Peter Andrews

On 11/23/2022 at 11:07 AM, Carl Looper said:

The lack of technical documents regarding how ScanStation scans a film when particular setting are applied, and that operators of ScanStations appear to have no idea what you are talking about when talking about colour spaces, means that one is left to hypothesise what the result of a scan might be. In practice, of course, scans can be eyeball adjusted in software such as Resolve, and most colours will be reconstructable through that process. It's when otherwise using a scan of a film print to assess that film print (e.g. ahead of making a better print) that the specifics of the encoding become important. One might very well take a scan through Resolve and make a beautiful digital result from it, but how to otherwise use that grading information to make a new projection print, is entirely lost if a scan house (or Lasergraphics) can't or won't describe the scan in terms of the transforms it uses to encode the scan. That all said, a combination of speculation (hypothesising) and tests of such would eventually solve for such lack of information.

 

Hi Carl, we are in Australia and have an Arriscan XT (The newest model from Arri) and a Xena, a Cintel, and some LG scanners. If you want to shoot a test film, we will happily scan it and post the images for everyone to dissect.

I've sent you a message ?

They absolutely cherry-picked that sample. We scan prints on our Arriscan XT and our previous Arriscan and I have never, ever seen a result that poor. We also have Lasergraphics scanners and have not seen any real difference on print material of that magnitude in either direction. The Arriscan XT does have the latitude and the settings for print film, the original Arriscan was not designed for print film, but with the right settings did a stellar job anyway.

I know this is an old topic, but we have an Archivist, a Cintel V2 sprocketless and an Arriscan. Happy to create some samples of the same film on each if someone wants to send in a test film. The Cintel V2 still has fixed pattern noise, and isn't as sharp as the Arri, and is low resolution on 16mm. The Archivist does 5.5K on 16mm overscanned, and the Arri up to 6.5K, the scans on the Arri and and Archivist are noticeably better than on the Cintel. The sound module on the Cintel is however very good, both for optical and mag and is adjustable. One thing to note,. we have been informed by our French clients that the Cintel is not allowed to be used as the basis for any restoration projects that the CNC (The National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image) funds as they consider the image quality not of a high enough standard.  

I know this is an old thread, but there is an ArriXT and a Scanstation in Canberra that takes on commercial and amateur scanning jobs.