Perry Paolantonio

On 3/26/2022 at 1:04 AM, Todd Ruel said:

Do the Lasergraphics products require constant communication and dialogue with Lasergraphics to keep them in good working order?  What's your experience, gentlemen?

No. They're incredibly reliable machines. There's probably a lot of back and forth when someone is new to a machine or to an upgrade but once you're up and running, it just works. We've found that we get our questions answered promptly. In the 8 years or so we've had our ScanStation, one thing has broken on it. The replacement cost was reasonable and the turnaround time was quick.

On 3/26/2022 at 1:28 AM, Dan Baxter said:

Without getting into an argument over audio quality, an interesting thing of note is that Blackmagic's audio reader is Optical + Keykode + 16mm Mag all for $3.5K. That makes it incredible value really.

Wait a minute. You made this about sound quality. In case you forgot, these are your words: "To be fair optical audio off a Lasergraphics is unmitigated shit."

But once again, you are comparing apples to oranges. The Cintel sound reader (as I understand it) is essentially what you get in a projector: an exciter bulb and a photocell. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Because if I'm right, you could just as easily say Cintel is overcharging by thousands for $10 in parts. 

1 hour ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Don't know who is telling the truth

If it were me, I'd believe the person who uses the machine every day. But I'm biased and clearly don't have a clue what I'm talking about. That being said...

Here is what it boils down to: 

1. The lasergraphics hardware reader captures an audio frequency range of up to 20kHz. This is more than an optical soundtrack can reproduce. Much more than a 16mm optical track can reproduce. The gap between the top end of the frequency range of the signal and the top end of the sound reader, at least for the frequencies within the range of human hearing, will be mostly white noise. 
2. "Hiss" is white noise. White noise is random. Film grain is also random. The white noise you hear is the sound of the film grain in the frequency ranges above top end of the signal. In the case of 16mm that means almost everything between 6kHz and 20kHz is white noise. A 16mm soundtrack would have been mixed to cut off the signal above 6kHz because a 16mm optical track projected at 24fps can't reproduce frequencies much higher than 6kHz. 35mm can, in part because the film is moving at a faster speed per second through the machine. If 16mm film ran through the projector at 48fps, it would have a frequency response similar to 35mm.  
3. In a projector or a telecine that uses a light and a photocell, there is a hardware low pass filter that cuts off just above the top end of the signal. This removes the hiss above 6kHz resulting in something that is more immediately pleasing to the ear. HOWEVER, it will also remove valid signal above 6kHz, weak as that signal may be. 
4. The optical track reader in the Lasergraphics scanner captures the sound at a sampling rate of about 80Khz. It does this by compiling a long, skinny image of the soundtrack, with one line of the image representing a single audio sample, 80,000 times every second. (And unlike traditional optical reproduction, slower speed through the optical reader means better resolution of the image of the soundtrack, because the number of samples is constant - run the film faster and you get fewer samples per given length of film. Run it slower and you get more). In any case, the long strip image is a digital image representing the optical track on the film. This means it sees the grain as well as the signal. And the grain is random. And random grain = white noise. 
5. The signal you get from the optical track reader is the same, regardless of whether noise reduction is on. Without noise reduction, you get some white noise from the film grain. With it on, you get the exact same signal without the white noise. because the white noise is the film grain and the film grain is gone (see below)
6. The optical track reader on the scanstation reads the soundtrack while the film is going around a roughly 2" diameter drum. This is a relatively tight radius and has the effect of flattening the film, resulting in a sharper image of the soundtrack, and getting better sound reproduction than a reader in the middle of a straight run of the film, or a picture of an entire frame of film, a la AEO-Light.

Lasergraphics Optical Track Noise Reduction: I've spoken at length with Lasergraphics this week about what exactly is happening under the hood here, so this information is from their engineers. I was also incorrect about how they do their noise reduction. When you capture with NR on, they are not applying noise reduction to the captured sound. What they're really doing is grain reduction on the image of the soundtrack *before* the image is converted to an audio file. This removes the white noise caused by the film grain, without affecting the image of the waveform. Thus, the same signal with and without noise reduction, but no white noise (film grain; randomness) on the NR version.  

We are actively investigating whether we want to start capturing optical audio with the noise reduction on, now that we have this information about how it's doing that noise reduction. We'll likely do a lot of testing on this before making a decision. In the mean time, we will continue to capture as we have been because even though it's capturing some noise (film grain) it's also capturing the full signal. And it's easy enough to remove the noise later if need be.

The track reader in the Archivist is different - conceptually, it functions like AEO-light, by looking at the overscanned frame's capture of the soundtrack (however, it is Lasergraphics' implementation, and isn't the same code as AEO-Light). Each frame's length of soundtrack is stitched to the next frame using some overlap, to form a long image that is then decoded into sound. Both AEO-Light and the Archivist software-based sound reader suffer from the same issue: If the film is warped when the image of the film is taken, stitching is harder and you may also get warbling in the sound, due to the out of focus image of the track. Additionally the resolution of the soundtrack in these cases is significantly lower than in the hardware Lasergraphics optical track reader, and is dependent upon the resolution you scanned the picture at.

Archivist Software/AEO-Light reader: Let's assume you're scanning a 5k (full overscan) image. Just to make the math easy, let's look at 15 frames of footage, scanned at a speed of 15fps (not relevant here, but is below): That's about 3800 vertical pixels times 15 frames, or 57,000 pixels of soundtrack information per half second of footage. Some of that gets thrown out because it has to be used to overlap with the next frame when stitching so the number would be lower. Figure 200 pixels per frame overlap, and that leaves you with about 54,000 samples per 15 frames. 

Lasergraphics hardware reader Assuming you scanned at 15fps, that 15 frame length of soundtrack is represented by 80,000 samples (because it took 1 second to go through the hardware reader, at 80,000 samples per second). That is all dedicated to the soundtrack. There is no overlap necessary because it's separate from the image camera. Scan it at 7.5fps (the standard speed for 4k HDR on the ScanStation), and that same 15 frames of soundtrack is represented by 160,000 samples. 

Based on specs, sound quality, and implementation, the hardware optical reader in the Lasergraphics scanner is gets you better reproduction of an optical soundtrack than a traditional projector/telecine exciter bulb and photocell setup, and in most cases a much better track than is possible with AEO-Light or implementation like it, that are based on scans of the picture+track.

(and for Dan Baxter: we tested this on our Scanstation with and without NR, a Philips Shadow HD Telecine across town, and on AEO light. Happy to try other track readers, but we don't have ready access to any) 

9 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

Minor correction:  Austria.

thanks for clarifying

First: 

On 3/23/2022 at 10:54 AM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Kinda confused about the IR dust cleaner. From what I gather on page 5, you pay $18.2k for a license to use the Diamant software with the Arriscan...but you still have to buy the Diamant. Is that right?

No. It's pretty clearly spelled out in the product description in the price sheet you posted.

IR requires Infrared lighting. That means there's a hardware component to generate the IR light and some amount of software to output the dust map files (usually mono dpx). So the $18k enables the IR option and has nothing to do with Diamant. The files it generates can be used in any restoration software that works with IR dust maps - MTI, PFClean, Diamant, etc.

Diamant is a standalone restoration package made in Germany, that is software only. It looks like for $23k you can by the above mentioned hardware IR stuff, plus you get a special version of Diamant that runs on the Arri's host PC under linux, to automatically do dust removal using the dust maps generated by the scanner. 

12 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

16mm warped film plate is only $370 - you should see what Lasergraphics charge for their one!!

I know reading is hard, but ...really? 

16mm Archive Film Gate: $33,670

The thing listed for $370 is (i'm guessing from the description) probably a plate for the takeup reel to keep warped film from telescoping off a core. All of this is written in the price sheet. Using words. In English, even. 

The lasergraphics warped film gate option is about 1/3 the cost of the Arri gates. You get gates with pressure plates as well as a complete set of special rollers. And if you buy multiple gauges at once the price per gauge drops. So 8mm, 16mm and 35mm gates combined cost *LESS* than the Arri 16mm only gate.  

4 minutes ago, Robert Houllahan said:

Sometimes dream do come true… ill scoot you one of these once I figure out which run and which don't… 

haha. that would be amazing. I always thought they were super cool. They were capable of analog video capture (with an add-on card) and didn't cost that much more than a fully tricked out mac with a video board at the time. There was even a version of Premiere that ran on it, I think.  

I also accept Aaton donations, by the way. No questions asked, you can just leave it at our door. 

It's from the mid 1990s and it was one of the earliest 4k motion picture film scanners. Everything inside is custom hardware. It uses an ancient SGI 02 machine (I always wanted one of those) to control it. It takes an hour to warm up the lamp before you can start scanning and the lamp only has a lifespan of about 150 hours. This is slow because it's old. It's a monochrome 4k line sensor with a corresponding fiber optic light pipe, which we've discussed here before. The sensor and the slit light are synchronized and both sweep past the film, which is held steady with registration pins. it does this three times - once for each color channel - then combines them into a color image. 

We just got rid of ours, which was 80% of the way converted into a modern film scanner. It went to someone locally who is going to finish converting it. It's a very nice transport.

Originally it was used for scanning short shots of film, not entire films. At the time, nobody did that. This would have been used for grabbing a scene from a film reel probably for visual effects work.

The lens inside (a 95mm Printing Nikkor) is worth almost what they're selling it for. The rest, not so much. it's about 400-500lbs of equipment too. 

Impressive that it's still working though. it's a very complicated machine. 

The prayer cards inside the door are missing. They're there to ward off evil spirits. It's probably cursed. 

4 minutes ago, Dan Baxter said:

Oh okay so that's a red-herring.

it is.

4 minutes ago, Dan Baxter said:

Yet on Audio I think we both agree we're not audio engineers, and yet you're the one throwing out a bunch of assumptions about how the better audio capture works and why you wouldn't want it.

Yes, we agree that we are not audio engineers. Which Is why I consulted one before posting. 

The *only* assumption I've made is that a sound reproducer that is outputting audio without the hiss is likely doing some level of filtering after the image of the soundtrack is picked up, probably a low-pass filter, but possibly more. This is a reasonable assumption. 

The hiss is the grain of the film, which manifests as white noise when quantized. The way to get rid of it is to filter it. Some machines do this while capturing. Some machines don't. I'd prefer the former as much as possible, so that we can control it ourselves. To me, that is certainly the better option. Just as capturing a flat scan without grading is a better option. We don't want to bake in any assumptions to the capture.

If you would like to keep ignoring what I've been saying, that's fine. But just to reiterate one more time, we would rather capture everything and then tease out the details, then cut off those details when capturing in order to get something that sounds better immediately. That's not a good trade-off, if you ask me. 

1 minute ago, Dan Baxter said:

And what about the backlight then reducing the visible base-damage in-camera would you prefer it didn't do that?

1 hour ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

This argument about the lighting on the picture side is a red herring and I'm not going to get into that.

8 minutes ago, Dan Baxter said:

you are literally the only person claiming that the ScanStation audio reader is perfect - no one else is claiming that. No one.

No i'm not. Because I never said that. You keep putting words in my mouth in order to further your argument, as you have done on other forums. Please, show me where I said that. 

You are doing what you always do - deflecting and ignoring facts. One last time, for the record: I would rather have a scan that captures everything than one that removes stuff while capturing. Scanning the sound a second time on another machine takes a lot longer then applying a filter and rendering out the sound. And with the method we're using, you have the original scan to go back to if you need it for fine tuning. That is a fundamental difference between archival scanning and scanning for quick release of a product on youtube 

On 3/12/2022 at 2:55 AM, Dan Baxter said:

You're a service provider and you're in a position to know better, and telling people that LG audio is "among the best optical soundtrack reproducers currently available" is false, deceptive, and misleading advertising

Honestly, Dan.This is the second time you've accused me of something like this (once in a private message on another forum) and it's getting really old, bordering on libel. I use this machine day in and day out. We've run well north of 3 million feet of film through our ScanStation. And you're making claims about things that seem to be primarily based on third-party information rather than first hand experience. I think I'm in a better position to speak about the quality of the audio on this scanner than you. 

The bottom line is: If you're using an archival film scanner like the Lasergraphics machines, as much as is possible, you don't want the scanner affecting the image or the sound when capturing.

I'm not going to argue that the audio from a Sondor is likely to sound better directly off the machine . Of course it is, because it's filtering out that hiss on the film. I do not know what methods it uses, but it's likely (at least in part) a low pass filter, which means it's cutting off any frequencies above a certain value. And that's a very effective way of dealing with the hiss. But it's also a very effective way to remove any signal that might be above that cutoff value as well. If you capture it all, you can fine-tune later to recover that signal. 

What I have showed you in the image above is the sound captured from a 16mm B/W film that I happened to have the elements for, so we could quickly take a look at what's happening. You can clearly see in the two optical tracks that there is signal above 6kHz. It's not much because it's buried in the hiss. But it's there. A low-pass filter will cut that off and it will be gone. But capturing it gives you the chance to recover that later using other tools.

How is that conceptually different a flat scan of the pix with no grading? The whole idea there is to not affect the image when scanning, such that there's as much to work with as possible after you scan. 

On 3/12/2022 at 2:55 AM, Dan Baxter said:

would you prefer that the backlight is not designed to minimise the visibility of the damage in-camera so that you can then try to remove all the scratches after the scan artificially because the scan is preserving the film exactly as it is

This argument about the lighting on the picture side is a red herring and I'm not going to get into that.

On 3/12/2022 at 2:55 AM, Dan Baxter said:

You've absolutely no evidence backing up your claim that the LG optical audio reader has been engineered perfectly - please do a proper comparison sometime then report back.

Nor have I said this is the case, so I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. 

On 3/12/2022 at 9:31 PM, Dan Baxter said:

The audio is not an audio file on the print, it's a printed picture it's all about how you capture the picture and convert it to audio.

It's more about what you do with it (via filtering, etc) than the method of converting the image of sound to an actual sound. Applying noise reduction or a low pass filter during the capture is permanent, and you will never be able to get at the signal that may have been captured, but was filtered out. Once you've done that, it's gone forever. It's fine to run those filters, but after you've captured the sound, where you can see the effect it's having and maximize the signal that's there. 

On 3/12/2022 at 9:31 PM, Dan Baxter said:

Whatever the source of the hiss is though there's a science behind capturing the audio perfectly and it certainly not as simple as capturing hissy audio and then removing the hiss afterwards.

A projector is a different thing, with a completely different purpose and a totally different method of capturing the sound. When you project, you are watching the film and hearing the sound immediately. You make a compromise  and apply a low pass filter or EQ the audio to get good sound because there is no time to process it more than that. A low pass filter can be implemented in hardware with basically no latency. It's also a 100% analog signal path so yes things like hum from the power supply can manifest in the sound. This isn't a problem with a digital capture of the track, though, so that's kind of irrelevant. 

But you don't use a scanner to project film, you use a scanner to capture the picture and sound, with the intention of doing more work on it afterwards, in the digital realm. 

And even so, as I've said above, if what you're looking for is an immediately viewable file from a scanner, you have the option to apply a grade while capturing, and to capture the audio with noise reduction. But we wouldn't do that for an archival scan because it's eliminating data during the capture that can never be recovered. And the scanner you're saying produces terrible audio is an archival scanner, doing what it's supposed to do.

It's not a telecine. if you want a graded scan with filtered audio, use a telecine. 

17 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

The Lasergraphics is very hissy

The Lasergraphics is not "hissy."

Your implication with this statement is that it is the scanner that is introducing noise that wasn't there, and this is incorrect.

What you are hearing is an accurate representation of the soundtrack as it exists on the film - that white noise is there. It is a part of the soundtrack that has always been there. In an analog playback system (say, theatrical projection), that would get cut out in the sound reproduction path so you wouldn't hear it. But you'd also be losing some information in that process. 

And as audio isn't my area of expertise and I don't want to be speaking about things I don't know about, I did a test this morning: I captured the 16mm mag mix, the 16mm optical neg and 16mm Print of a short film I made 30 years ago. I sent the files to a friend of mine who is an audio mastering engineer. Here's what we found:

On the left you see the mag. This is the mix, which is obviously the cleanest version with the most dynamic range. This mag is a dub of the same mix as the element that was sent to the lab that made the OTN (which in this case was a Nagra tape), so the sound hasn't been compressed into the frequency range required for 16mm audio (about 100Hz-6kHz). That was done by the lab when the Nagra master was played into the optical track recorder. The Track neg and the Print are in the middle and right, respectively. 

Horizontal axis is time. Vertical axis is frequency. The audio is the same ~2 minutes from the beginning of the film. All three were captured at 24bit/96kHz to WAV files. The brightness of the color indicates the level, and as you can see the optical tracks have brighter backgrounds, which we perceive as hiss. the line at about 5kHz in the optical tracks is an artifact of the Nagra tape (the pilot tone that's reference below). Here's their explanation:

Quote

 

White noise has equal energy per linear band, pink noise has equal energy per log band. Since we perceive frequency on a log scale, pink noise sounds flat and white noise sounds bright, ie "hissy." In the optical path, there would be a low-pass filter that would remove the pilot tone and everything above it. So the noise above 5k would go away, but the stuff below would remain

In other words, because of the limited frequency range of the optical track, most everything above about 5kHz is noise. And because that's all higher frequency, and because there's little to no signal there, we perceive it as extraneous hiss.

The ScanStation is capturing the sound as it exists on the soundtrack, and not processing it further to remove that. As an archival scanner, this is the correct way to do it, and I wouldn't want it to behave differently. If you don't want the hiss to be there in the captured audio, you have the option of applying noise reduction to the capture. We don't do this, because from an archival perspective it's the wrong way to approach this problem. The right way is to do it post-scan, on a copy. Again, I defer to the audio expert for an explanation:

Quote

As you can see, the mag has signal up to 20k. So if you are working off optical, you are better oversampling, notching out the pilot tone, and denoising the rest. You aren't going to get signal to 20k off it, but you can get another octave of real information pretty easily.

This is trivially easy to do even with free software. Resolve has a pretty decent de-noise filter and it does a nice job most of the time with just the default settings. 

Again, I would ask you to please stop spreading misinformation. The scanner is doing exactly what it's designed to do, and if that isn't what you want, then there is the option of applying noise reduction at the time of scanning.

Though, anyone thinking they can use a modern film scanner to create a final product directly off the machine, is using that machine in the wrong way, 

12 minutes ago, Heikki Repo said:

Must have been quite shiny innards in your clients' cameras! ?

haha. it's subtle, but the flicker was definitely there before it was repainted, and gone afterwards! I bet with something like Black 3.0 paint, it would be totally eliminated. Though I'm not sure how well that stuff will stand up over time, since it's more of an artists paint than an industrial paint. 

Something else to look at: we've had two customers with ACL S16 conversions that had a similar issue. In both cases the problem wasn't a light leak per se, but some of the black paint inside the camera body had been scraped off during the machining. Light was bouncing around inside the camera body, causing reflections that lead to a similar flicker. It's worth taking a look to see if you need to touch up any painted areas. 

2 hours ago, Dan Baxter said:

To be fair optical audio off a Lasergraphics is unmitigated shit. Professional companies just transfer optical audio separately.

That's completely ridiculous, and also untrue. It is in fact, among the best optical soundtrack reproducers currently available.  

We've had filmmakers who are intimately familiar with their own soundtracks tell us they've never heard their optical tracks sound as good as they do after we've scanned them.

Honestly, what is up with you and spewing information about a machine you have apparently never even used? Why do you insist on spreading misinformation like this?

12 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Magnatech gets away with this by having two big capstans. 

Magnatech doesn't use capstans. They're sprocket-drive, with stepper motors.

I love my ACL 1.5 (basically a II). It's comfortable to use, sits nicely on your shoulder, isn't especially heavy and the ergonomics are very good. It's quiet, too and the mags are pretty easy to load. I never liked Arri 16mm cameras. The SR series is clunky if you're hand holding (fine if you're on a tripod), and it's heavier on the electronic controls. 30-40 year old electronics are more likely to fail than something simpler like the ACL. 

As for Super 16 - why? Super 16 was invented was for doing blowups for 35mm. Since you're almost certainly going to scan the film and not blow up to 35, just crop it digitally to the aspect ratio you want. The extra couple mm you get with a Super 16 conversion isn't worth all the hassle of having to have the lens recentered, dealing with potentially bad machining on the gate enlargement, etc.

Obviously a camera that was designed as Super 16 from the beginning is a different story. But we've seen enough clients come through with sub-par S16 conversions to various cameras that it never really seemed worth it to me. 

12 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

You should look at your grade on its intended viewing medium...TV,  Movie Screen, YouTube / phone, whatever. Each may need their own grade. If it is too much with the dedicated grading, just split the difference. That is what I do or you can go crazy. 

This is *not* how you should grade and you shouldn't make a different grade for each target! 

Color correction should be done against a reference monitor using a defined color space and gamma, using proper scopes (waveform/vectorscope, etc). It should look correct on that calibrated reference monitor, and that's the only one that you should really be concerned with. If you start looking at every conceivable display (none of which will be calibrated in the wild), you will go mad.

If you're really good, you can even do most grading strictly by the scopes, but that takes a fair bit of time and experience.

You *should* QC it on the intended target, but you shouldn't make color decisions based on those screens unless every screen you're looking at is calibrated. Two screens of the same model by the same manufacturer with the same settings in the menus will rarely produce the same result. If you grade it properly to a known standard, things will fall into place when you export out for your intended targets (for example, you could grade Rec 709 and then bring that to whoever is making the theatrical DCP. The DCP encoder will apply the correct transforms so it looks right when projected). 

If you try to "split the difference" you're going to end up with a mediocre grade on all platforms, and creating a different grade for each platform is kind of crazy because of the duplication of effort and time involved. Unless you're doing first-run theatrical releases, this is out of most budgets and is unnecessary. 

At a certain point, one has to accept that most people's screens are messed up, and you can't fix that. But you can grade to a known standard. 

As for the eyes, if they require a different grade than the overall scene, just use a qualifier to create a matte that isolates the whites, give it some soft edges, then neutralize your highlights as needed, and apply a tracker to the eye matte so that it follows any head movement. It's trivial in any color correction system made in the past 15+ years, such as Resolve. 

6 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

It's the only way to fix damaged film. 

sigh. No, it's not. 

Wet gate will help with some things. It will do nothing to "fix" the film, but it will make for a better duplicate on certain scanners, or on photochemical printers. It does absolutely nothing for 50% of the film, though (the emulsion side). 

13 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

Here is a Xena 16mm liquid gate:

is it liquid through one set of holes and air through another to dry it? or are these to drain liquid? 

9 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

But no one has made a better suggestion for clear edge film. I

The issue is that a laser is not a great method for perf detection. Unless you spend big bucks on a proper sensor from a company like Keyence, which makes some that can detect the perfs in clear film. but they cost hundreds of dollars each, and they're probably too bulky to fit inside that scanner. Also, laser detection is problematic when you have multiple gauges and the perfs are in different places. It's just a bad way to do it, IMO, without a major engineering effort. 

Short of a sprocket wheel (which can be problematic on shrunken film), the best method is to take an image of the whole frame (overscanned, including the perfs), and use machine vision to locate the perfs. There are big advantages to this, including handling areas where there are no perfs due to damage. On film where you have perfs on both sides, you can fall back on other holes. Or for formats like Super 8, you can take a guess at where the film should be based on calculations made from where the surrounding frames ended up, and use the opposite edge from the perfs to do the left/right alignment using the film edge. 

Lasers are fine if the film is reversal with dark areas between the perfs. But unless you spend a lot of money testing with lots of different types of film (something I suspect isn't the case with this scanner), and a lot of money on higher end components, then it's just not going to work in all cases. 

3 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

But even if rich, don't know I'd buy a Lasergraphics. It is just that I have zero confidence in a company that never answers emails even after years of writing them.

If the emails to them are anything like your last 147 posts this evening, I can’t say I’d blame them for hitting the ignore button. 

6 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Some of the archival material has exposures all over the place...just terrible to work with. Best light scans won't work for many of the films and auto exposure won't work.  

You're not scanning archival film correctly if you're grading during the scan. The way you scan is to capture everything and then grade it later, scene by scene in software. The tools available in most scanners are not good enough to do this correctly, and they don't offer proper monitoring or scopes for doing real color grading during the scan. Minor tweaks, sure. But the correct method is to make sure you don't clip or crush anything, then deal with it later. 

3 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

That is why you have an extensive DVD/s instructional set and an extensive manual Perry that comes with the scanner

You do know that DVD is a dead medium, right? It's been years since we built or bought a computer with a DVD drive. And for the record, our company started as a DVD authoring service over 20 years ago, also offered Blu-ray, and I personally authored nearly 1000 titles in the first 15 years we were in business. But yes, I get your point - it could be a download or a PDF or a printed book hand gilded by monks or something. 

You are completely ignoring the fact that for the most part, it isn't necessary to have a manual for this scanner. That was one of Lasergraphics' primary design goals when making this machine - to make it simple to use, and they have absolutely achieved that. You say that's not the case, but you don't use one and clearly never have, so I don't know what to say.

One needs to know very little to figure out how to use it. How to use it well, and how to use it correctly, is beyond the scope of most software manuals you will find. And the reason for that is that with a product as specialized as this, it is assumed you have a baseline of knowledge about the materials you're working with, as well as what should be expected on the output side. Those two things combined should be sufficient to figure out if things are working properly. And if not, you ask the company for help. And by "figure out" I mainly mean knowing the workflow of the specific software, which again, isn't hard to use and has very little to do with the details of film scanning itself. 

BTW, your ridiculous Kettlebell example is completely off the mark. The DVD that's included with that is almost certainly designed to get you to buy more DVDs. Not more Kettlebells. It's a commodity item mass produced in the tens of thousands. I've authored tons of these kinds of DVDs and they're all the same. The Kettlebell isn't the product here, the DVD (and the other ones they almost certainly offer), is what they're selling you. 

11 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

You know Perry, if you give the same film to 10 scanning companies you will get 10 different scans.

This is true but not for the reasons you think. And so what? All scanners are a bit different and it's not a big deal that they produce slightly different images. Assuming negative film, if they're all scanned log, while they may all look slightly different, everything you need to color grade it to the same result is still there. It's also possible to get completely different scans on the same machine. If, for example, you base calibrate on a frame that's slightly fogged, you will get a different result than base calibrating on a frame that's not fogged. This is why Rob mention's the ArriScan's ability to apply a predefined base cal based on keykode. The ScanStation and Director can do this as well. In practice, it's a bit more complicated than that, especially if you're scanning something like an A/B roll, where you may have a short shot on different stock that has no keykode. 

15 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

So, a lot of scanning and post work is subjective to taste

Post work, sure - that's subjective. Properly scanned film is not. You don't do it by what you see on your monitor, you do it by what you see on your scopes. And again, it doesn't matter if the color cast is a bit more green on one scanner and a bit more blue on another. As long as you've captured everything you're good to go. Ask any colorist who has worked extensively with film scans - Never have film scanners all produced the same thing. But it doesn't matter, because you have tools to correct for that after the scan is done. 

17 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

The other option Perry is for the archives to do nothing. The archive that has a few million feet of film and does not have a few millions of dollars to spend on scans has little choice if they want to digitize their films, Perry.  They may have $100K to spend for a scanner and a budget for a $45k a year operator. 

This is not how it works. Our experience is that most of the scanners owned by archives sit unused or under-used. There are definitely exceptions to that, but we regularly scan for two clients who have their own scanners, but don't have people to use them. Once the person who knows the machine best leaves, the institutional knowledge is gone, and you have a very expensive dust collector sitting in the corner. 

The calculus for an institution buying a scanner is often "It will cost X to scan this much film, but less if we buy a scanner." Yet more often than not, the costs associated with maintaining and running that scanner are overlooked. And eventually there's nobody to use it. 

Most archives we deal with, and that is our primary business, scan film as they need it. Typically this is funded by someone who needs the film in digital form, such as a filmmaker who wants to use portions in another film. Eventually a lot of work gets done. Is it the most efficient way to do it? no. But it's reality. 

23 minutes ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

Listen Perry, you know some archives with good scanners that are just sitting, tell them to loan me the scanner for a 5 years. I will scan all their films for free (but only the ones that interest me) and they share the digital output of these films with my Archive for noncommercial use. 

Best of luck with that. 

On 2/25/2022 at 7:44 PM, Dan Baxter said:

On 2/25/2022 at 12:56 PM, Perry Paolantonio said:

I am basing my statements on fact, and experience.

And yet not on what LG themselves say. Your stubborn answer is that these people have no business scanning film if they want documentation for their scanner.

No, that's not my response, that's you (again) twisting my words around and cherry picking phrases out of what I'm saying.

I have been using the ScanStation on a near daily basis for 8 years, and worked with Lasergraphics through a previous client way back in 2009 or so when the only scanner they made was the Director.

We have the first ScanStation that Lasergraphics shipped, and we have been working with them for about 9 years. Our experience with Lasergraphics support has been rocky at times, and I'm not, as @Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said (but then apparently redacted), a "fanboy." I have plenty of issues with Lasergraphics as anyone who knows me can attest to. But on the whole it is the best scanner available for the widest range of scanning jobs today, at a reasonable price. Support for the machine is good, the company is actively developing new tools (compare that to the GoldenEye - even though DigitalVision is still around, they haven't released a software update in years for that scanner, yet we can download new ScanStation software every 2 months, or when we ask for the latest copy).  The ScanStation, Director and Archivist are incredibly easy to use, they rarely break, and despite your assertions, the software isn't "buggy." 

(On buggy software: We used PixelFarm's PFClean for a few years. It cost us something like $15k, and it never ran without crashing. We lost more money on having to redo work that was corrupted or lost than we spent on the software itself. Eventually we ditched it and haven't looked back. That's buggy software. It prevented us from getting work done.)

Are the annoyances in how the ScanStation software works? Of course there are. But they're mostly minor nitpicks, not things that prevent you from efficiently getting a good scan. Case in point: we recently scanned 180k feet of 16mm and Super 16 camera original film at 2k, HDR. All of that was done, without issues, in about 2.5 weeks. 18 bankers boxes full of lab flats, and we also scanned some other jobs along the way for different clients. This is because the software and hardware works as it's supposed to. If it was truly buggy, we would have been fighting with it all the way.

On 2/26/2022 at 6:41 PM, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

And what is the company? They sell a cheap piece of software...yet they give you a zillion times more than Lasergraphics would give you in 10 lifetimes.

Again, you're comparing apples to oranges here. And as someone who used to run a discussion board  20k users, I can tell you that it's a nightmare to deal with. So much more goes on behind the scenes that I don't think you have any clue about, from having to deal with forum software updates, to security issues, to spammers, to getting personally dragged into conflicts between users.  I would much rather have a direct line to their support team when I have a problem, or a resource like the Lasergraphics Users Facebook group when I have a general question that's not time-critical. Why does the company need to be the administrator for a forum anyway? There are plenty of options for us owners/users to discuss things among ourselves. 

You seem to have this idea that any company has unlimited resources and should provide all kinds of stuff at no charge. In the case of a small software company that has one or two developers, community support forums can alleviate the support load, but the quality of that community support is almost always lower than direct support from the people who make the product and know it best (from the inside, not just as a user). I am happy to pay for support knowing I can get an answer quickly, because we can't afford long stretches of downtime while we wait for some random person on the internet to make a suggestion that may or may not have any relevance to the problem at hand. 

On 2/27/2022 at 1:11 AM, David Sekanina said:

I don't mind eccentric, but his posts border on spam - thankfully there is an ignore function in this forum ?

So much of my time has been taken up in recent months replying to posts on forums like this one that are spreading false information about the scanner we rely on on a day to day basis for our business. You have no idea how many emails I've gotten from customers pointing to posts here and on other forums that are completely incorrect, worried about something that someone said (which is based on guesswork, usually) that's not correct. Seriously, I feel like a huge chunk of my day every day is spent responding here to counter the false information. It's soul sucking, but we can't ignore it because once bad info is out there, it has a tendency to stick. 

On 2/25/2022 at 10:35 PM, Robert Houllahan said:

What a great machine and it does some things which are truly great like changing calibrations automatically by reading the keycode info.

The scanstation does this as well.