Perry Paolantonio

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).

 

Yes I have. LED illumination is something we would go for anyway (diffused). I like the fact that linescan cameras are very fast, full rez (no bayer), can do more vertical resolution and outputting the correct aspect ration. However, there is always the risk (or problem) with image compression.

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.

Do they avoid static by humidity control or do they use an earth?

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

One piece of kit that some documentary sound recordists used was a device that had a small light bulb (torch type), which when illuminated sent tone to the audio recorder.

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)

I use Sony Vegas 10. I did find one tool that almost works but doesn't because of the pillar boxes on the lateral sides.

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

Hopefully they will come out with something more in line with the indi film market they serve with their cameras, like a 2K 8/16mm version for under $5K.

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.

Two follow up question if I may. It doesn't do vista vision, and it's only 2K right? Do lasergraphic have any update path for it 4K, 8perf and son on?

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

And a more general question, I have read the old Cintel manuals, and as I understand it, flying spot machines can basically scan any pref or format size. (There is a certain warmth to Cintel scans that I really like.) Now with modern chip and line scanners, my question is can you build a machine that scans the whole with of 35mm, the whole frame sprockets and all, and is length independent at least 1-16 perfs.

I'll leave that one to Rob, who knows more about these machines than I.

-perry

If color is more important than the scanning then why not offer cheap scanning so we can at least edit footage digitally and send the finished product back to you for grading? Or does it not work that way because you must grade as you scan? I am not sure how the chain works so correct me if I am wrong. Thing is, I would rather pay for a colorist's time for only the scenes I wish to use.

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.

Perry let me quote you “the scan is not a good place to try to do things on the cheap “ but that's the whole point of this -- it should be, and thanks to BMD it will be.

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.

Perry by the way I saw you had a scanstaion what's the price on those?

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.

The part of film production that is most costly (from my standpoint) is the scanning. Everything else in my chain is easier to find deals on.

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

http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/cintel

 

$30K

 

Go...

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