Perry Paolantonio

This was scanned at 2k on the ScanStation. -perry

ATTO has always made nice hardware. We get about 1100 MB/s on the 8-drive RAID with the Highpoint RocketRaid card in our scanner host PC and generic WD Green drives. Plenty for 2k and probably higher. In our SAN and in one of our Blu-ray encoding machines we've got Areca and 3Com cards respectively, which are awesome, but much more expensive. The SAN has 16 drives in it with the Areca card, and in testing we got a steady 1.5GB/second throughput, in a RAID 6 configuration. The 3Com is similar, but with an 8-drive setup. Both of those machines have desktop drives in them - Seagates or WD - but nothing fancy. -perry

The intermittent white bits are dust, on the surface of the film itself. Unfortunately, when I scanned this the film wasn't threaded over the PTR rollers, which would have taken care of most of that (one of our rollers is damaged and I didn't want to risk running the film over it until we get a replacement).

Hi Jeremy, RAIDs work by splitting the data up over many drives and writing to them in parallel. The way this works is different depending on the RAID configuration you have - RAID 0 is generally the fastest, but is also the most volatile. If one of the drives in the RAID fails then all of the data on the RAID is lost. You're better off going with a RAID level like 5 or 6, which allow for any one or two drives to fail, while not losing any data. This buys you time to replace the bad drive and rebuild the array. In the mean time, performance will be degraded, but the data is safe. This is what we have in the PC that controls our scanner. When we first got the scanner, the enclosure for the PC didn't have enough space for 8 drives, so we had to run a 6-drive RAID 0. We could do 30fps 2k DPX (10 bit) scanning on this for a few seconds at a time, and performance degraded significantly as the drive filled up. When the enclosure was upgraded and more spaces were available for additional drives, it was bumped to 8, and a RAID 5 for redundancy. Now we can easily scan to 2k DPX files at 30fps all day long. For what it's worth, we're using cheap WD Green 3TB drives in this RAID. You could get a little more performance out of enterprise drives, but you'll pay a fortune for them. If you're doing an 8-disk RAID, you're not going to see a substantial speed improvement with them (there will be some, but it's not worth the extra cost, in my opinion). With RAID, more drives is always better. Also - the controller matters a lot. We're using an inexpensive HighPoint RocketRaid PCIe card, and it's fine for this purpose. You don't want to rely on the system to do the RAID in software (Mac and Windows can both do this in their disk formatting tools), because that puts load on the CPU and performance is much lower. All that said - if your scanner isn't going to need to work at real time or faster, you can probably get away with a smaller RAID. Just don't expect to be able to play those files back at real time. -perry

Right - lead acid is no good for onboard batteries. At the time I made mine (in the late-90s) it was the cheapest option and I didn't mind too much about that. The original Eclair batteries are a bunch of Sub-C cells inside those black plastic enclosures, so it should be possible to make something that's a similar size by using these. They can be purchased at most stores that sell electronic components. unlike regular C-cells, they have solder tabs instead of the usual protrusion on one end of the cell. So you have to be careful to get the polarity correct, and of course you have to solder them together. They're smaller than regular C-cells too. -perry

Mine came with several dead original batteries, one of which I recelled, only to find that the charger was also dead. So I ended up adapting a lead acid motorcycle battery, which worked great. It's a little heavy, but it runs forever. I put it inside a soft case for a small camcorder, which has a shoulder strap. That makes it a lot like the originals, only bigger. I also put in an automotive-style 12v socket (like you'd have for a cigarette lighter), and then made a power cable that connected to the port on the side of the camera, and that makes it easier to break down and store away, plus it adds flexibility if you want to make longer cables (by not having it hardwired). Not elegant, but functional.

It's not the performance of the desktop machine (CPU/GPU) that's really at issue - it's more of an I/O thing. 2k DPX files are about 12MB/Frame. Unlike a quicktime file (a single stream of data with less disk overhead), with DPX or TIFF every single frame has to be opened, displayed, closed. That's a lot of hits to the drive, all happening very quickly, with a lot of operating system resources spent on transactional data (find the file/open the file/display the frame/close the file -- for every frame). It doesn't matter how fast your computer is, you're going to need a disk subsystem that's capable of moving about 500MB/second. SSDs can do it, but they're too small to be useful with DPX - you need terabytes of extremely fast storage for files like this. At minimum, you would want a 6-drive RAID, but 8 would probably be faster and more reliable, especially with SATA drives, which tend to slow down quite a bit as they fill up. More drives in the RAID means the load is spread out more, which means you can push them farther. Our first MTI Correct restoration system was a circa-2004 Dell PC - a dual processor Xeon PC running Windows XP. High end at the time, but a slug by today's standards. It easily (and only) handled DPX files. ...But only if they were on a SCSI RAID that could move about 550MB/second -- and on top of that, MTI used a proprietary filesystem where all the files lived inside a single disk image file on the RAID, so even though the RAID itself was formatted as NTFS, the actual DPX files lived inside the one file that was on that RAID, which appeared to the MTI software as a drive with its own highly efficient file system. In that way they were able to work around the issues of desktop filesystems like NTFS, to push the data through without dropping frames. In contrast, you can play a 2k ProRes 4444 file off of a single internal SATA drive (no RAID), on a relatively modest computer, without hiccups. With the FCP testing we did, it wasn't a matter of struggling to keep up - with fast enough disks you should be able to make it work. But FCP was never built to handle DPX, and so it was buggy and clunky. You have to install a third party plugin (like GlueTools) to get DPX to import and it was just unreliable and flaky. It would play back ok, but it we had lots of other weird issues with files disappearing, hanging, etc. Also, certain plugins didn't work correctly, if I recall. This was several years ago, but I doubt it has improved too much since then. FCP 7 just isn't meant to handle the format. Absolutely - and that's why you should look at software that was designed to deal with image sequences from the get-go. Like Resolve (which now has more editing capabilities built-in, too). And it's free. So if you're building a PC from the ground up, I'd build it with those specs in mind. Either way, though, you're going to need massive and very fast storage for 2k or larger image sequences. -perry

FCP - at least version 7, can't speak to X, since I've never used it - doesn't really play well with DPX sequences. But again, make a proxy format like ProRes or Avid DNxHD and work with that, then conform later in Resolve or some other application that handles DPX natively. GlueTools lets you open DPX in FCP 7, but we had mixed results with that in testing and found that it was just easier to work in ProRes proxies for editing. Most scanners can also transfer to TIFF sequences as well, which is a bit more generic than DPX and may work better in your NLE. You'll likely still have the system performance issues you'd have with DPX, though - lots of overhead with any HD or higher resolution image sequence. -perry

This is absolutely correct, but Anthony's question was about resolution. So if you assume an HD transfer was pillarboxed rather than 1.78:1, the actual image area is somewhere around 1440x1080ish (1.55 Million pixels). If you transfer that same film to 2k at 2048x1556, it's over 3.1 Million pixels. Even if the film was shot with the intention of cropping for 1.78:1, the 2k scan gives you greater flexibility to reframe shots in post, rather than baking those decisions in when doing the transfer. In terms of your own scans, you have a few options: you can request the scan be done to a format like ProRes 4444 (which is definitely easier to work with for most people, and in many cases is good enough as the final format). Alternatively, you could make 2k Prores files from the DPX sequence in any of a number of applications. This becomes a proxy for the DPX scans. So you can edit, reframe, etc in your NLE, and then do your final grade and conform the DPX files at a facility that's set up to handle it more easily than one can do on a desktop machine. If you want to work with DPX directly, you need a RAID capable of moving about 500MB/second, a fairly substantial GPU, lots of RAM, and an edit/grading system that can work with the files directly. For most people, working with proxies makes more sense and is more convenient. And with modest hardware, you can do this at 2k, in a format like ProRes, without needing a high end RAID. -perry

February Scanning Special For the month of February, Gamma Ray Digital is offering the following special rate for Super8 and 16mm 2k scans to DPX or ProRes files on our Lasergraphics ScanStation. This is only for members of the Cinematography.com forums: 2k DPX Log scans from negative -OR- 2k DPX or ProRes flat scans (ungraded) from prints/reversal: 16mm, 16bit DPX: $0.43/foot 16mm, 10bit DPX or ProRes 4444 or ProRes 422 HQ: $0.35/foot Super-8, 16bit DPX: $0.54/foot Super-8, 10bit DPX or ProRes 4444 or ProRes 422 HQ: $0.50/foot No extra fees for optical audio capture. Low minimum order size. No fees for file copy if you follow the hard drive guidelines below. The fine print: 100' minimum for Super 8, 200' minimum for 16mm. You supply the hard drive: eSATA or bare Internal SATA in NTFS format required for DPX; eSATA, Firewire 800 or USB3 in HFS+ or NTFS for ProRes. Does not include return shipping costs. Order must be placed and film must arrive at our office before Friday, 2/28/14. Payment by credit card, PayPal or wire transfer (cash is ok if you're picking up in person). A small setup fee may apply if you have lots of short reels (50' for S8 and 100' for 16mm). Let us know how many small reels you're sending and we'll let you know the setup fees, if any. Turnaround time is typically two business days, depending on how much film you're scanning. Let us know if you've got a deadline and we'll make it work. To place an order, use our contact form (http://www.gammaraydigital.com/contact), and include the code "CINEMATOGRAPHY" in the Subject line. Let us know your cinematography.com username if it's not your real name, how much film you've got, and what gauge/type.

Yes, several have 2-perf capability: Lasergraphics Director Northlight Arriscan Scanity GoldenEye I'm sure there are others, but these are just off the top of my head. Not sure about the 35mm version of the Lasergraphics ScanStation - ours is 8/16 only, but I can ask. It'd be limited to 2k though. that said, for 2-perf that might not be bad for a lot of use cases. -perry

Yes, I'm assuming it's sprocketed, but that's because of the pivoting arms that look like they snap in over the wheels are a mechanical feature of many sprocket guided film paths. I could be wrong - without more pictures, who knows? That said, at the speed this scans, I can't see this being used professionally in a scanning service, so how would it drive the cost of scanning down? I mean, I guess if you buy your own system and do your own films, but at 5 seconds/2 frames it's 2.5 hours to scan a 50 foot reel of Super 8, and for all that effort you're only getting HD. We can do that same film on the ScanStation in just over 90 seconds, at 2k. Let's say you have 1000 feet of Super 8 - just 20 rolls. It would cost less to have that scanned professionally, to 2k in some cases, than it would cost to buy this scanner -- even if the reflecta drops to $1000 as you predict. 20 rolls isn't that much for a home movie collection, so it doesn't make economic sense to buy this for that kind of material when you can have it scanned professionally for less. I'm all for more scanners in the market, don't get me wrong - it just makes things better for everyone to have that kind of competition, but I feel scanners like this aren't much better than DIY setups and I don't see how the reflecta will spur competition in a meaningful way.

That may be - but of that 50k feet we've put through our ScanStation, almost all of it is home movies. I'm not saying it's enough of a sample to make a statement about the world's collection of Super 8 film, but so much of what we've gotten has been such a mess that I think it's safe to say a very large percentage of the home movies out there wouldn't do so well in a sprocketed transfer system. That said, I just don't see why, at this stage of the game, anyone would want to put their film through a system that could cause damage, when there are so many viable alternatives, and more appearing all the time. On the high end, just off the top of my head, I can think of almost half a dozen machines that are gentle on film (ScanStation, GoldenEye, Kinetta, Flashtransfer Choice, Xena - and there are more if you include 16/35-only scanners). Hell, the Retro-8 on the low end is sprocketless. To me, it just seems like a gamble to put your film through a machine like the reflecta, especially if you're only getting HD out of it. Again, I'm biased, but we've been researching the purchase of a scanner for the past 10 years, and in that time the idea of getting a sprocketed unit never even entered into the equation. We had to wait a while for the price/performance to hit a point where it makes sense, but now there are quite a few systems out there. As Rob said, though - as these scanners come down in price, the cost of doing transfers will come down too, making systems like the reflecta less relevant. -perry

Hi Gabriele, David got ProRes 4444 files from us, I believe, which are not LOG. The ScanStation can do 10 or 16 bit LOG from negative, but only as DPX. When we do a "flat" scan of print or reversal, we're basically making sure the full dynamic range is captured, and nothing is clipped or crushed. The result is a relatively low contrast scan that will require a second pass in a color correction system to really pull out all the details. While the scanner can do primary grading when the image is captured, it's really better to do that later on a properly set up grading system where you have a lot more control. The idea is get everything that's on the film in the scan phase, and then tweak later. -perry

*If* Blackmagic does come out with something, and their past pattern holds true, it'll be A: cheap and B: totally broken for 2-3 years! Oh, and and C: Features listed on their web site may never actually be implemented... That said, I don't think they bought Cintel for the scanner tech, I think it was for the larger patent portfolio. I'd honestly be surprised if they come out with a cheap scanner, but hey - you never know! -perry

Here's my take on this: it's essentially a very slow film chain, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to be sprocketed. Since we got our scanstation a few months ago, we've probably put about 50,000 feet of Super8 and Regular 8 film through it. I'd say less than half of that would have gone through a projector without problems, due to shrinkage, perf damage, splices made with athletic tape (seriously), etc. We're talking about films going back as as far as the late 1940s (for R8). But even some of the Super8 has been in such rough shape that I'd be surprised if it could actually make it through something like this, with a sprocket-based transport. One client brought in Super 8 Reversal that he shot less than a year ago. His projector tore massive holes between each perf, and he couldn't get it to project anymore. We were able to scan it and get a decent result, but I seriously doubt any transport based on sprockets would have been able to do it because there was basically nothing left for it to grab onto. Personally, (and I fully understand I'm biased here), I wouldn't put any of my own Super 8 through anything that's projector-like anymore. Even my own films from the early 90s are starting to show signs of shrinkage already, and I take good care of them. -perry

Oops. Of course, I meant "Anthony" not Ian. Too early to be replying to forum posts! Need more coffee. -perry

Hi Rob, It's a CCD, actually. -perry

Hi Ian, Rob is about right on the price. However, it's still the size of a fridge! It's about 4' wide and stands at just under 6' tall. With the 35mm option (which ups the price substantially), it's slightly taller because the central camera/lens housing is larger. We're extremely happy with it so far - we've had ours in house since about August of last summer and both Super 8 and 16mm look fantastic on it. Great dynamic range, too, which makes it possible to do really high quality scans of reversal and prints as well. -perry

Hmm. I don't think you're talking about Uncompressed then. Just to compare apples to apples here, these are the date rates for 24fps 4:2:2 video @ 1920x1080: Uncompressed 10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps = 127 MBYTES per/sec, or 445 GB per/hr. (Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncompressed_video#Storage_and_Data_Rates_for_Uncompressed_Video) ProRes 422 HQ 10 bit @ 1920 x 1080 @ 24fps = 176 MBITS per/sec, or 99 GB per/hr. (Source: Apple ProRes White Paper http://bit.ly/K72ZlW) An uncompressed (422) 10 bit feature film at 1080p is closer to 800GB in size, where a ProRes HQ feature is more in the 100-120GB range. Small potatoes in comparison. The only thing that prevents most (desktop) machines from working with Uncompressed HD properly is the disk array. You need a fairly serious RAID that can move a lot of data to be able to work with it, but not a ton of CPU power. For many years we used a G5 as our primary HD capture station, with a Blackmagic Decklink board. It captured and played back 10 bit 1920x1080 with a SCSI RAID, day in and day out. The CPU has very little to do with Uncompressed, it's more about bandwidth. ProRes, on the other hand, requires newer machines to handle the decompression. We can't play ProRes files on that same G5, because the CPU can't handle it. You need an Intel CPU to be able to decode it. On my MacBook Pro at home (a core i7 from a couple years ago, ProRes 4444 files are no problem off the internal 2.5" drive). I am too - I think it's a great format. Not perfect for everything, but for most use cases, it's ideal. 215GB sounds about right for a 1080p 4:4:4 feature in ProRes, and that's not hard at all for our 2008 MacPro to handle. If you're having a hard time with that, I'd look at your drives. It likely won't work well off of external Firewire drives (especially if they're daisy chained, or you're trying to pull two or more streams at once while editing), and definitely won't work well off of USB under any circumstances. But it should play no problem off of a single internal or external SATA drive, even slow RPM drives. We've been doing that daily for years. -perry

Without a doubt, you're getting more information (and zero compression) with image sequences. But ProRes 4444 is a good middle ground, because the compression is negligible, it's 4:4:4, and it's easily playable on desktop computers without the need for a massive workstation and RAID. It's 12 bit, too, so it's got all the color information you need, certainly for the use case we're talking about here. I wonder if the reason the colorists you're working with prefer image sequences is because it's what their software supports and/or what they're set up to do? I mean, there's nothing wrong with that - having a defined, predictable workflow is critical to getting work done efficiently. But unless you're doing really high end work, ProRes 4444 is a great option for 16mm 2k scans. We've actually had a lot of people who have us do two scans simultaneously - a DPX "archival master" to store away, and an HD or even 2k ProRes file for editing (since the scanner can do this in the same pass, it's just a small additional cost). Believe it or not, a lot of people have done this with their home movies. We've found that IT-savvy customers have asked for this setup, since they have the wherewithal to keep proper backups of the image sequences in case they want them in the future, but have an immediate need to edit their home movies in iMovie or FCP or Vegas, etc, where ProRes is more appropriate. I'm surprised to hear this. We've been using ProRes HQ for a lot of work that goes to DVD and Blu-ray, for years, and it's a pleasure to work with - files aren't that big, so we can do a lot of stuff over a gigabit ethernet network with them. And we mostly work with feature films, as single Quicktime files (so easily 100-120GB per file). We've also used it as a proxy format for HD Uncompressed files (which are truly massive and clunky to work with), when conforming feature films. I've never found it to be a problem to work with, at least on desktop machines. maybe on iMacs or laptops, but even in our older MacPros, ProRes is pretty easy to work with. Maybe this is just relative. We worked with Uncompressed 10 bit HD on so many projects in the mid-2000's that just took forever to move around from machine to machine, that ProRes feels easier in comparison? -perry

Hi Tyler, I'm curious about this resolution. For 4:3 16mm, we'd typically scan to 2048x1556. For Super16, you'd use something like 2048x1226. Why 2048x1080? For Image Sequences, Targa is just one of many - DPX is probably more widely used, but there's also TIFF. That said, for a project like this, a 2k scan to ProRes 4444 is going to look really good, and is totally workable in an editing application such as Final Cut Pro (even 7), as well as grading tools like Resolve. And that's on modest hardware. We've got a 2008 MacPro here that can play 2k ProRes files with no issues at all, off of non-RAID drives even. There's no inherent reason why 2k needs to be done to an image sequence, which is indeed clunky to work with unless you have the right tools and some pretty beefy hardware. But it's certainly viable as an edit format if you're working in a lightly compressed format like ProRes. We scan directly to ProRes HQ and 4444 in 2k almost daily - it's a very popular format, and for good reason. I would disagree that 2k is worthless. I'm unconvinced that you'd see much of a difference if you scanned at *more* than 2k for 16mm, though. 2K is really an ideal fit for the format, and not just for filmouts or DCPs. Hell, 8mm/S8 looks fantastic scanned at 2k, and if you're going to downconvert it to 1440x1080 to fit into a pillarboxed 1080p HD frame, you're usually better off starting from a bigger image and scaling down, than smaller and scaling up. Also, there's another advantage to 2k 16mm 4:3 that I think is often overlooked - if you're ultimately making a full frame 16:9 program, scanning at a resolution like 2048x1556 gives you several hundred pixels top and bottom and a little bit left and right, to reposition the image when cropping for your full frame 16:9 final composition. That's nice, because it gives you some additional compositional wiggle room, which you can adjust shot by shot, post-scan. It also lets you crop out some things like (camera) gate hairs without anyone ever knowing... Personally, I don't think I'd ever put my own film through a telecine again. Since we got the ScanStation, I just don't see the point. Scanning prices are lower than ever, and most facilities are willing to work with folks who don't have a lot of footage, to help them get what they need within a reasonable budget. Scanning is just a much more natural fit for today's file-based workflows than telecine is, in my opinion. Then again, maybe I'm a little biased... -perry

I could take a shot of the surface of the LED itself, but the bulk of it is enclosed in a box that I don't believe is easily opened so I don't think it will be terribly instructive. I'll be back in the office on Thursday, after the holiday, so I'll take a look at it then. -perry

The Kinetta and most other modern scanners use LEDs. So do the Lasergraphics scanners. Couldn't say who manufactures them myself, I think most of these are highly customized by the scanner manufacturer - at least, the LEDs in our ScanStation are not off-the-shelf, as far as I know.