Perry Paolantonio

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.

So here's something I haven't seen before: A client sent us some Super 8 Sound film shot in the 1980s, but the audio is consistently about 1 second out of sync throughout the reel. How is this possible? The sound record head was a fixed distance (18 frames) from the gate in all sound cameras, and it's clear that this is sync sound with appropriate ambient noise (not post-dubbed on a projector or editor). The subjects are holding the typical cheap condenser microphone that came with most of these cameras. You can hear them bump the mic against a table about a second before you see them do it. I could see a sloppy manufacturer having the head be maybe a frame or two out of place, but given the way S8 Sound carts were constructed, there's not enough of a window for the record head to be a full 18 frames *more* away from the gate than it already is. Any ideas? I'm stumped. (and just to verify it's not our scanner, we've scanned several other films known to be in perfect sync and they're absolutely fine). -perry

We are doing 5k 16m and Super 16 on our ScanStation and we're 1-day shipping via UPS Ground (cheap) from Cinelab.

Here's an example of a 2k scan made on our scanner in 5k mode. That is, the full 5k sensor is used, to output a 2k file. If you look at the Super2k example, you can see that the grain is much more finely resolved than a straight 2k scan done on the same scanner. I realize you're asking about 4k, but the question is whether the detail is there, and the answer is clearly yes, whether the scanner is scaling down to 2k or to 4k. http://www.gammaraydigital.com/blog/case-super2k Assuming you're using a scanner that has extremely high quality optics in it (like our ScanStation), the main factor in terms of sharpness is probably going to be the lens on your camera. I'd second the suggestion to use a pin-registered camera like an Arri SR, though you could also look at Eclair ACLs or Aatons, both of which produce extremely stable images and are available for reasonable prices these days. Lens options are better on all of these cameras since they have more "professional" mounts available, where the Bolex is just a C-Mount. Nothing wrong with C-mount, but if you were to rent lenses, you'll probably have a wider range to choose from if you've got a variety of mount choices at your disposal. My ACL, for instance, has a C-mount built in, but also has an Eclair mount ring that allows for Eclair's bayonet mount. There were similar adapters for this camera for Nikon and PL mount, I believe. Your choice of stock and the lighting will affect graininess. Generally, overexpose a bit with neg. The scanner is really resolving grain, so as long as you're working with a high quality scanner, the rest is up to you in terms of the lens and lighting... -perry

Just curious - why go to digital betacam these days?

I've got one of the Beaulieu 4008 Pro8mm Max8 modified cameras, but I'm noticing that the battery life is pretty bad - It's supposed to last "50 rolls" but I'm barely getting through one. I think these are NiCads, which sucks, because of memory issues. I'm wondering if anyone has the schematics for these battery packs that I might look at, because I think I want to build my own. The way it's constructed, to take it apart is to basically ruin it (looks like it's basically a cluster of sub-c cells stuffed inside a big heat shrink tube. So there's no easy way to open it without destroying the case. Happy to do that if I need to, but I'd like to look at some pictures or a schematic first, if one is available. My thought is that I might just build my own using better, more modern batteries. Or if a standard belt exists that I could pick up cheaply, I'd go for that too. Thanks! -perry

Actually, with Super 8 there's also the issue of Kodak's sloppy perforations, which cause lateral movement on pin registered scanners or digital stabilization done using the perfs as reference points, if the camera used is either pin-registered or exceptionally stable. That's totally independent of both camera and scanner, and is squarely (heh, get it? square -- like perfs?) on Kodak's shoulders. It's annoying, to say the least.

http://www.revostock.com/SearchResult.html?text=super+8&themediatype=video http://www.shutterstock.com/video/search/?searchterm=super+8&lang=en&language=en&search_source=footage&safesearch=1&version=llv1 http://www.istockphoto.com/videos/super+8#17502aa2 If you search "Super 8" on most stock footage sites, there's stuff there.

Thanks, David. That makes more sense. I hadn't considered the spacing between photosites might be wider, with the sensor physically being the same size as if it had 6k horizontal photosites. That's pretty clever, actually. -perry

Assume the image is projected onto a plane that the sensor is focused on. If the sensor is 3x2k, and the image fills the sensor area, and there's a miro-movement in the sensor position between images that it takes of the film frame (all of which is what I'm getting from this thread), then how is a 6k image a direct sample? if the sensor is 3000x2000 and the output is 6000x4000, then it must be using those multiple exposures from slightly different positions to interpolate up a new image. Again, this would be more accurate than a single 3000x2000 upscale, but it's still scaling, no? Or is the sensor taking an image, moving 3000 to the left and taking another, then 2000 down for a third, then 2000 to the right for the last, then stitching? That would produce a 6000x4000 image, directly sampled. If that's the case, then I'm not understanding the 'half-pixel offset' that David Mullen describes, thus my confusion. -perry

What I'm not really understanding is how it's making a 6k image from a 3k x 2k sensor. From their web site, on the technical specs: The way I interpret this is that the sensor is taking 4 shots of the frame, to result in a 6k x 4k image. There are two ways one could do this, I'd think: 1) Move the sensor down 2k or across 3k, depending on the image being taken, stitch them together. However, based on what you said earlier in the thread about it moving a half pixel, it sounds like: 2) Take multiple images with a micro-shift in the sensor position, and use those to interpolate a 6k image. Now, that's not the same as blowing up a 3k x 2k image to 6k, which would involve making up a lot of image data. A lot of accurate information can be derived by subpixel changes in an image, so you'd probably get a significantly better interpolation to 6k this way than with a single shot at 3k x 2k. But I'm not understanding how this is truly a 6k image if it's doing that. It's still interpolated. Or am I completely misunderstanding what's going on inside the machine? -perry

Ahh - I misunderstood. I was under the impression the Arriscan used a full 6k sensor and downsampled to resolutions like 2k or 4k. Instead it's using a 3k sensor, taking two images to make a 6k composite, then downsampling that? Is there a technical advantage to making a 6k scan this way, or is it a result of the lack of 6k sensors at the time the scanner was designed? on its face, it sounds kind of kludgy. -perry

Now I'm curious about this - what's the reasoning behind the offset?

I agree that the CIRO splicers are easiest for editing. We deal with a lot of archival film scanning, and need to attach head and tail leader as well as performing the occasional broken splice repair. I personally prefer tape splices for these repairs, because you can back out of them by removing the tape (vs a cement splice, which permanently alters the film). In these cases, the Rivas splicers are better because they're a bit more flexible. But again, when editing new film, you can't beat the speed of a CIRO splicer.

Their credit card system is definitely a bit weird. I recently ordered some 7203 and some 7266 Super 8. The charge for the total amount appeared on my card, but because the Tri-X was backordered, the charge disappeared and they charged me again just for the color neg. Then when the Tri-X was ready to ship, they charged for the balance. The total added up to the same amount, but it was confusing to see the charges appearing and disappearing from my account. Kodak, sadly, is totally old school on customer service and ordering, preferring to do everything over the phone - why they haven't set up proper online ordering is beyond me. It would save them money and it would be a hell of a lot more convenient for most people. I would recommend getting the name of a CSR who is helpful, and make sure to ask for them whenever you call so that you're dealing with the same person every time - it'll make resolving issues like this easier. Get their email address, too.

These are good splicers for new film, but I wouldn't use them on older or shrunken material. The tape used by these has no pre-made perfs, so the splicer creates them when you push the lever down - this is perfectly fine on new stock, but on older film it can be problematic. For that reason, we use Rivas splicers for 16mm and 35mm. In these, the film is held down on either side of the splice by only two pins, and one of those pins is spring loaded, so you can put shrunken film in it without fear of damaging the film. The splicing tape is pre-perforated, and if the perfs don't line up perfectly, that's ok for our scanner, but it's easy enough to cut out the excess tape with an Xacto knife if need be. -perry