Robin Phillips

apologies, my brain is so tuned to 16mm lately I made a bad assumption

you should be able to ask them which scanner is which. I havent dealt with NYC but Atlanta has always been super helpful with answering questions. its possible the HD scan is on their blackmagic cintel scanner, which is actually less than 1080p.

one thing you might wanna try, though the plugin isnt particularly cheap, is to run the footage thru Neat Video (no affiliation). it has degrain and sharpen tools that work pretty well, and you can re-mix it with your original footage. I tend to use it on super16 just to squeeze a tad more sharpness out of it, especially if Im using older glass, then I'll do a mix of 25% sharpened 75% original. its just enough to sharpen up the eyes, some details a liiiitle bit more. You might find it can get some of your footage here a bit more acceptable to you. works with premier, avid, AE etc

Check with Ablecine service department in LA. They might have something in storage.

Try playing with Neat Video some time. you can clean up 16mm to look cleaner than 35 if you want. My personal favorite trick is to do a high quality degrain, sweeten up the picture with some sharpening, then do a mix with the source footage to get the grain back. it gives a great extra little kick to the image if you need it (especially if you had to compromise on your scan format)

I spoke with Visual Products this week. they're doing ones that will be replacements for the Arri SR3 IVS model as well as the Aaton Xtera. Glorious days of HD monitoring ahead!

Posted 7 days ago, super interesting

Any chance anyone on here has a PDF of the AATON VSU Mk II manual? for the life of me I cant find it online

does it have a 3 perf movement or 4 perf?

Tyler do you do commercial scanning?

I've had some test stuff scanned at 4k before just to see. When using Ultra16 lenses it looks theres definitely a benefit over 2k, but I really dont think you'll get to actual 4k between the lenses and the film stock. If you were finishing a film its probably worth a 4k scan if budget permits, otherwise ya may as well just scan at 2k and upscale.

It sounds like it doesnt serve the story and you're ditching it, but I think if you wanted to do this a hybrid approach would be best - photograph the cookies under real light, then duplicate them or texture models with the lit photographs. This was one of the approaches for the tall standing rocks in the Episode 1 pod race sequence (granted rocks not fortune cookies), and has long been a short cut when budgets are tight and exact shots are known. think of it as a 2.5D (as oppose to 3D) trick.

does anyone know what restoration tools were used on the 16mm portions? it looked way too sharp to not have been majorly cleaned up

technically there was something close enough - for space shuttle missions kodak made 400' daylight spools for the SR, but those were not super 16 compatible IIRC. I suspect they were loud AF if the 100' daylight spools are any indication... *scrape scrape scrape*

These guys have archival 16mm film cans for reels up to 2000' https://www.gaylord.com/c/Storage-Boxes-and-Cans