that were transferred in Europe from the film masters to 24 (so we need to make 23.98 masters for DVD/BD here).

     

    -perry

  7. 24 vs 25 is a big difference though. In the 80s I remember hearing about ways to correct the pitch of the sound. So a documentary shot at 25 fps for tv would sound ok projected in the cinema.

     

    Most modern time stretch algorithms do pitch correction. We do this all the time, converting from 25fps masters to 23.98 (often for clients who can only get the good masters of US films from European distributors, so they're at 25). Even tools like Soundtrack Pro do a nice job of pitch correcting. You'd never know the speed was changed unless you were watching a clock.

     

    -perry

  8. A Spirit is generally used as telecine system and not a scanner. For example, the Northlight is also an older machine like the Spirit. But, it's a far superior ( and slower ) scanner, not telecine.

     

    That's a good point, and I should have been clearer in my original post - I'd avoid older *telecine*-style transfer systems, for the reasons David enumerated. Even the Scanity can have problems with splices, simply because it's a line scanner with a continuous motion transport.

     

    Our Northlight is like 12 years old and slow as hell, but produces beautiful scans. Unlike the Spirit, though, it's an intermittent transport, so it's not subject to the frame warping that happens on machines like the Spirit/Shadow/Scanity.

     

    -perry

  9. Can anyone also recommend any other labs that do 2k scanning for a reasonable cost?

     

     

    Hi Mayer,

     

    We don't do processing, but if you'd like a quote on scanning, send me a message (or use the contact form on our web site.

     

     

    Personally, I'd avoid transferring on older hardware like the Spirit. You will get better results from a modern large-sensor scanner like the Xena or our 5k ScanStation, even if you're only outputting to 2k.

     

    -perry

  10. Same here - my ACL 1.5 always kept perfect sync. I've recorded audio with a Nagra 4, Tascam DAT and even a cheap handheld digital voice recorder, and all were dead on when synced up.

     

    As long as both devices (camera and audio recorder) have crystal sync, you're good to go.

     

    -perry

  11. Setbacks like this are totally normal and should be expected. The steam power thing, that's just crazy to me!

     

    ...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

    • Upvote 1
  12. 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

    • Upvote 1
  13. If there is serious sprocket damage, do any of these facilities have a way to correct when the film starts 'skipping'? I've got a few films where the sprocket holes are completely gone for as much as a couple feet, and the faux sprocket hole areas are basically guilotine splicing tape, which don't always hold during projection (as I recall anyway - haven't had a working projector in five years.)

     

    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

  14. @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

  15. Thanks, I didn't realize it varied so greatly. The place I contacted quoted for a minimum of 1 hour labor, less than 30 minutes of film they still charge for an hour..umm. We'll see. After researching I'd prefer a Data scan, 4 k.

     

    I think for where I am at and for my goals, I'll never be sending in more than 10 or 15 minutes a film at a time for scanning...if that much.

     

     

    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

  16. I just heard a quote for what the hour minimum charge for a 2k scan was and i'm actually a bit stunned.

     

    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

  17. 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

  18.  

    I understand what you are saying, Perry. But seeing as how I can't view Friedemann's film any other way, I am forced to make a judgment based on what I see on the web...just like every other video that is shared across it.

     

    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

  19. It actaully remains to be seen if the perf is faulty, ie. outside the range of tolerances permitted for Super8. Or how the pin-rego handled the film . In other words it's not due to any perf problem that image stabilisation was used. There just isn't yet any scanner set up to exploit the camera's pin-rego. Absence of proof isn't proof.

     

    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

  20.  

    Hi Friedemann. I know this is 50D which is fine-grained to begin with, but did you have any grain-removal done?

     

    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.

  21. I wonder how much of the achievable quality is down to the camera, though. The overwhelming majority of the technology is in the lens and the filmstock. As is inevitable with super-8, the registration, looking at that sprocket hole dancing about, is poor.

     

    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

  22. 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.

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