Guy Burns

I'd appreciate some comments on a typical frame, call it F01, from an 8mm film that has been scanned on a… Unknown Nikon machine (Sydney, 2010) Epson V700 flatbed (home, 2016) RetroScan Universal (Melbourne, 2016) … and is just about to be scanned on a higher-end machine. Uploaded Sample I have uploaded a tiff image of the three scans. They images are layered and aligned, but not corrected in any way: http://www.mediafire.com/download/319f66472xzd9x4/F01_Comparison.tif Epson as reference for exposure I'm confident that the Epson scan can be used as the reference for exposure. It was set to scan with no corrections of any kind. The histogram sits nicely in the middle, telling me that F01 was well exposed when originally captured on film. I'm not so sure about the colour, but comparing the Epson scan with the actual film on a lightbox, the colour looks quite close: a slight pink-cast overall, which throws the sky slightly purple and gives the end of the building a pinkish look. Comments please, on: EXPOSURE Sydney Scan: has undergone a certain amount of correction by the scan company. The whites, though not clipped, have lost detail – detail that is clearly visible in the Epson and Retro scans. Q1: For the Sydney scan, why has detail been lost in unclipped whites? What did the scanner do to achieve that? Retroscan: I asked for the RetroScan to be set to optimum manual exposure. It came back with the histogram moved towards black, resulting in clipped shadow detail (slightly). Now, the exposure, when setting up the RetroScan, might have been upset because I asked for the perforations to be included (cropped out of the download). Maybe the operator exposed on the entire scan, including the perforations. And since they're bright white, that would have caused the exposure to move towards black. That leads me to… Q2: On high end machines, if I ask for the perforations to be included in the scan, is that going to upset the exposure? Or is exposure set via a method independent of the film, something like a grey card? Anyway, the RetroScan has given this particular frame what I call the "chocolate look" – the thickening of shadow areas which happens sometimes when photographing film with a digital camera. For a detailed description of the "chocolate look" see page 80 (under sRGB and D700) of: http://www.mediafire.com/download/qc67n2gkdz3viyp/Scanning_Kodachrome_%28Incomplete%29.pdf.zip. Run your mouse over the options at top right to see the various scans. COLOUR The Sydney scanner has serious purple and yellow fringing, not seen in the other scans, but clearly seen in F02: http://www.mediafire.com/download/m3ydc4imrfhymj7/F02_%28Sydney%29.tif Q3: Any suggestions as to where the purple and yellow fringing came from? Does it indicate what type of scanner was used?

Thanks for the suggestions. I was pretty keen to try Resolve. Assumed it would have a reasonable dust-busting tool, being part of such flash software. So I downloaded Resolve, installed El Capitan on an external drive to run it, dragged a very dirty 8mm movie into the timeline, and started drawing some rectangles. Is DaVinci kidding? Problem 1 There's no sensible undo. First time I've come across an Edit > Undo in any software that doesn't work. Doesn't do anything. Wait… what's this Edit > Resolve Undo right down the bottom? Aha! Yes, that works – but it undoes every clean you've made. You could have done 100 cleans and want to undo just the last one because it looks a bit sus, but no, the whole lot are undone. So, you have two options for Undo: none or the lot. Ridiculous. But maybe I missed something. Problem 2 No accurate control about how the cloning is done. You either click on a point – and it clones who-knows-how; or you draw a box – and it clones who-knows how. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes it's not. But if the latter, there's no sensible undo. Now you're listening to a cloning-expert here. I've cloned away hundreds of thousands of imperfections on my scanned slides, using either the Healing Brush Tool or the Clone Stamp Tool in Photoshop. Each has it's advantages in specific cases. But unlike Resolve, PS allows the user to clone very accurately, by adjusting the relative position, size, and blending mode of the tool, as well as zooming and moving the canvas, if required. But with Resolve you just hope for the best. And you can't undo! Problem 3 To use Resolve to dust-bust, you have to turn the clip into an image sequence. Well, if I'm going to do that, and if I'm going to clean manually by drawing rectangles, I may as well use PS which offers full control over cloning – and it offers Undos. Conclusion I'm surprised that such a professional-looking piece of software as Resolve offers such a mickey mouse feature. Two good things have come out of this: I can cross Resolve off the list. I can put Photoshop back on the list. Adobe and Film Cleaning Photoshop has the ability to stitch images together. To me, that's pretty amazing image-analyzing technology. If it can determine that the edges of two images are similar, and work out how to join them, it must be able to determine which parts of two images (two adjacent frames, say) are dissimilar. Then it could use it's cloning features to remove that dissimilarity. It seems to me that the technology already available in Photoshop and After Effects would enable Adobe to come up with a viable, virtually automatic cleaning system for film, much like Digital ICE. Under manual override/undo, of course. Maybe it'll come.

Background I'm on a search for software that has the ability to run through a scanned film and remove a certain amount of dust. Or, a service provider that has such software, and I send them a hard drive and away they go. I don't want the films to look like a restored Blu-ray; I do want some imperfections to remain to give the feeling of age. The films are 8mm, and they will be scanned into ProRes 4444. Dust removal would be best done by Digital ICE during scanning, but very few scanning companies – or machines for that matter – have the ability to detect dust via an infra-red pass and then clone it away. My Nikon Coolscan has ICE. To me it's the most magical thing – the combination of hardware and software accurately removing thousands of dust spots on an old slide. No other bit of computer technology so impresses me. What's interesting to me is that for a static image such as a slide, the only automatic way to accurately remove dust is via ICE. It can't be done accurately by software – yet. That's not so for a moving image, because you have other frames as a comparison. If dust and dirt come and go, they can be detected and removed. That leads me to… A Sydney Solution I spoke with a scanning company in Sydney about this. They said they use their own software which is based on a 5-frame comparison. As I understand it, given a particular frame to clean, the images in the surrounding four frames are compared, and anything that is not on all of them, is cloned away. Something like that. Sounds a good solution. I just stepped through several frames of a very dirty scan, imagined myself to be a dumb bit of software looking for small things flicking in and out, and I reckon I would have done a good job of cleaning. Enough, at least, for my purposes. Software I don't want, do want I don't want software that does everything. This is not a Hollywood restoration project. I just want an elegant piece of software in which you open the movie and can see the frames, you alter certain settings (probably just two or three), press CLEAN and it comes back with a cleaned-up movie. If you don't like the result (too aggressive, too gentle), you cancel and run it again. It doesn't attempt to remove scratches, just small blobs. Ques 1 What software is available as a standalone package, preferably on OSX, that uses something similar to the Sydney Solution? It could be part of a larger suite, or an extracted feature sold separately. Ques 2 What companies offer a simple, effective, dust-removal service? I don't want grain reduction, colour correction, flicker removal, and so on. Just the removal of smallish blobs that come and go, frame-to-frame. Any comments/suggestions most appreciated.

The GOP thing is a bit beyond me really. However… I've been using MP4Tools for several years, and early on I commented to the developer that if I selected a trim from the 6-sec point to the 12-sec point, for example, I always lost the start. He was right on the ball, and in a few days came back with a new version that started one second early. So asking for 6-12 gives me 5-12. He also mentioned something about GOP and that he could only cut at approximately one-second intervals, so maybe he was talking about the same thing as you.

Thanks for the responses. I've think I've found out the machines that occupy the two top positions in Australian commercial movie scanning. One is a Rank Cintel Ursa Diamond tele-cine that the woman on the switchboard told me has been in the company for years, purchased secondhand from overseas. Takes up a whole room she said, "and looks rock solid". The other, the one that scanned my friend's movie, was a "Nikon film scanner" according to the rep, that had been modified in-house, software and hardware, dating back more than 10 years. The rep wouldn't tell me the model. I asked whether it was a modified Coolscan, but he was quick to say it wasn't. The machine takes 80 minutes to scan a 50' reel, and 5 hours overnight to scan a 200' reel. He told me the reason for my friend's duplicate frames: that the customer must have requested a 25 fps transfer. Looks like the whole of Australia can't support a top-end scanner. I thought someone would say hard drives are cheap. Here's what was originally in my post, under Reason 2, but I edited it out. Should have left it in. Before anyone says "Storage is cheap. Get a bigger drive." I run three firewire backups on my desk, one in another room, and two in the shed. If I exceed 2TB and need new 3TB drives, it won't be cheap. About $1200 (A$1600). So, I keep file size down. Using MP4Tools is not destructive. I can remove unwanted video from a 30-second AVCHD clip (about 100 MB) and end up with a 6-second clip, say, in a couple of seconds. Quick and lossless. It just cuts into the data stream. Do it all the time. Two out of three ain't bad Only two of the three companies I chose responded by email. And both of them in this thread. I wasn't expecting that. The one that didn't respond is the company that – I'm guessing here – is referenced by "Hollywood quality, without the attitude". Anyway, they miss out on my small amount of business. Rob and Perry – you've both the job. If you've looked at my Kodachrome document, I'll be doing a similar thing for movie scans, but on a much smaller scale. I want the movies scanned, but I am very interested in scanning itself, so I want comparisons. Once I round up the films (I have to convince the owner to part with them first), they'll go to Melbourne for scanning on a Retro Scan Universal, then back to me and on to Rob. Then I'm hoping Rob is agreeable to forward them to Perry, instead of coming back to Tasmania first. I'll let you know by email when the films are ready. And I'll have a few more questions in those emails, if that's okay. You've both been very helpful. Thanks a lot. And so was Roger Evans.

Thanks for the responses. Rob said: "You can use a flat bed scanner". But the results will be quite poor for 8mm. The Epson V700 is a well-regarded scanner. With a small amount of post-scan processing, it can give results for slides almost as sharp as the Nikon Coolscans. See pp75-138 of my PDF… http://www.mediafire.com/download/qc67n2gkdz3viyp/Scanning_Kodachrome_%28Incomplete%29.pdf.zip Colour is often better, and it gives demonstrably superior scans of colour negatives. But it is quite blurry for 8mm. The frames are too small, 1/50 of the area of a slide. Tiffs I'm coming from slide scanning on my Coolscan and movie-scanning on my Epson, thus my emphasis on Tiff. I am obviously wrong about tiff for movie scans. However, there are two reasons I like Tiff. Reason 1 The scan people can't foul up the fps What I didn't say about my friend's scan, was that the frames inside the AVI were in a 3:4 cadence. Every third frame was repeated. Exactly. No change at all. And from a company that boasts in bold letters on it's home page: "NOBODY IN THE WORLD DOES MEDIA DIGITISING LIKE ***" That's quite an accurate statement when you read what they did to a movie that was shot at 16 fps. I don't know how they did it, but this is the effect (I'll use Premiere terminology): 1. Thinking the film was Super 8, they interpreted the frames at 18 fps. 2. The movie then went into a 24 fps timeline, introducing the 3:4 cadence. 3. Somehow that 24 fps was reinterpreted at 25 fps, and that's how my friend got his AVI file. Reason 2 Extracting and keeping only the desirable frames – without re-encoding If I choose DPX or ProRes for my scanned movies, instead of Tiff, can I crop those files without re-encoding? With Tiff, its easy. I just bin them. It's also easy with AVCHD from my GH3. The utility MP4Tools allows me to crop the start and finish without re-encoding. It's fairly important to me to crop – to get rid of frames I don't need to save space. Two more questions. QUES 2 Typically, how does a scanning company deal with various frame rates? Say they receive a batch of reels of different frame rates from the same customer. Is it a non-issue because the scanner itself will assume the correct frame rate from the size of the sprocket holes? I ask because I don't want a repeat of my friend's experience with frame rates. QUES 3 How does a scanning company deal with different-size holes in film reels? I'm looking at two now, and they're different. Do the scanners have spindles of different sizes? Retro Scan I must put in a good word for Roger Evans, maker of the Retro Scan Universal. He reminds me of Steve Jobs, originally making stuff in his garage. He did relent and get back to me by email, and even offered to ring me regarding my thorny questions about the Retro Scan. I'm sure it gives adequate results. I just can't see how it could give quality results without the expertise in colour, software, mechanics, and general R&D that the big boys have. I will be running all the films through one of his machines in Australia, before I send the films to the USA. I have to do that in case they're lost in transit. And when I have received all the scans, I'll be posting a detailed comparison. Watch out you big fellas with your fancy machines!

Thanks to this forum, I think I now have three superb options for scanning my Standard 8mm films, three companies in the USA. Regarding scanning, I have some general questions. But first, some background. Background I'm digitising my multi-screen slide shows from the 1980s, and turning them into a Blu-ray. I wasn't expecting to include any movies, but recently I came across some amateur 8mm footage of bushwalking in Tasmania in the 1930s, and it just has to be included. My search for a scanner I thought my Epson V700 would be up to the job, but after comparing scans from the Epson and scans from an ageing Nikon movie scanner done by a company in Sydney (80 minutes to scan a 50 foot reel), I moved on from the Epson – and moved on from Sydney. Next I approached a dedicated enthusiast at Nano (http://nanolab.com.au/). A top bloke. Built his own scanner. But he has so much work he won't scan unless he develops your film as well. He suggested Movie Stuff. So I checked out the Retro Scan Universal (http://www.moviestuff.tv/). To this newbie, it looked pretty good. And the owner is certainly keen to talk on the phone. Gave me his cell phone number. But wouldn't answer most of questions by email. Why not? And I need answers. Several hours on the net gradually led me to this forum, and names such as Lasergraphics, Flashscan, Kinetta, Spirit, Oxberry, and Xena. And three companies which I just know will scan at world's best. I must say I was surprised at the scanning cost. In my mind I had never considered top of the range stuff, thinking it would cost thousands of dollars to scan a ten-minute reel. But times are changing. Ques 1 Does anyone know of an Australian company that can scan Standard 8 on one of the machines mentioned? Ques 2 Is it correct that exposure should be constant when scanning? If I was setting up a machine, I would expect to set exposure off an 18% grey-scale card, or similar technique, to get maximum lattitude to black and white. What put me off the Retro Scan, for example, was minimal exposure control. It's either automatic – changing frame by frame – or a manual setting by changing numbers. My Epson calibrates itself between every scan. Ques 3 How accurate is the frame-to-frame registration on the top-notch scanners I mentioned? When I did my test scans on the Epson, I took the scans into After Effects, and tracked the frame movement via the sprocket holes. Worked quite well. But will I need to track, and correct, sprocket movement from the top-notch scanners, or has that already been done by the scanner? Ques 4 Is Digital ICE – the infra-red dust-removal technique used on my Nikon Coolscan – possible on the top-notch scanners? It gives superb results when scanning slides. Ques 5 Is it normal, without extra cost, to receive frame images in tiff, cropped to just outside the actual image? Preferably LZW compressed. The reason for this question is that a friend received a 32 GB avi file for a 3 minute silent film. It was 1920 x 1080, had black bars each side, with beautifully digitised (but silent) PCM audio at 1.5 Mbps. Nothing was compressed. If they had been LZW Tiff, without the black bars, the file would have been about 5-6 GB Ques 6 Is is sensible to scan 8mm film above 1080P? My experience after scanning about 7000 slides on my Coolscan, and some on the Epson, backed up by numbers from other sources, is that slide film has an resolution of about 4000 dpi. For Standard 8 frame (4.5mm x 3.3 mm) that would mean about 700 x 500 pixels. Thanks in advance for any comments.