Perry Paolantonio

I didn't realize the Director was sold *without* HDR. I would ask them for a test of your material, and select clips that are very dense. This will show off whether or not the noise issues in the 5k sensor are going to be a problem. As Rob Houllahan mentioned, it's worth noting that while it is the same underlying sensor as the 5k ScanStation, the Director's sensor is monochrome - which means it has no bayer mask. This may improve the noise profile, so it's worth doing a test. Also worth noting - if they scan it at 10k but output it to something like 4k, you are likely to get a better result than a straight 4k scan. This is because of the oversampling, and it may overcome some noise issues as well. A 10k scan, with 3-flash HDR is actually 18 exposures per frame. This is because the camera's sensor is moved microscopically to achieve the pixelshift effect, and double the resolution. So you have three each R, G, B exposures (for the 3-flash HDR), times two, because you're making a 10k image with a 5k sensor. If the camera in the scanner is the same model they used in the ScanStation, but in monochrome, it can do this at roughly 1fps, I think. Maybe a bit faster. I wouldn't get too into the weeds on the specifications of the scanner. A lot of that is irrelevant to you, as the end customer. What really matters is whether the image looks good so I would find some challenging footage and see what the results look like.

If your Final Cut experience is with version 7 or earlier, Resolve is the closest to that of all the available software. It's free, and ubiquitous now, so it's worth knowing. It's a very capable editor, as well as an excellent color correction tool.

Right. I should have pointed that out in my comment above. The CMOSIS 5k sensor is identical to the bayer sensor the ScanStation used, only without the bayer mask so it's monochrome.

The 10k Version used the same CMOSIS 5k sensor as the ScanStation 5k did. The difference is that the scanner used pixelshift to obtain the higher resolution. This allowed for a decent mix of speed and resolution. The issue is that that CMOSIS sensor had a lot of fixed pattern noise, and lower dynamic range than the Sony IMX sensors do. When properly tuned, and with HDR, the 5k sensor is not "horrible" - but it's not as good as the Sony. Our ScanStation got the upgrade from the 5k CMOSIS to the 6.5k Sony sensor a few years ago and we immediately saw two things: 1) With the Sony sensor, we could make noise free images of even very dense film without having to use HDR (2-flash) scanning. With HDR, the dynamic range is definitely extended further, though. 2) With the CMOSIS 5k sensor, the overall dynamic range was lower, even in HDR mode. Lasergraphics tells me it's around 14-15 stops of dynamic range with the Sony 6.5k in HDR mode. With the CMOSIS, it's probably more like 12, but the extreme ends of this range are too noisy to be that useful. If the film is perfectly exposed, the 5k sensor is not bad at all, in HDR mode. It's worth noting that the Director can do 3-flash HDR as well, and that further reduces noise and extends dynamic range. My observations are based on the ScanStation. It's a different beast, and it's 2-flash, so results will vary. There was government-funded Czech TV study to find the best of the available scanners a few years ago. They compared the Arriscan XT, Director 10k, GoldenEye and Scanity. The resulting study is available for download on Lasergraphics site, here. I was at NAB in the Lasergraphics booth when they were scanning some of the test footage that was specifically commissioned for this shootout, and it was pretty impressive. The Director 10k did quite well, and I believe it was the scanner that Czech TV ended up buying. My guess (I don't know for sure) is that the 13k version is using the same 6.5k sensor as the ScanStation does, with the same method of pixelshifting that the 10k version used. This is not unusual (it's how the Arriscan did it too). If that's the case, then it's just going to be an improvement over the already good 10k version. That being said, I think you'll find that there aren't many of these out in the wild (compared to machines like the ScanStation), and yes, you will need to ask which version is being used. They definitely sell a lot more ScanStations than Directors.

Dwight Cody helped me move mine back in the 90s from one apartment to another. I learned about how to take it apart and move it down three twisty flights of stairs that day - things I wish I had known previously! By the time I moved out of my last place, I owned a 1971 VW camper van. I considered dismantling the Steenbeck as Dwight showed had me on the previous move, but on a hunch we slid the side door open and lo and behold, it was like that van was designed to move flatbed editors. Four people to lift it and it slipped right in. Fit like a glove.

I'm not really interested in getting into a holy war about CPUs. Use what works for you. The 16-core system you say you have is woefully inadequate though. DigitalVision's software is CPU-bound and heavily multi-threaded, but not for all DVO Tools. For example. the scratch tool (at least in the most recent version we got) is still single threaded, which means it makes zero difference how many cores you have: you will max out exactly one of them when running a scratch repair. Other functions, such as DVO DryClean, are multithreaded, so you gain an advantage from more cores. And the programming was optimized for Intel chips. Say what you want about them, but the system we have is pretty fast for many functions, pretty slow for others. But the things that are slow wouldn't gain much advantage from more cores. Yes, the vast majority of what we do is higher resolution than that as well. I brought up 2k because you keep talking about image sequences and NTFS not being able to handle lots of small files. Phoenix (or any other tool) will be slower with larger files for obvious reasons. But I was talking about the NTFS issue you bring up over and over again here, to illustrate that we can easily work with high frame rate image sequences in Phoenix on an NTFS volume, without these problems you claim are a plague on the post production world.

Huh? By "post stabilization" do you mean the Scanstation's optical pin registration? It's not really post stabilization since it happens inside the scanner before you see the output. And there's really no reason to ever have optical pin reg turned off. You gain no advantage by doing so. As I said, a sprocketless scanner doesn't need to, and should not spend any real effort trying to achieve anything more than a "good enough" approach to getting the film frame inside the view of the scanner's camera. That is to say, somewhere inside the gate. The mechanical work involved to make a stable image for multiple gauges, and for film that's widely varied in condition (shrinkage, warping, etc), without software assistance, makes that an almost impossible task. Instead, the scanner should only aim to get the film in roughly the right area, then it should handle registering it by looking at the captured image, determining the position of the frame. Any other approach is really trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. The point I've been trying to make is that you're blaming the lack of a stable image on position of the laser perf detector, because you have an expectation that the image should be consistently placed in the gate. Yes, flat rollers will smooth the film out and "fix" your problem. But the issue is that the HDS+ wasn't designed to produce a perfectly stable image at the point of capture. That was a conscious design decision on the part of their engineers. With the FilmFabriek scanners, the idea has always been that you scan the image and deal with all that stuff later. So comparisons to the pre-registered frames between two scanners are kind of pointless. I mean, who cares? as long as the film is in the frame it can be stabilized one way or another. The two machines just do it differently: Scanstation does it internally, HDS+ leaves it to you to do. The Kinetta (at least the early models) took the same approach by the way. It's because this is hard to do in that it involves a fair bit of engineering work. I think registration might be part of the capture process on the Kinetta now though. OpenCV is not an end-user tool. It's a programming library. You wouldn't use it unless you're writing an application to do stabilization. It's FilmFabriek who should be looking at it and integrating it (or something like it - such as FPGA-based machine vision libraries on a frame grabber board), not you.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the laser perf detector. It's literally just an on-off switch. It tells the scanner "I see a perf" or "I don't see a perf" and nothing more. If they are using it as a means of stabilizing the film then that's a massive design flaw. but I don't think that's what they're doing. Their scanners have always assumed you'd do post-processing of the footage, and one of those steps is stabilization. The way to fix this is for them to do optical frame registration before the file is written to disk. There is always going to be some level of slop in any transport, due to splices, or stretched or shrunken film. and the smaller the film gauge the more that slop will be magnified. It's the job of the scanner to create a stable image, which this machine does not do, simply because they are not doing it. The perf detector tells the scanner "there's a frame in the gate" and it probably triggers the camera to snap an image when it doe, but it doesn't (and shouldn't) determine where in the gate that frame is. Moving the laser closer to the gate might help a bit, but it's still the wrong solution because there are other things that could cause instability that can all be fixed in one fell swoop simply by taking the image wherever the frame may be in the gate, and registering it before the file is output. It's not. bad. It's 100% by design. The ScanStation was conceived as a machine to handle film that is shrunken and warped or damaged. So the gate is oversized to allow the film to naturally float. Of course the frames appear to be "off" relative to the scanner's gate. It was never their intention to try to nail the positioning of the frame mechanically, because that's impossible due to the variety of conditions the film might be in. The scanner knows where the frame should be based on how far it has moved the capstan, and it takes an image. It measures shrinkage amounts as well, so if the frame position drifts, it likely compensates for that by analyzing the positions of the last couple frames and making sure it's roughly in the center of the gate before taking the next one. Digital frame registration done after the image is taken is then used to align it so it's perfectly fine, in fact expected, that frame A and Frame B will not be in precisely the same position in the gate when the image is made. The whole point here is that you shouldn't bother trying to do a super-stable gate when the software tools exist (FOR FREE: See OpenCV) to relatively easily do realtime registration that's completely seamless to the end user. FilmFabriek chose not to do that, and that's why I've never taken their scanners seriously. They don't seem to be interested in doing this the right way.

Yes, you turn off the OS-level disk indexing because that's always going to slow stuff down. But NTFS isn't the problem. As I said, we use an 8-drive 24TB RAID5 on our ScanStation. This is NTFS. It easily reads and writes 60fps DPX if the resolution is low enough. When you copy files from it (so, reading) to our SAN, you're doing it at speeds faster than that. The Phoenix system is a similar setup, but RAID-0 NTFS. I've been building RAID arrays for video for the past 27 years. I know exactly what they're doing and how our systems are set up because I set them up personally and tuned them myself. What you are describing has never been an issue for us since Windows 7 came out. Old versions of Windows - absolutely. And MacOS as well. In fact, in 2005ish, it was significantly worse on the Mac than on Windows. Our SAN set up is this: bare RAID-5 pools on a linux server presented to a Windows TigerStore metadata server as iSCSI targets via 40GbE. These are UNFORMATTED on the Linux box where they live, which is how iSCSI works. The machine that mounts the iSCSI target formats it however it wants. They are formatted as NTFS by TigerStore, which acts as an intermediate layer, serving the NTFS volumes to any of the connected clients in such a way that they appear to be that platform's native disk format. That is, they show up as HFS+ to a mac, and as NTFS to a Windows box to optimize performance. The metadata server handles file locking and sharing conflicts. It is a proper SAN. Lasergraphics does not provide storage or storage controllers. You buy the scanner and you get the PC that runs the scanner but you are on your own to integrate the storage as you need. We installed an internal RAID card and moved the entire PC into a larger enclosure that could house the number of drives we wanted. Additionally we added a 10GbE card so we can move files to the SAN. All of our scanning is done directly to the internal RAID then copied to the SAN. The issues you describe sound more like misconfigurations than anything else. Dude - this is ridiculous. First, DigitalVision only just started supporting AMD CPUs for Phoenix recently. Their recommended hardware has been multi-core Xeons for years and still was as of the last time I checked a few months ago. But they do now support threadripper. They have been optimizing for Intel chips for many many years.It's only in the past few years started to work with AMD to optimize their software. And I know this because we proposed to them, right around 2019, building a threadripper system. they talked us out of it because it was unsupported. So instead we built a new machine with dual 12-core Xeons. Ours is easily capable of doing a lot of work at 60+fps for lower resolution files. Because Phoenix is CPU bound, yes - it's slow with very high res files. But work done at HD or 2k, depending on which DVO Tools you're using, can be incredibly fast. It depends on what you're doing and how you have things set up. It's heavily cache dependent, so our setup reads files from the SAN, caches locally, and writes final output to the SAN. This works well. and the cache drives are NTFS RAID0 that have none of the problems you describe.

You're missing the point. Laser detection has exactly zero to do with the stability of the image. You are saying the laser's position is related to the stability. it is not. The point of the laser is to trigger the camera when it detects a perf, or to count frames. It is not there to stabilize the image. A laser perf detector is a simple on/of switch and nothing more. If the gate is not holding the film steady, then the only option for stabilizing is to do it post-scan (Whether you're doing that in the scanner behind the scenes or in software afterwards). but this is utterly unrelated to the laser, which is just a trigger. The Scanstation's gate has nothing to hold the film stable and is designed to allow it to weave quite a bit, so all of the stabilzation is done in the computer after the image is taken but before it's written to disk. This is the only way to do it if you're not using a system with a proper edge guiding and mechanical pin registration.

You keep saying this, but it's simply not the case. Please provide documented proof (and not anecdata from some random forum) that this is truly an issue. This was a problem with Windows XP, for sure. 15 years ago. Most VFX houses are using image sequences of some kind (DPX, EXR, etc), and not having these issues. We work with DPX sequences all the time, reading and writing them, on Windows machines. Our ScanStation is a Core i9 with a built-in 24TB RAID 5 that can easily do north of 1GB/second. We capture 4k DPX to this system at 15fps all the time. That's the max scan speed of the ScanStation in that resolution. We can do faster than that with lower resolutions. On our Phoenix system we have an internal RAID-0 which we use as a scratch disk for caching. Caches are 10bit DPX at the native res of the job being done - typically about 4.5k. Again, we're easily able to play back and write cache files to this drive at faster speeds than our ScanStation. Our SAN arrays can do more than 2GB/s and when we copy massive DPX sequences off the ScanStations internal RAID to the SAN, there are no issues as you describe. The SAN is windows based.

This is only the case with Super-8 - those are punched using a linear punch that makes 5-6 holes at a time. Even being microscopically out of parallel with the film edge will result in the sawtooth pattern that causes the frame to weave if you use the Super 8 perf for registration. That's why S8 has to be registered (horizontally) using the opposite edge of the film itself, just like the edge guides in a camera. For any other gauge you absolutely do use the perfs for registration and they should be perfectly stable. Depending on the camera used, the picture may or may not be stable though. A pin registered camera, or a well designed non-pin camera like an Eclair ACL, should be rock solid. A bolex or a K3 or inexpensive consumer cameras may very well move around a bit because even when the perfs are perfectly registered. This is incorrect. The edge opposite the perf is fine. the issue is the placement of the perf punch relative to the perf-side edge of the film. It is not parallel, and this causes a sawtooth pattern that repeats ever few perfs. Detecting the position of the opposite-side film edge and aligning the film to a consistent location is the correct way to handle Super 8, if doing digital stabilization (in scanner or otherwise).

*in a scanner that doesn't use optical frame registration. There's nothing wrong with using a PTR as your capstan if you're registering the frame correctly. But short of a system that uses a mechanical registration pin or the digital equivalent of one, you're never going to get stable images regardless of the roller used. The laser perf detector will do one thing: tell you when it's hit a perf so that it knows to take an image of the frame currently in the gate. It says nothing about how to position that image for proper registration. The capstan in the ScanStation, for example, is essentially a PTR roller - slightly harder and not as easily removable, but still the same basic thing. Huh? We use split reels all the time on our ScanStation. It's 100% unavoidable in many cases. Particularly with old or damaged film, which will not wind correctly on the platter no matter what the angle of the platters is set to. When the film is warped or twisted, a split reel is mandatory to make sure it doesn't telescope off a core. Hell, even my old Steenbeck had a hard time with warped film telescoping, and that's got the platters sitting parallel to the ground, so gravity is doing everything it can. We used to use a split reel half with the hub drilled out to sit on top of the film, as a way to keep it from telescoping. One shouldn't rely on the scanner for a tight wind of the film when done. That's best done on the rewind bench after the scan anyway.

It makes a godawful mess of your scanner. If we get film with that crap on it, we won't scan it until it's cleaned off.

I don't think they're in business to the public. I believe these services are being offered to people in the USC system and probably for outsiders who need digital copies of materials in the archive.

It appears the new version is shipping. From what I read yesterday, the only difference is the new light source that was mentioned here a few months ago. That's to allow them to do HDR in a single pass, rather than having to back the film up and run it a second time, which is clunky at best. It does not appear there's anything else new on there though, at least in terms of hardware. Still seems to be the same crappy camera as before, locked at UHD, which isn't even an aspect ratio that matches any film gauge. It's a cool design, poorly implemented. Rented. The commercial real estate market in Boston has lost its mind. The city is hell bent on "beating" the San Francisco Bay area on life sciences lab space square footage, so everyone with an inch of office space is trying to sell it as lab space. Even old gas stations. There's basically nothing you can buy in this town for anything even resembling a reasonable price. Our current building, where we've been for 15 years, and which has housed countless post production and production companies over the years - even the Boston Film Video Foundation (where you could rent Steenbeck time by the hour back in the day) - is being razed to construct a 12 story lab building. Outside our window, we can see 7 or 8 major construction sites, so it's been like one huge traffic jam here for the past two years. I'll be happy to be in a quiet (mostly residential) neighborhood that's quiet!

No, I'm not. I have no idea as we haven't done a "trade-up" -- as we already have the top end ScanStation, there's nowhere to trade up to. But we have consistently upgraded features (hardware and software) over the years. It's an easy process - you buy the part, they send it to you with instructions for installation, and you send back the old part (like if you're upgrading camera modules). What I am saying is that many of the parts on their Scanstation-form-factor machines are probably interchageable. Can you upgrade an archivist to a full scanstation in the field? No idea but I'm guessing the answer is no. The basic chassis appears to be similar in most ways, but there are things you would not be able to do - like add the optical/mag track reader module. That requires an opening in the deck plate for the connections as well as the mounting holes and registration pins to hold the module in place. I don't see any of that in the photos of the Archivist. That would imply that an upgrade is more complicated. You'd probably have to send it back and they give you a discount on a pre-built scanstation. For the most part I have always found that Lasergraphics pricing is reasonable and the quality of the equipment more than justifies what some people think is a high price. It's really not, when you can rely on the hardware to just work, correctly, all the time.

The cintel sound module uses a light and a photocell, like a projector, and requires manual focusing/adjustment to dial it in, doesn't it? The ScanStation optical module (not the software extraction) is *far* superior to this method, automatically aligning the track image and steadying it, then imaging the track at a very high sample rate, removing the film grain (hiss) and then converting it to an audio file. Once we've moved into our new office (hopefully January) we'll have a blog post up about this. I'd love to add the Cintel into the test pool but haven't found anyone in the states who has the optical module. They all use software soundtrack extraction, it seems. Interesting about the CNC barring the Cintel from restoration use. In our experience the noise was beyond unacceptable - even at NAB demo presentations you could see it, but they didn't seem to notice, which was concerning.

The example shown has been up on their web site since I dunno - 2010 or maybe earlier? It compares a Director to a first-gen Arriscan. It wouldn't have been "cherry picked" at the time, but it is outdated, comparing it to an older model. In case nobody noticed, the basic Lasergraphics web site has looked the same since around 2009 or so, when we first started talking to them about buying a scanner. Clearly, that part of their marketing budget is not a huge priority...

This is a workshop designed for non-technical archivists who are thinking of using LTO (most likely in small archives where there may not be a large IT staff), at a conference where there are a bunch of like minded people already gathered together. You don't need a workshop to set one up, you need to read the manual. It took me about 20 minutes to get our first LTO drive up and running. It's simply not that big a deal. But if you don't have experience with it or you're not technical, this serves as an introduction. LTFS drivers make these trivially easy to use. Your tape literally shows up like a mounted hard drive and if you're on Windows (or presumably mac, I don't know since we use linux for our LTOs), it's drag-and-drop at the simplest level. More sophisticated software will do things like checksum all the files before copying, create a manifest of those checksums, and verify the data after copying.

There's a whole bunch of people out there doing this. You're correct that most are doing 8mm or 16mm and they're relatively simple conversions (using projectors). There are a handful of us who are building high end scanners either from scratch or based on the chassis of an old telecine. Mine is a 14k scanner capable of scanning 28mm through 15p IMAX. It's sprocketless, intermittent motion, 3-color sequential RGB, eventually HDR, etc. It's built on a Cintel URSA Diamond chassis, but the light source, rollers, platters are my design, and the feed/takeup and capstan servos have nothing to do with the old Ursa: I know @Robert Houllahan is also building one for large gauge film. And there are a bunch of folks on the Kinograph forum making different types of scanners, so it's become a bit of a hangout with lots of good information.

The Archivist, ScanStation Personal and ScanStation all use the same basic chassis design. The early ScanStations (like ours) have the capstan to the left of the lamphouse, the newer ones have it to the right - so it can operate just fine on either side. All of these machines are designed in a modular fashion, and things like camera stack replacements, optical readers, lamp house, even control boards, are pretty easy to do in the field. When someone upgrades from one machine to another, they are essentially getting a box of new parts and instructions for how to swap them and send back the old ones. We have upgraded our camera stack twice, replaced the optical audio reader when it died, and installed new film gauges through upgrades. Lasergraphics has never had to come here to do any of it, because it's easy for the end user to do, nor have we had to send the entire machine back, just the parts that needed repair or the old parts were replacing after installing and testing the upgrade. There is a decent market for used parts (cameras, etc) on ebay, because as Rob said, the vast majority of the hardware inside these is off the shelf stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they just sell the used standard parts to recoup some of their money, or put them into test models for in-house use. There simply aren't enough of these machines out there that there would be a flood of old ones sitting in a warehouse.

They don't sell used scanners.

You need to try using some color grading software and stop making direct comparisons to still image scanning and editing. What you're doing here is easy in any grading application if the image data is there. You don't do motion picture grading frame-to-frame. You do it shot by shot, and sometimes you have to break a shot up or use keyframes to make in-shot adjustments. But you can't make comparisons between lightroom and motion picture grading software as if it's exactly the same process. It's not. There is certainly some overlap, but software like Resolve, Baselight, Nucoda, etc, are all designed to deal with film-originated content and could pull out that level of detail *if* the data is present in the scan. And nobody doing serious motion picture scanning does it to TIFF files. Sure, most scanners can scan to that format, but it's a nightmare to work with. DPX or EXR or even CinemaDNG make more sense for image sequences, or ProRes 4444 for containerized movie files. All of them will contain sufficient information to pull out that level of detail from an underexposed frame, as long as the scanner is capable of capturing that kind of dynamic range.

The Arriscan is not, and never was designed to scan print film. Print and negative are different beasts and that's a scan of print film. The Director (which is what that particular example was done on (they've used that same image since before the ScanStation existed), was designed to handle both print and negative from the beginning. The ScanStation's results are similar so it's fair to use that image on the ScanStation page, by the way. Cherry picked? In a sense, I guess. But they're picking film that shows off a legitimate difference between the two machines. What company doesn't do that in their marketing? These scanners have been compared (here, on this forum) so many times. Search is your friend.