Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

OK, thanks! (BTW, these were silent films.) It makes sense that they looked poor compared to todays films. Fast action is very jumpy. I think I saved this at 15fps. (I should keep some notes.) I save it all speed options and see what looks the best. Don't know if they offer 16fps on the software.

I got some old home movies from the 1920's. It looks like the footage is fast and jerky. Did the cheap, home 16mm cams shoot at 24fps back then?

OP, just how it is. $$ runs the world, not art. CA was taken down over $$, with cheap illegal labor. Brexit was stopped over $$. Scorsese ruined the end of Taxi Driver, desaturating the blood over $$. Why was Trump stopped from closing down the border to Mexico...that is right $$. England lost the Colonies back in the 1780's over $$...the Stamp Tax. That is one of the big benefits of working underground. You don't care one thing about profit other than do you have the $$ to do a project. Of course, filmmaking is even worse than still photography for sucking down $$. One way or another it always boils down to $$ when doing art. If I could draw I could be in biz with a used napkin and a pencil. And if grandma had balls she would be grandpa. Just gotta suck it up and do the best we can in the world we got.

I think this discussion is only for the low budget films. As Tyler brought up, for big $$ films, you can do as you like and film vs digital cost is inconsequential. I think the issue will be as the old timers (film trained) die off, the young guns (digital trained) coming up will have a harder time with film. You can see how it went with 3 strip Technicolor...a lost art.

Here is a scan of a splice detail on a film scanned in TIFF. Single TIFF files are about 3.28mb in 2K 4:3 on the Retroscan. (Although this sample was 4mb.) Click on image to view larger. This was not done as a single image scan, but was taken out of the scan sequence of the film. So it is representational of what you would get when scanning a movie. (Plus I had to reduce it to post on the forum.) I didn't do any special focusing. Maybe it can be done slightly sharper if the film was fine tuned for focus before running. But I think it is a good sample as-is for what the Retroscan can do for sharpness. I hope to give you a rundown of the Lasergate in a few months. As I mentioned previously, the standard Retroscan 16mm gate does poorly with clear edge film. A good portion of the film in my Archive is clear edge. So consider what type of film you will be scanning when buying a Retroscan to get the right configuration.

In the old days it was a big deal on May 1 https://vintagephotographyddteolijr.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/maypole-may-day-collection/

Here Scott, this is a 16mm raw scan, a 2K Retroscan file 1.17MB JPEG 2048 x 1536. I reduced it to 292kb for the forum limits. The Retroscan does not have a film plate to keep the film flat, so maybe 2K will be sharper on another scanner. If you blow it up, the grain is not too sharp. The image falls apart before you can see the grain on the 1.17mb jpeg. From what I can tell, what looks like grain here is more of the texture from the sensor or something like that. I got some flatbed scans of this film and they don't show the grain either and some are 10mb jpegs for 3 or 4 frames. Well Scott, we will have to keep on the trail of the unobtainable scan that can show the grain! But in the future, shoot in BW and you may have an easier time seeing the grain.

Well, you gotta do it then and post the results. Get a 2K, 4K, 8K and 10K scan. Then put it up on the Internet Archive. But color film is dye based and the grain is not sharp like BW film. And I don't think a movie film scanner will produce as sharp a scan as a flatbed scanner. But that is another test. Sometimes when I get some time I will compare a 2K Retroscan to a flatbed scan. But right now my computer is a mess, and I'm having trouble replacing it. So it is a test for down the road. Did you go to the link I posted earlier on photography compared? You didn't see any grain in the color film example I posted. It is a hji res flatbed scan and blown up like hell. Color film does not have the grain structure like BW. Here..from the Wiki "In black-and-white photographic film, there is usually one layer of silver halide crystals. When the exposed silver halide grains are developed, the silver halide crystals are converted to metallic silver, which blocks light and appears as the black part of the film negative. Color film has at least three sensitive layers, incorporating different combinations of sensitizing dyes. Typically the blue-sensitive layer is on top, followed by a yellow filter layer to stop any remaining blue light from affecting the layers below. Next comes a green-and-blue sensitive layer, and a red-and-blue sensitive layer, which record the green and red images respectively. During development, the exposed silver halide crystals are converted to metallic silver, just as with black-and-white film. But in a color film, the by-products of the development reaction simultaneously combine with chemicals known as color couplers that are included either in the film itself or in the developer solution to form colored dyes. Because the by-products are created in direct proportion to the amount of exposure and development, the dye clouds formed are also in proportion to the exposure and development. Following development, the silver is converted back to silver halide crystals in the bleach step. It is removed from the film during the process of fixing the image on the film with a solution of ammonium thiosulfate or sodium thiosulfate (hypo or fixer).[3] Fixing leaves behind only the formed color dyes, which combine to make up the colored visible image. Later color films, like Kodacolor II, have as many as 12 emulsion layers,[4] with upwards of 20 different chemicals in each layer." - - - - - - - Scott, I'd tell you to scan a small section of your film on a flatbed scanner to get a reference example of what you can achieve. Then use that to compare your 10K scan to.

Sure Perry, no one is suggestion to upscale his movie. The discussion was about getting progressively higher res scans. I thought he wanted hi res scans to project it bigger. My take is even with super hi res scans, 8 can only go so big for projection. With still photos, upscaling can work in some instances combined with sharpening. Upscaling is not as good as hi res scans, but sometimes it makes a more pleasing image to the eye than not upscaling. You got to view the results to see if you like it. If you are pixel peeping then you may not like it, but how does it look to the eye? That is the question. I do lots of upscaling with digital images of still photos. I never saved any before and after examples of it, but will look out for them in the future. The reason I upscale is I cannot always get a good digital original and it may be kinda low res. The upscaling can work to help make a better moderate size print, like a 8 x 10, but the upscaling wont magically make it a low res file to produce sharp 20 x 24's That is how I use upscaling. And it is just like you say with your audio example above. Sometimes the upscaled image does not look as good as the original, so it fails. You just have to try it Perry. And I'm talking about moderate upscaling. When I come across a good example of a upscaling before and after success I will post it for you guys.

Dunno, looks good to me. What are you expecting with 8? You can only do so much with 8. Every film format has an optimum projection size and viewing distance. Just gotta suck it up if you work with 8 and accept you are not going to have hi image quality even with super hi res scans.

Forget reasoning. Just run some tests and post the results. If work is done right, proof is in the puddin, not in reasoning. Your scans may be poorly done, even at high res. The scanning companies may just scan things and not try for critical focus. Ask them if they can offer critical focus service. See if that helps the grain pop. I don't know how the $$ scanners work, it may be autofocus, but grain should show up if it is scanned sharply. Some color films seem to have clumpy grain that is different that BW grain. See the link below for photography compared to see color grain vs BW grain. Apples to apples, oranges to oranges...film is less sharp than digital. 35mm negative film = 3 or 4 mp with a P&S cam. (Chromes may be different.) Here are the test photos. http://photographycompared.tumblr.com/ Perceived sharpness on the big screen may be something different. But these are the results with still film.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-rise-fall-internet-art-communities ...what fantastic an article! With ADD, I could only get through a fraction of it. I will have to digest it over a few sittings.

Retroscan has a 'clean crop' option for saving film scans. It takes a little crop all around to fine tune the scan from ragged edges. But it wont crop what you got out. You can get a frame by frame TIFF scan and clean up with Lightroom or Photoshop if it is that important to you. They got some crazy film restoration software that may do better, but the cost is astronomical. (from what I can tell.)

That is heavy duty. Had no idea.

If you are interested in learning about old time film handling here are a series of 16mm film I put up at the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/search.php?query=film handling 16mm teoli&and[]=mediatype%3A"movies" The AV Geeks had one of these projection films. They said they sell DVD's of the film for $10. I contacted then, they said it was a low res DVD and asked what I was using it for. I told them to put in my film archive and to watch. After I told them that, they would not reply to my emails and would not sell me a copy. Worked out OK for me. I got 6 projection films for next to nothing. ….F the Geeks.