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Is this type of film scanner viable to use or is it too far out of date?


Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

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

Shadow Telecine S 35mm and S 16mm film HD SD magnetic and optical sound. | eBay

Looks like it was $$ when new, but if you can't get a scan out of it, what good is it.

Everything is sold as-is, so it is a crapshoot.

 

Way out of date. The problem with machines like this, is that they don't just work when you plug them in. These machines need calibration and you can't do that yourself. It requires a professional tech to be hired and that can cost thousands of dollars. Plus it weighs 1400lb probably, so good luck moving it around. They also require high pressure air like the Spirits do. So you have to come up with a triple filtered air solution, which is expensive and the computer to run the thing, well yea... good luck getting that to work. It doesn't just run on a modern windows program. Sure, you can thread film onto it and take the HDSDI output and put it into a recorder, but without a full grading panel which requires the computer to work, you can't really do much. You'll be stuck not being able to do basic calibration. 

So where it's cool, but they're basically paperweights. We have a much later generation Spirit 2k/4k and it's a nightmare to keep working. I bet we've spent more keeping it working than the initial purchase price. 

If you have some money and you want to invest in a real Super 8 and 16mm scanner, there is a brand new scanner that just came out and they're willing to do leases on them. If you PM me I can tell you all about it. One that does 16mm and 35mm good, is hard to get a hold of sadly. They're generally a lot more money. 

Edited by Tyler Purcell
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Yeah the Shadow was the "Lite" version of the original Classic Spirit and the original Classic has sort of sub HD performance and the Shadow is even more 'Videoey" looking.

Decent for it's time but heavy and complex to setup and run.

Also you could get a Classic Spirit basically for free I know where several are and have full documentation for them.

 

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21 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Way out of date. The problem with machines like this, is that they don't just work when you plug them in. These machines need calibration and you can't do that yourself. It requires a professional tech to be hired and that can cost thousands of dollars. Plus it weighs 1400lb probably, so good luck moving it around. They also require high pressure air like the Spirits do. So you have to come up with a triple filtered air solution, which is expensive and the computer to run the thing, well yea... good luck getting that to work. It doesn't just run on a modern windows program. Sure, you can thread film onto it and take the HDSDI output and put it into a recorder, but without a full grading panel which requires the computer to work, you can't really do much. You'll be stuck not being able to do basic calibration. 

So where it's cool, but they're basically paperweights. We have a much later generation Spirit 2k/4k and it's a nightmare to keep working. I bet we've spent more keeping it working than the initial purchase price. 

If you have some money and you want to invest in a real Super 8 and 16mm scanner, there is a brand new scanner that just came out and they're willing to do leases on them. If you PM me I can tell you all about it. One that does 16mm and 35mm good, is hard to get a hold of sadly. They're generally a lot more money. 

 

Wow, had no idea it was such a pain. Sounds like even in the best of times it was a problem child.

What was the air used for? Was it to keep the film dust free?

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8 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

Yeah the Shadow was the "Lite" version of the original Classic Spirit and the original Classic has sort of sub HD performance and the Shadow is even more 'Videoey" looking.

Decent for it's time but heavy and complex to setup and run.

Also you could get a Classic Spirit basically for free I know where several are and have full documentation for them.

 

Why don't they sell them? Are old machines, even if in working order, that worthless?

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

 

Wow, had no idea it was such a pain. Sounds like even in the best of times it was a problem child.

Oh they are amazing machines, the fact they work is beyond belief. If you saw it up close, you'd drop your jaw, it's bigger than a forklift! It has drawers underneath full of memory buffers and controls for the high voltage lamp. The back opens up and is full of optical components and the beam splitter line imager assembly. It's very complicated and honestly, having worked with it a lot, they do work amazingly... when they work. God help ya if a lamp blows up or there is a power surge. You're rolling it to the curb and hoping someone grabs it lol ?

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

What was the air used for? Was it to keep the film dust free?

I believe there is a slight vacuum on the film as it goes through the gate. This helps keep it in position. 

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

Why don't they sell them? Are old machines, even if in working order, that worthless?

DFT sells new machines, I think they are a million dollars or something like that. Same design, just updated. 

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I have had stuff telecined for dailies use on Shadow and that is exactly what it is good for: making affordable dailies scans. The image quality is not enough for making final scans for any use by my opinion. The pixel grid, the colour response and dynamic range etc.

If you are very good in fpga programming and would like to make your own film scanner using the mechanical and optical parts of the original Shadow, then it might make sense to purchase one. Meaning that you would make the all image processing electronics by yourself from ground up starting from updating a new sensor and learning how to control it with a fpga+microcontroller combo and how to read image stream from it and process the stream to usable pixels you can use. If you are very dedicated in making film scanners by yourself and have couple of years of free time then this might be a great project opportunity

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As much as I can without ever having done it, I think these days that building scanners is vastly easier than it ever was - still not easy, but pretty doable on a home user level. If you were buying something like this solely for the mechanical film handling parts I think I'd just start from scratch. You don't even need to do FPGA programming; if you're willing to end up with a reasonably slow scanner you can do two-pass scanning with RGB lighting and any of several machine vision cameras.

I'd really like to try it one of these days, but frankly, with such a tiny amount of film being shot it wouldn't be anything other than a fun way to waste time.

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The easiest way is to make a slow frame by frame scanner which uses a mirrorless photo camera to take the images of the film to its own memory card. The camera is controlled by a wired remote which is hacked so that a sensor in the mechanics can trigger the camera at correct moments.

This type of system works pretty well (I built a crude prototype over a year ago and scanned film with it. The quality was great but image stability was pretty poor and needed extensive post stabilization to be watchable) but you need to have good mechanics and sensor system in it to get reasonable stability for usable results. 

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19 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:

I think I'd probably reach for post stabilisation anyway. Spirits did it. Probably better than anything you could reasonably hope to build unless you ripped the gate mechanism out of a Mitchell!

yes a mitchell or a bh movement would work well for this. it is much easier to improve image stability mechanically than try to handle the extensive instability caused by bad mechanics (my first prototype had vertical instability of about 1/50 of the image height which is massive. one should have something like 1/500 or 1/1000 for it to be useful. 

One could take a movement out of Konvas or similar low cost camera to get basic intermittent movement relatively easily. arranging the film path so that you could use a reasonable quality led light can be complicated with camera movement based designs but if machining your own pressure plate and redesigning the mechanical linking of the film transport to allow enough room for the led light, then why not.  Making a basic film movement is not that hard either if just having enough time to adjust it correctly

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6 hours ago, aapo lettinen said:

The easiest way is to make a slow frame by frame scanner which uses a mirrorless photo camera to take the images of the film to its own memory card. The camera is controlled by a wired remote which is hacked so that a sensor in the mechanics can trigger the camera at correct moments.

This type of system works pretty well (I built a crude prototype over a year ago and scanned film with it. The quality was great but image stability was pretty poor and needed extensive post stabilization to be watchable) but you need to have good mechanics and sensor system in it to get reasonable stability for usable results. 

Would love to hear your recommendations on specific cameras for this application.

This is precisely the kind of system I too have been building.  Already have the transport finished,

which was built around an old process projector head with a standard 35mm pin-reg shuttle.

Just need to attach a camera.

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32 minutes ago, dan kessler said:

Would love to hear your recommendations on specific cameras for this application.

This is precisely the kind of system I too have been building.  Already have the transport finished,

which was built around an old process projector head with a standard 35mm pin-reg shuttle.

Just need to attach a camera.

basically anything which has capability to shoot raw stills in at least 5k resolution and which has fully electronic shutter option (to avoid wearing out the mechanical shutter). I used Panasonic GH4 for my tests because I have a leftover one which I rarely use for other stuff.  The simplest wired remote controls are pretty easy to hack if having basic electronics knowledge. Depending on the sensor system you may need to do some basic programming to be able to trigger the camera at exactly the same frame position but using a intermittent mechanism makes this way easier so you may manage with for example a light sensor which triggers the camera after certain time period after it sees that the shutter is open and the light is coming through the aperture. needs less mechanical modifications.  alternatively you can install a sensor somewhere to the projector mechanism so that it triggers the camera when shutter is in the middle of the open phase. A hall sensor or a optical one would do. This arrangement has the advantage of not needing any basic(arduino or other) programming skills but will need more mechanical work to function correctly

Edited by aapo lettinen
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There are a lot of issues building your own scanner. The major one is calibrating a camera system not designed to be inverted. For positive it maybe ok, but negative it can be tricky. To me, you will never be able to get the quality of a purpose built scanner, but it can get close. 

The other problem is speed. Can't get close to real time. 

Edited by Tyler Purcell
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You guys with the home built scanners should post some example scans. Whatever scanner I get needs to be sprocketless. Many of my films are in terrible condition. 

As far as mirrorless cams being used in a home scanner? I guess you would need one with an electronic shutter. If it had a mechanical shutter I'd think it would soon wear out.

I talked with one guy from eBay that made a scanner. He would not go into details too much with me, but he said he said to pay $4,000 to get a 4K camera with no lens. Apparently he has all the rest worked out as he has been producing scans right along. But he upgraded to 4K recently for a client. 

Edited by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.
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The 6.5K Sony Pregius sensor camera i out in one of our DCS Xena scanners (I helped develop the scanner with DCS in LA) cost $9500.00 and it is the newest sensor that LaserGraphics and others are putting into machine now.

You could take a look at the Xena www.digitalcinemasystems.net

They will be providing a range of solutions from a "kit" with boards and software for a full DIY solution up to fully configured scanners.

It is more possible than ever to DIY a film scanner but getting the hardware and software fully developed is a big task.

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1 hour ago, Robert Houllahan said:

It is more possible than ever to DIY a film scanner but getting the hardware and software fully developed is a big task.

Yep, you're mostly paying for speed in the long run. If you want a system that has no software and is just a 1fps solution with a camera and a animation gate, it's not difficult to do. If you want a 24fps system with triple flash for a full 444 color space with software and such, man you'll probably blow more money and time then buying a solution new. 

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5 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yep, you're mostly paying for speed in the long run. If you want a system that has no software and is just a 1fps solution with a camera and a animation gate, it's not difficult to do.

Could you provide more insight into that? What kind of equipment would be needed to achieve the best quality possible if time is not an issue at all? Especially the transport coupled with the camera part. 

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"Not difficult to do" needs to be qualified.  If you have the machine tools and knowledge of how to use them, then your efforts are more likely to be satisfactory.  I was spared much time and effort in constructing a transport mechanism by scoring an old projector head off ebay, which in its day probably cost $20,000 to build.  I paid $0 for it.  It is a thing of beauty for anyone who wants to build a scanner, an optical printer or whatever.  I later bought a 35mm pin-reg shuttle from a veteran effects artist, again on ebay, for $300.  I considered that a bargain, and it slipped right into the head I bought for nothing.  My work consisted of modifying the gear train and motor drive and building feed and take-up chambers from scratch.  To build all of this from scratch would've been much harder and time-consuming.  Projects like these can run into months and years.  I've been at this game a long time.

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3 minutes ago, dan kessler said:

"Not difficult to do" needs to be qualified.  If you have the machine tools and knowledge of how to use them, then your efforts are more likely to be satisfactory.  I was spared much time and effort in constructing a transport mechanism by scoring an old projector head off ebay, which in its day probably cost $20,000 to build.  I paid $0 for it.  It is a thing of beauty for anyone who wants to build a scanner, an optical printer or whatever.  I later bought a 35mm pin-reg shuttle from a veteran effects artist, again on ebay, for $300.  I considered that a bargain, and it slipped right into the head I bought for nothing.  My work consisted of modifying the gear train and motor drive and building feed and take-up chambers from scratch.  To build all of this from scratch would've been much harder and time-consuming.  Projects like these can run into months and years.  I've been at this game a long time.

Did you end up with the finished product? How were the results?

The 35mm film projectors I see on ebay are huge monstrosities. Are there any recommended 35mm projectors that are more portable?

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Like I mentioned earlier, all I need to do is attach an appropriate camera.  I'm in no rush; I'll wait for the right time and deal.

This is not a film  projector in the usual sense.  It is a projector head that was part of an optical printer or process projector, which was a specially built piece of gear for optical effects work in the days long before digital effects.  It was fabricated from heavy steel castings and precision machined.  Portable it is not.  It was built for absolute steadiness, not portability.

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