Perry Paolantonio

I don't use Vegas so I can't say for sure, but you should be able to make a simple transparent matte for this. http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/creating_masking_tracks_in_vegas

I wouldn't hold my breath. Like we discussed earlier, the sensors alone cost thousands. Even using their own camera as a base there's a ton of mechanical engineering work that goes into even simple scanners, so selling something for $5k seems highly unlikely. Cameras have no moving parts and they'll sell them in much greater numbers, which is why they're able to sell them cheaply. I just don't see that big a market for film scanners. They'd probably have to sell many thousands of them to turn a profit, and that seems unlikely.

On the Vistavision question - there are some scanners that can do it at 4k and higher. The old Imagica 3000v (there's a broken one on ebay for $2500 if you're feeling adventurous/masochistic) has a vistavision option. But it's something like 90 seconds per frame to scan at 4k. The Imager XE (faster, more expensive) had a Vistavision option as well, that worked at 6k x4k. I believe they offered an 8K and 10K sensor upgrade as well. I'm not sure how many of these are out there in the wild at these resolutions, though. I don't think they made a 2-perf gate for the XE, but they did have a 3-perf option. The "smaller" Imagica scanners work as Rob described on the bigfoot: the film is held in the gate for the duration of the scan, and the sensor sweeps the length of it. They're slow, but produce very nice scans. Both of Lasergraphic's scanners use area imagers, and I doubt they have an 8-perf option for the Director, since that would require fairly significant design modifications to accommodate the gate, lens and sensor assemblies. -perry

There's been a conversation on the AMIA-L about this, and to sum up one post, there are two ways to look at the price hike, either: 1) Kodak is trying to kill off the format 2) Kodak is trying to save the format I tend to think it's #2. If they wanted to stop making Super 8, they'd just stop. They have the power to do that. But film is making them a profit (even if it's not *that* much), and they can't afford to lose the cash flow that it brings in. The volume of customers buying film has dropped, obviously. So basic supply and demand dictates that the price will need to go up in order for them to cover their costs and still make a profit. Couple that with the fact that they're set up to make massive runs of film, not short batches, and the only way they can continue operating is to charge more. Is it painful to the customer? Yeah. But it's probably necessary for the survival of the format.

If you mean the ScanStation, the machine is limited to 2k, so anything bigger than 4-perf 35mm would really be pushing it. I'd have to check with Lasergraphics because they don't get into specifics on 35mm specs on their web site about what formats they support, but I don't think it'll do anything larger than 4-perf. My guess would be 2- 3- and 4-perf, all at 2k. Our ScanStation is for 8mm and 16mm only (R8/S8/R16/S16/U16). Their other scanner, the Director, is 4k with multi-flash HDR, the same kind of optical pin registration as the ScanStation and it handles 16mm and 35mm (2/3/4 perf). It's also twice the price of the ScanStation I'll leave that one to Rob, who knows more about these machines than I. -perry

What we do a lot of for independent filmmakers and students is flat scanning. Most people have access to at least rudimentary (often much more) color correction tools these days, whether in their NLEs or in free tools like Resolve. Doing a flat scan is relatively inexpensive and gets you the full dynamic range of the original film, without baking in the color corrections at that stage. This gives you maximum flexibility later. You can do a basic grade in your editing system to get it in the ballpark, then take your scans to a colorist to just do the final edit. This removes color correction from the transfer process, which lowers prices. Really, it's no different than all-digital workflows that use on-set grading tools to get a basic look, and a colorist later to finalize everything. That keeps the costs down, quite a bit. That said, in order for this to work, you need a scanner that can give you the latitude you'll require later on to make those adjustments, and that isn't cheap. If you build your own, a proper 2k machine vision camera with a good sensor in it is many thousands of dollars (That's just for the raw camera, not including the transport, the control software, etc). Using the Müller scanner as an example, only because it's fresh in my mind from NAB, the whole unit is about $35,000 for small gauge scanning with the "2k" camera. And it's pretty cool, for what it is. Except that it's really only 1.6k, it didn't seem to have very good dynamic range, and it required a lot of manual tweaking that you simply don't have to do with more expensive scanners. So while the initial hardware may be relatively cheap, you'll have to spend a lot more time at the scanning stage making sure you're not losing any detail in the scan itself so that you can do exactly what you're requesting. All that extra work makes for a costlier scan, negating much of the cost savings of the scanner itself.

Well, this remains to be seen. It may be a fine scanner. It may have issues. we won't know until it's in someone's hands. It depends entirely on the options you get. Between about $100k-$200k, though, is the range for that scanner. It can be customized in many ways, so the final cost depends on multiple factors. -perry

I think there may have been some motorized ones, but if it has rewinds, it's probably manual. Just do like they used to in the silent era and sing a little song to yourself while you crank, to keep the speed constant! I'd just avoid threading it up over and over again in a projector, because they tend to be fairly unforgiving. So you want to minimize the number of times you project your original. -perry

with reversal, it's typically called "camera original" and with neg, OCN or Original Camera Negative. The most basic editing setup would require: Set of rewinds Extra reels Leader Viewer Splicer white cotton gloves are a good idea, too, to minimize fingerprints on the film A sync block isn't strictly necessary, but can be handy if you need to count frames since most have built in counters. In terms of a splicer, if you look on ebay there are quite a few guillotine splicers, though they can be expensive. If you're really on a budget, a presstape splicer will do, it's just kind of a pain to work with. they're dirt cheap though. For viewers, Moviescops are the simplest, I think, though again they can be a bit expensive. If you look around, you can often find setups that include a viewer and rewinds mounted to a common platform, sometimes with a splicer built in. -perry

First thing - if you're shooting reversal, then it's not negative. It's a positive image. What's in the camera is what you're editing and projecting. The traditional workflow using neg would be to shoot negative, have a workprint made, then go back to the negative to cut it to match the final edit. From this, you'd strike your prints. In this scenario, the workprint is kind of sacrificial, because it will be handled quite a bit and every time the film is exposed to air, it's likely to pick up dust. You'll probably see a fair bit of dust and some small scratching, even if you're careful, at each cut you make. I would suggest that a better workflow would be to shoot the film and then scan it and edit digitally. Don't even project the film - go direct from processing to scanner, and you should get a pretty pristine looking scan. Any time the film is run through a projector, viewer, or even unspooled to look at by eye, you risk getting it dirty. That's why the old neg/workprint/neg cut workflow worked - the only times the negative were ever handled were when the film was shot, the film was processed and workprinted, and when the neg was cut to match the final edit. As a result, you ensured that any subsequent prints looked good. The same idea applies to hybrid film/digital workflows: handle the film as minimally as possible, and scan early. All that said, if you need to do this manually, don't run it through a projector, get yourself a simple Moviescop (or similar) viewer, sync block and rewinds on ebay. Set up a on a very clean bench, and be extra careful about how you handle the film. While presstape-style splices are fine, they're kind of a pain. If you can afford it, get a guillotine style splicer. Fewer fingerprints on the tape that way, and they're way faster to work with. -perry

Trust me, I understand where you're coming from in terms of budgets. No disrespect, but frankly your argument doesn't really make sense - on the one hand, you want to shoot film for the quality of the image. On the other, you say you're willing to compromise on the quality of the scan to save some money. I guess I just don't follow the logic. I went to art school for filmmaking, so I not only understand the budget constraints, I've been there myself and have had to deal with the same trade offs. We also do a lot of work for students, so the budgetary constraints are well understood. Maybe a little perspective will help make my point: Pre-digital editing, you'd have had to rent a steenbeck, pay for multiple prints along the way (workprints, answer prints, release prints, optical tracks), not to mention audio mix houses, mag tape dubs, someone to do your titles and any optical effects, negative cutting, the list goes on. All of the above were expensive but necessary steps. And all of the above can now be done with inexpensive, off the shelf computers (which you probably already have) with pretty inexpensive software. My point is that just like choosing a good camera and lens, or processing your OCN, the scan is not a good place to try to do things on the cheap, when there are so many other ways one can save that don't affect everything that happens downstream in post. Scanning costs *have* been steadily declining for years. Personally, if it were me and my own film (and I didn't have access to a really nice scanner) I'd pay someone else to do that because it's too important a step to try to save a few bucks. -perry

Remember though, that .30-.50/ft covers more than the cost of the scanner. Other than basic overhead (rent, electricity, salaries, ongoing support and maintenance costs, computer upgrades, etc), there's the experience of the operator of the machine. Believe me, there are systems out there that can make 16mm scanning happen cheaply (the Muller scanner for instance - it's about the same price as the Cintel), but it's got a very basic control interface and requires a fair bit of post-processing to get a good image - for example, there's no stabilization but they provide software that does it. It has to run overnight, for just a few minutes of film (on the other hand, scanners like the ScanStation and Director just do this while scanning). It automates almost nothing about the process, and is very bare bones. But even on scanners that automate many of the basic setup processes, like our ScanStation (base calibration, focus, primary grades, etc), it's pretty easy to produce a bad scan if you don't know what you're doing or what to look out for. Like I said, I do think the Cintel will shake things up a bit, and there are some for whom it will be an ideal scanner (We have clients who only want 2k 35mm scanning because they only release their films in HD, so this might be perfect for that kind of work). The quality of the scanner remains to be seen, as does the reliability of the machine. While this may be based on Cintel's past hardware, it's a new machine so there's really no telling yet how well it will work. My hunch on how this will play out: When Apple bought Spruce to acquire their high end DVD Authoring system (Maestro), they released it as a mac version for about $1000. As Spruce Maestro it was about a $30,000 system. The Apple version wasn't the same though, leaving out key features in the name of making the system simpler and easier to use. For many, it was good enough, and we saw a serious dip for about a year or two in our DVD authoring work, at the height of the DVD boom. Then something happened: clients started coming back to us to do their authoring because they were either in over their heads or they weren't able to get the same quality as we were, using essentially the same authoring system (Maestro). There are potentially a lot of parallels with Cintel - in the end it will make it possible for those who want to do things themselves to do it - more power to those folks. But for people who need to get the work done on time and on budget, with the work just done right the first time because of other pressures (deadlines, for example), that work will still be farmed out to companies with more experience. This has happened over and over again in the film industry for many years. -perry

It's quite good looking. They're being intentionally cagey about features, and the official line is that it's because they're looking for feedback on what features they should implement. The "demo" was one of two prototype units, and it was using a macbook pro on the computer side. I don't know if it was actually capturing or if it was just playing the film. My guess is that the software was purpose-built for the demo and consisted of just a viewer screen and RGB wheels for color correction. Captures to DNG, and since it comes with Resolve, that'll probably be the only format it captures to. At least, that's my guess. I would think they could repurpose the Media Express application to work with the scanner for capture. It's sprocketed, and they claim it will handle slightly shrunken film - we often see film worse than what it's supposed to handle, so I don't think this is going to be considered an archival scanner. Scanning back catalogs, yes. Scanning ancient film, probably not. There are connectors on the scanner deck for add-on devices such as an audio reader. They're actively working on that, they say. I would imagine there would be something for keykode and other metadata as well. I don't think smaller than 16mm is likely on this machine. All in all, it's pretty impressive, and I do like the approach they're taking of throwing it out there and asking for feedback before proceeding. Perhaps this is something they're changing about the culture at BMD. The scanner is not being hyped at the show. It was just there in a low key way, and there was a lot of headscratching by attendees ("hey look! film!"). I think they're definitely going to shake up the scanning world, at least in terms of pricing. I wouldn't expect this to be on par with the Director, Scanity or other high end machines, but I could be wrong. Without tech specs nailed down it's hard to say, but I do think it'll have an effect on the high end scanners, just by covering most of the basics. Interesting times.

Depends on what you're looking for and who you're asking. There are a lot of places that are sticking to the old models of very high minimum order sizes, very costly per-foot or per-frame rates, etc. And then there are those that aren't, in part because the most recent generation of film scanners required a much lower capital investment. In the past year, the pricing for scanning has already started to come down significantly, you just need to look around to find the deals. -perry

You at NAB, Rob? I'm heading out today and I'm planning to check this thing out tomorrow. My first take, based on a long history with BMD: 1) It's probably not done. According to the press release: "later in 2014 once all the NAB customer feedback has been included into the product" -- so, yeah, not done. 2) It's not likely to ship anywhere near that timeframe. Maybe next NAB? If it's inside a glass box at their booth and they don't have a model with platters spinning, then make that NAB 2016! 3) They spent an awful lot of time making it look pretty on the wall. Sure, we have more wall space than floor space right now, but it feels like they're marketing it as something you'd hang in your living room. I'm more concerned with the total lack of specs than how pretty it is. Check the photo out: http://images.blackmagicdesign.com/media/8756077/cintelfilmscannerhero.jpg 4) Doesn't look like it handles audio, at least from the pictures Don't get me wrong - I'm all for disruptive technology like this and I can't wait to see what it'll do to pricing on other scanners. But I'm not holding my breath on this. They still haven't implemented Teranex features they announced 3 years ago at NAB... Last year it was "3 months from now." -perrry

Will - you're correct. Scanning at 2k gives you more compositional flexibility later, should you need to make a 1.78:1 master, for example. But the most compelling reason for scanning at 2k vs HD for Super 8 is the aspect ratio, I think. A pillarboxed HD scan from Super 8 will get you an image area of only about 1440x1080 (approximately, width depends on the crop). However, a 2k scan of that same film gets you a file that's about 2048x1556 (again, exact dimensions depend on format and crop). That's more than twice the number of pixels for the same frame. To my mind, that's the main reason one would want to scan to 2k. If you're spending the money on a decent transfer, why cripple it by cropping to 1.4k from the get-go? By the way, we've seen some really fantastic looking Super 8 shot on Kodachrome and Ektachrome from the 60s and 70s, that looks just amazing in 2k. Lots of factors at play (quality of shooting, camera, lenses, light, processing, storage of film for the past 40+ years, etc), but just because it's old doesn't mean 2k is overkill. You'd be surprised how many people have opted to do their home movies with us at 2k. I was - honestly, I expected most consumers would want HD and only filmmakers would be interested in anything higher, but we priced our 2k scans so competitively that a lot of people are choosing it because it's not that much more than HD, for much more picture and greater flexibility. -perry

I realize you may not have the resources to fight this, but I have to be honest - they're screwing you because they're in the position of power here and they know it. If you took 10 seconds of CNN footage, tweaked the color and used it in your documentary, you can bet they'd be all over you. The fact that they've given you credit is nice, but it's not really enough. While it may not seem like it, not fighting this just creates a precedent that tells CNN that it's ok to steal other people's content. If they went to a stock footage house, they'd have paid $600+ for that footage - your work is worth something to them and you should be compensated for it with more than just a credit. If you're still a student, I'd see if the school where you study offers free legal services. Many schools do - often in cooperation with either their own or other local college's law schools. It's worth it even if you don't pursue this, just to find out the best way to cover yourself in the future. It may be too late to do something about this situation, especially if you already agreed to anything, but remember - the lawyer for CNN has nothing to lose here, so they can say whatever they want to make it sound like you don't stand a chance at winning. You're not a lawyer (presumably), so the approach they're likely taking is one of intimidation, even if it comes with a friendly smile and a token gesture like giving you credit. Sorry - this kind of thing really makes me mad. Your work is valuable and you should be compensated for it. Not demanding that just reinforces the status quo.

My understanding is that you don't need to do this (unless you want to "spoil" the video). The fact that you chose the Standard YouTube License means you're not making it freely available for anyone to use. I have a friend who shot a 1 minute iPhone video last summer of a praying mantis. It went (mildly) viral. Other YouTube accounts ripped it and re-posted it as their own, and it showed up on television (Inside Edition played it, apparently). My friend contracted with a UK company to go after the people who used it and get some compensation. Apparently this company went after broadcasters on my friend's behalf as well as web sites that had reposted the video as if it was their own (making money off their own advertisements at my friend's expense). Six months later they got a check for $1500. It's not much, but more than they ever expected to make off of it, which was zero. In any case, you should definitely speak with a lawyer and demand compensation. Too many TV stations treat YouTube as a free video stock footage warehouse.

The cable connecting my battery is similar to this, but since I made it myself I can't find an exact picture on the web. you get the idea though: I think mine is about 2' long coiled, and maybe 4' long stretched out. I never had any problems with strain on the camera's power connector. The weight of the battery (about 5lbs) isn't bad if you put the strap across your shoulder, and it actually came in handy a couple times in helping to stabilize a lightweight tripod I had to use on a shoot (gave it some extra weight!).

There's 12 feet of leader at the head and tail of the reels in the scanner - the film never "runs through" like it might in a projector. Tension is kept at a constant at all times and the film must be "loaded" in software (tensions applied, registration readied, base calibrated, etc), before you can start to scan. Before you can remove the film from the scanner, you have to "unload" in software - this unlocks the motors and "relaxes" the machine so you can unthread the film.

To answer your specific question: the ScanStation uses edge rollers to keep the film in approximately the correct location as it passes across the gate. Precise registration is done digitally, before the frame is written to disk. This is by design: with shrunken film, the amount of shrinkage can vary even within the same roll, so the edge rollers make sure the whole frame is imaged, but the digital registration is done to reposition each frame so it's where it should be. A registration pin's only point of reference is a perforation. If that perf is in a different location on the film than the other perfs, you'll see the film itself move slightly in the gate. The camera will always hold the perf in the same spot relative to the gate, but the film could move slightly if the perf isn't in the right spot. Since the whole point of pin registration is to hold the film in a known location in the camera (or scanner), the perforation is all the camera (or scanner) has to go by. If the perf is not placed precisely relative to the edge of the film, it will cause the whole strip of film to move around. The scanner's digital pin registration behaves like mechanical pin registration, though it's more accurate. That is, it looks only at the perforation and aligns that perforation to a fixed position on the X/Y axes. It does this for every frame, while scanning, with no post processing. In its simplest form, if it sees the perf is 1 pixel to the left of where it should be, it moves the whole image by 1 pixel on that axis, so that the perf aligns perfectly with the previous and subsequent frames. Friedemann's perforation video shows this - notice that the perfs themselves don't move, but the image does. The ScanStation doesn't look at the edges of the frames - it's NOT doing motion stabilization like you may be familiar with in an NLE or compositing tool, it's only doing pin registration - minus the mechanical pin, of course. You would see the same effect in a mechanically pin-registered scanner. Therefore, if the perf is poorly placed, the film will be slightly off center in the camera when registered. Because of this, you will see the gap between the perf and the edge of the picture will vary slightly. If you look at Friedemann's perforation video, you'll see that this is the case: the gap between perf and picture widens and narrows in a fixed pattern. This example was scanned here on the ScanStation as well, by the way. I believe Friedemann said he applied some stabilization to the scanned test film, to correct for this film manufacturing error. It's possible that some of what you've described is related to that. Stabilization algorithms will vary from application to application, so you may see better or worse results, depending on what you're using to stabilize, as well as the parameters set within the stabilization tool itself. So, what you have here is a very precise camera and a very precise scanner, but not very precise film, it seems. -perry

The purpose of the PTRs is to remove incidental dust that might be on the surface of the film. That dust could have been picked up when it was at the lab for processing, or while the film was being prepped for scanning - really any time the film is exposed to air, it's susceptible. The PTRs do a good job of removing most of it. Because one was damaged (and you need to thread through both for them to be effective) we threaded the film around them, thus that dust wasn't removed. Normally we use them all the time, but this was a rare exception.

Got the PTR replacement yesterday, so it's all set now. The footage isn't ours so I can't upload files for sharing - that's up to Friedemann and I suppose the folks at Logmar. We've already sent the films back. -perry

Depends on what you mean by "handling" I think. If you just want to play it back, you can do it even on older machines - Our old MTI Correct system was built in 2004. It was a Windows XP (32bit) PC with a couple of Xeon processors in it. It could handle 2k DPX playback at realtime speeds. But that's just playback. When Iridas had SpeedGrade (Pre-Adobe), they had a little application that could play DPX sequences in real time. This was heavily GPU dependent, but it still required high speed disks. It didn't require a hugely fast computer, but it was just for playback, which is relatively simple to do. If you're talking about multitrack editing, realtime effects, cropping, scaling, text overlays, etc - the requirements would be different than for simple playback. You'd still need the same disk array underneath (possibly with even more speed if you're doing multi-track timeline editing), CPU speed probably comes more into play at this point, and certainly GPU, since most modern software is GPU optimized. It's hard to say though, without knowing the applications in question and the things you want to do. The requirements will vary. -perry