Perry Paolantonio

It's my understanding that this is a C-mount lens once you remove the motorized zoom control box that's attached to it, along with the larger ring screw mount. I'm wondering if anyone has instructions on how to do this? I've taken out the three set screws that hold the collar that the zoom control seems to be attached to, and I was hoping the whole thing might slide off or unscrew, but it's not happening. So, I feel like I'm missing something. Any suggestions? Thanks, -perry

These are the second generation encoders I was referring to - tsunami, cinemacraft, etc. We were pretty early adopters of both, even though we had one of the better hardware MPEG encoders. Speed wise, you couldn't beat the hardware at first, but you got better quality at lower bit rates so it was worth the tradeoff if the schedule allowed.

If they're older discs, it could also be encoding issues. The first DVD I ever bought was 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was unwatchably bad compression. Space wasn't solid black, it was this crazy mosaic of macroblocking! And the ship interiors were just swimming in compression. Truly awful. In the early days of DVD the compression tools weren't so great. in about 2004/2005, there was a new generation of encoders and quality improved dramatically, giving you exponentially better picture at the same bit rates. It wouldn't surprise me if what you're seeing is related to heavy handed noise reduction, which was a technique used a lot in the early days of DVD to keep the encoders from totally freaking out on noise in the master tapes. Remember that back then almost all compression was done in hardware, direct from tape, not in software like it is today.

Believe it or not, in 2014 we still get the occasional master on BetaSP from telecine work done in the 80s, for commercial feature film DVD releases. Usually we try to persuade the client to find a newer master if they can, because these transfers often have the issues you've described. Not to mention 25+ year old Beta SP tapes are rarely dropout-free. But, sometimes the film is lost and all that's left are those transfers. I think in the early days of DVD the studios were just cranking out whatever they had on tape, to start filling shelves. -perry

"shake" or weave is common in transfers that don't use pin registration or some kind of active stabilization mechanism (whether in-transfer or in post). Breathing, where the film is going in and out of focus, could be from shrinkage like Rob says. Are you seeing this in a consistent pattern, or is it only at cuts? With telecine-like machines that use constant motion and a line scanner, you can get some warping of the image at cuts. This will look like a blur or smear, usually across only part of the frame, though. It's also possible, since you're using DVD as a reference, that the problem is in the encode and not the transfer from film. I've seen some truly awful discs made by the major studios (looking at you, Warner). I mean really terrible: aggressive noise reduction, terrible compression, etc. The compression on DVD (and Blu-ray) is temporal as well as spatial, so it's not unusual for the only good looking frames to be I-Frames (usually every 12-15 frames), with the rest looking kind of meh. This could cause an effect that looks like the picture is going in and out of focus.

Matt, Our rates are in line with what you're looking for, for 2k scans, not HD (we can do HD, too, but there's little point unless your film is shot widescreen). No minimum for camera test reels or for students, but we do have a 100' minimum for normal orders. You can supply your own hard drive, and there are no fees for copying the files. DPX, TIFF, Quicktime, whatever you need. Turnaround time is generally 24 hours for small orders. PM me if you want more info, or send me an email through our web site (the contact form goes directly to me). -perry

One thing to consider: an HD scan is always widescreen, super 8 (except in certain circumstances) is not. So if you transfer to HD, you're really only getting about 1440x1080 of picture, and a lot of black in the pillarboxes on the sides. If you transfer to 2k, you get more than twice the resolution, and a scan that matches the film's aspect ratio. The advantage of this is that it gives you flexibility to reposition the image or crop out gate hairs, etc, when you downconvert to HD for display. And you'll have a 2k version for future use. If you scan to HD, and you need to do motion stabilization in software, or if you want to crop the film a little differently, you're starting from a much more difficult place than if you do a 2k scan. Also, there's a lot more picture in Super 8 than most people think, even contrasty reversal from 50 years ago. There is a real benefit to scanning it on a proper high dynamic range scanner at 2k. I really didn't think we'd be doing a lot of 2k home movie scanning when we bought our ScanStation last year, but I've been proven wrong - I'd say about 60% of home movies we scan are done at 2k. I think it's because the additional cost to do 2k scanning is negligible, and the arguments above are compelling enough that if you're going to pull the trigger on scanning a big pile of films, it's worth it to just do it at the highest res possible the first time. All of that applies to freshly shot negative as well, of course. If your film was shot in a widescreen format, one could make an argument for scanning direct to HD, but I still think it makes sense from a workflow perspective to do it at 2k, which buys you more flexibility up front. And if these are destined for YouTube, you're better off uploading 2k, because you get nicer HD display once they've recompressed it. -perry

Many of the studios do work in house, or hire it out to one of a few companies. The odds of them telling you who does their work are slim to none, though - they tend to keep that information private for whatever reason. We specialize in DVD and Blu-ray authoring for feature films (and have for 14 years). I'd be happy to give you a quote - PM me your email if you're interested.

We charge a nominal fee for prep on small gauge scanning (8mm and 16mm up to 2k): a few bucks per reel to cover the cost of the leader and the 5-10 minutes work it takes to actually make two splices and rewind the reel. Others charge more for this. We originally didn't charge anything for it, but leader can get expensive (especially when you have to prep 100+ 50' reels), so we charge for that now. In most cases, this is all we need to do, because our scanner can deal with most bad splices or perf damage, so prep time is pretty minimal. On scanners that can't deal with bad perfs, there may be more setup involved, so they may just charge a larger flat rate for everyone. We don't charge for file copying. You're paying for digital files, and the only way to get them to you is on a hard drive or similar media. Charging for copy time is a little nickle-and-dimey feeling (though at the rates you quote, that's a lot of nickles and dimes). That said, if you absolutely had to have files right away, we'd charge a rush fee for a large file copy operation - it ties up the machine and we can't be scanning on it at the same time, which costs us money. In most cases, with large file copies, we just set it up to run overnight when it doesn't matter, and we don't charge for that. (By the way, Firewire is relatively slow, especially for large files - eSATA would be much faster, and is what we recommend/prefer for DPX/TIFF scans). Depending on the scanner and workflow, there may be more or less work involved in any given operation from lab to lab. For example, our scanner can scan directly to ProRes file (or to DPX or TIFF or whatever). A lot of scanners only go to DPX or similar image-based formats. If you don't need DPX and just want a ProRes file, we just scan right to that format and we're done with it. With other scanners, you need to do a file conversion. That does take up computer time, plus a nominal amount of operator time to set up the job, but it's largely an unattended operation. From your perspective, you just want ProRes, so why should you have to pay for a conversion from another format (totally understandable point of view, I might add). But from the lab's perspective, the scanner doesn't do that, so there's a lot of work involved for them. The pricing for this stuff can get complicated, which is part of the reason we don't put our rates on the web site. Sometimes that information is misleading and you can actually end up paying less (or more) than the rate sheet shows. Kind of like taking your car to the mechanic: they're not going to give you a price to fix something without figuring out exactly what they need to do first. My feeling is that charging a lot for things that don't involve skills (copying files, for instance) isn't in our best interest, so we don't do it. Then again, our overhead is much lower than many other labs, and we're not in LA, where apparently you can charge for things like that.

Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you start with low quality, you end with lower quality. as was mentioned, a dSLR is recording to a very highly compressed file format. That introduces all manner of artifacts into the image, some you can see, some you can't. But even the ones you can't see have an effect on later processing of the image. I'm not a camera guy, so I'll let someone else talk about the specifics, but the simple fact of the matter is - if you're going to put your picture through the wringer, which is the norm in any post-production workflow, even simple ones, then you need to start with the highest quality. Otherwise, by the time the picture comes out the other end, it's got a ton of other problems. Compression is the first one that pops to mind, but there's other stuff: the quality of the lenses, the color space of the captured file, the noise introduced by the sensor, the quality of the processing done inside the camera, and on and on. With something like a dSLR, you're baking a ton of problems into your source file - sometimes things that cannot be unbaked in post.

Aside from all the other reasons people have enumerated above, how do you think these things are developed? The amount of engineering time and effort that goes into making something like this literally takes years, with multiple people working on it (electrical and mechanical engineers, software developers, etc). Those people have to be paid salaries, they need offices to work in, electricity bills have to be paid, parts need to be purchased, they need tools to make these things (which themselves are incredibly expensive), subcontractors need to machine bits of the camera, manufacture circuit boards, build chips, etc. That's before you get into marketing it, building a network of sales people, and doesn't even begin to consider technical support, shipping costs, and any of a host of other things that one needs to consider when something is being manufactured. Arri isn't in it to make cameras for free, they're doing it because it's a business, and they need to turn a profit. So, on top of all the costs that go into making and selling them, they need to do more than break even. Because if they don't, they won't exist. Money is needed to feed future development, so there's more to it than just breaking even. How many of these do you think they sell in a year? I'd be surprised if it's much more than 100-150 of them. This is a specialty market, unlike iPhones or dSLRs, where millions of units will be sold (in turn bringing the manufacturing costs way down). While it would be amazing if we had Star Trek style replicators available to just spit these out at will, making things (especially complicated, high quality things), is hard, slow, expensive work, and that costs money.

That makes a lot of sense actually - H264 is very highly compressed, so it's going to cause all kinds of problems with further compression passes. You might also experiment with ProRes (422HQ or 4444) instead of Uncompressed. It's a lightly compressed format, but gives you much more reasonable file sizes than Uncompressed. It's often a good trade-off when space is an issue - faster file copy times, faster render times, less disk space, and sometimes even faster encodes for Blu-ray, depending on your setup.

This is not a bad idea, to be honest. The tools used to compress the discs you buy commercially start at about $10k. With tools like Encore or other desktop authoring software, the encoding is usually so-so unless you're doing short, high bitrate encodes. The source file you feed into the encoder is a major factor as well. If you're giving the encoder something shot on a dSLR, it's probably going to look pretty bad, especially in the blacks. If it's a high quality film transfer, a good encoder shouldn't have any problem with the film grain. Also, with Blu-ray there are three different codecs you can use for your video. Stick with AVC and you definitely want to do a multi-pass encode to get the best results. If you're using MPEG2, it's only really going to look good at very high bit rates. Nobody really uses VC1, but it's basically equivalent to AVC. Also, if you're planning to replicate the discs, you really want the disc authored on software like Scenarist or BluPrint, since they're guaranteed to produce compliant disc images for the replicator. I think Adobe says Encore can do it, but from what I've been told it doesn't work well and a lot of replicators don't like the disc images it makes. We use Scenarist and have authored hundreds of feature films on DVD and Blu-ray. We investigated all the cheaper software, but wound up dropping $30k on the Scenarist system several years ago because nothing else was as reliable or produced comparable encodes. Other than it being a nightmare of a user interface, no real regrets about that decision... -perry

It would depend on the camera, of course, but let's say a brand new dSLR has a lifespan of 300,000 exposures (I'm basing this on a number I saw on the kinograph web site, but actual numbers could be way lower depending on the camera). One reel of Super 8 is 3600 exposures. Odds are good you'll have to redo a lot of stuff, so build in a conservative overage of 25%. That is, for every 3600 frame reel, you'll have to scan 3600 frames + 900 more, or 4500 total. Some reels will go through fine on the first try, some will need to be redone entirely. So it kind of all evens out. That means with a brand new camera, you'd have about 66 rolls worth of transfers before that camera is at the end of its useful life. Now, let's say you're using a camera that's in the $500 range - fairly low for a dSLR. A good one with a nice sensor would be $1000+ for the body alone. But let's keep it cheap for the sake of argument. A $500 camera works out to about $8/roll to transfer. Yup- cheap. But you have to assume you'll replace that camera every 66 rolls - We've scanned home movie collections that have twice that number, and that isn't at all unusual. 66 rolls is not that long a life, and that number assumes you're doing very little re-scanning (which in reality is uncommon, especially for a DIY setup where you may need to tweak settings repeatedly). With used cameras or cheaper cameras, the lifespan will be lower, so you might only get 30-40 rolls out of the camera body. But the bigger issue with mixing and matching is inconsistency from camera to camera. The sensor in camera A might be just a tiny bit off from the sensor in camera B, both in terms of calibration and physical placement (the tiniest variations won't matter for still photography, but will for motion picture scanning, where changes from Camera A to Camera B will be amplified and noticeable when you cut between them). Matching up scans, especially if you're in the middle of a large project, could be a potential problem and a lot of extra post production work. Honestly, if you're going to do something like this, just use a proper machine vision camera that was meant for this kind of work.

The problem with HD and Super 8 (or regular 16mm) is that unless you're shooting a widescreen format like, you've got a pretty big mismatch in aspect ratios. That means you have to either crop the Super8 frame to fit the 16:9 HD frame, or you need to pillarbox. If you pillarbox, you're getting a relatively small image area (about 1440x1080). By contrast, scanning to 2k, you get a frame that's about the same aspect ratio as your original film frame, at more than twice the resolution (1440x1080 vs 2048x1556). We try to price our 2k scans so they're not much more than a high end HD telecine transfer, for this reason. Unless you want to crop, HD isn't a good fit for Super 8 or Regular 16mm, in my opinion. -perry

It's hard to say without seeing the raw, uncompressed sequence, but it's possible the transfer was done with some kind of noise reduction hardware in the signal path. If the settings are too aggressive, this kind of thing can happen. That shouldn't happen with a frame-by-frame film scanner (not just the Arriscan).

By "compression" I assume you mean the warping that can happen at splices and such, right? That depends on the scanner design. Machines like the Imagica or Northlight are intermittent motion but use linescan cameras (part of the reason they're so slow). The film is held in place and the scanner itself is moved across the frame, rather than having the film run constantly past the scanner. Because it's pin registered, you don't wind up with the same kind of warping you'd see in a telecine, when you hit a splice. But it ain't fast.

Is the disc NTSC? Most of Region 2 is PAL - if that's the case and you're watching on a computer, then it would be showing at 25fps. and should be a 1:1 frame mapping to the original film. If it's NTSC, it was probably transferred at 23.976. If it was a new transfer to HD, it would have been done at this frame rate. If it's an older transfer, it would have been done to an interlaced format at 29.97, with pulldown. In either case, if properly encoded it will show at 23.976, as a progressive stream, with no pulldown artifacts.

When I worked in a lab (20 years ago), we did it by feel, in a dark room, slowly. There was no grounding of the rewinds, you were just careful. At least here in New England, summers can be humid and you wouldn't see as much static then. But winters are typically very dry. If you wind too fast, you can see a halo of static electricity. Personally I wouldn't risk it, especially with higher speed films. I mean, any film on rewinds has the potential to generate static electricity (exposed or unexposed negative, prints, whatever), especially if you're using your fingers to keep the tension on the film. It's going to be worse if the air is dry, though.

It's a Quicktime ProRes file, but it's only 2 frames, so it doesn't really "play" per se. It's just to show the layout. If you can see the image, you get the idea. -perry

Would something like this be of use in camera evaluations? https://www.dropbox.com/s/r0e1hfda7i3r937/FilmEvalSample_S8.mov We currently offer this kind of low-res, low cost (960x720) scan to film archives for evaluating shrunken and damaged film that they can't otherwise view on projectors or other sprocket-driven devices. It's overscanned so you can see the full frame, and it occurs to me that this might be of use in camera test reels as well. What do you guys think?

You need a darkroom. Not just a dark room, but a room completely free of light leaks. If you have such a space, you'll need a clean rewind bench and a set of good rewinds (you can get them on ebay fairly cheaply). If you need to spool to cores, then you also need a tightwind arm on the left rewind. Now that you're set up, it goes like this: --In total darkness-- 1) stand in the room for several minutes to acclimate, and tape off any light leaks around the door with gaffer's tape 2) Put your film in a split reel, and stick it on the left rewind. Set up another split reel on the right side. 3) VERY SLOWLY wind the film from left to right until all of the film is on the right side. You have to go slowly to prevent static electricity from flashing the film. 4) Now remove the left split reel and replace it with a daylight spool. VERY SLOWLY rewind the film onto that until it's full. Repeat 3 more times. If you have something like an Eclair 200' mag and you want to go to cores, Step 4 is a bit different. In this case, you load up a 2" core on the left rewind, thread in your film and drop the tightwind arm. Then you have to load the film until you get to 200' -- but how do you know you're there in the dark? You have to practice with some leader or exposed film with a sync block that has a counter on it, and count the number of cranks on the left rewind. I used to know this number because I did this all the time for my Eclair, but I forget what it is now. I'm sure someone will know.

It's like a 40 year old camera. Probably a bad solder joint somewhere, and giving it a whack made a proper connection temporarily. If you're lucky it might be near the battery contacts and you might be able to fix it yourself without having to take the camera apart. More likely it's somewhere inside the camera though. A serious cleaning and overhaul might be necessary no matter what. But if you shoot a test roll and everything seems to work you might also choose to just live with it and use a handheld meter with the camera in manual mode. That's probably what I'd do. It might also not be electrical at all - since the meter display uses a physical needle, it's possible that was just stuck and a good smack loosened up whatever had it frozen in place. -perry

I built one of these years ago for my Eclair ACL and DAT recorder. the mic was mounted on the camera and hooked into the left channel of the dat, and the handheld bloop slate in the right. A button on the side of the slate box box lit a light and activated a tone generator (cheap kit bought at an electronics store) that sent 1000hz to the DAT. The whole setup cost me about $20 in parts and an hour to make. After a couple days of using it I went back to finger snaps. Without a sound person, it was too much bother. -perry

Snap your fingers in front of the lens. Shot slated. (if you want to get fancy, once for head, twice for tail, so you know which snap is which in your audio)