Do top end film scanners use sprockets to register the scans?

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

I was scanning an ancient stag film from the 1930's, Hycock's Dance School. (1932-1936) My Retroscan scanner kept jamming at 77 feet. I finally noticed that they had spliced in a piece of sound film that they had copied the film on with no sprockets on the left side. (This is a silent film) I flipped the film to scan with the sprockets on the left side, but the intertitles are backwards now. 

I got 2 questions:

1) Do top end film scanners use sprockets to register the scans? (If they do not need sprockets my problem would have been solved.)

2) Is there software to flip the scan to the right side so the intertitles can be read? If so, what is it?

Thanks

 

 

Edited May 24, 2021 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.

[Robert Houllahan]

Some do like the Arriscan and some (mostly newer ones) do not have any sprockets at all.

Newer scanners use high performance GPUs and high resolution high bandwidth sensors which scan the whole gauge and the machines use Machine Vision to "see" the perforations and stabilize the film using multiple perfs as reference.

So if it's 16mm the newer scanners might not work with the perfs flipped to the opposite side as the machine vision is expecting to "see" the perfs in a general area. If it is 35mm and it is flipped the scanner will expect to see perfs on both sides so it will still be registered and stabilized.

Any new modern editing software can flip the clip X-Y and reverse it if necessary, BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve offers and extremely powerful free version of the software that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

[Tyler Purcell]

I 2nd what Robert said. 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Thanks for the info!

I would be disappointed if the high end scanner would not scan the film. I would expect it to be a whiz bang machine for the high prices they charge. 

This problem has not happened much to me. Someone optically printed 2/3 of the film onto sound stock backwards. (Or maybe they contact printed it?) I don't know how they duplicated films back then. 

You see all kinds of crazy stuff with these old stag films.

In the old days the silent 16mm projectors had sprockets on both sides. They ran this film in a silent machine and the sprocket tore up the sound side some. I guess it is a good education being a film archivist / film handler and dealing with all these messed up films.

A filmmaker / film collector may not be that versed in splicing. As an archivst / scanner you do thousands and thousands of splices. Film collectors usually deal with pretty pristine films. And if not pristine, they are not usually a mess like the stuff I get. I look at it as a challenge to see what I can recover from the film to preserve. 

Internet Photo - Fair Use

Edited May 25, 2021 by Daniel D. Teoli Jr.