Introduce yourself

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Hello!

My name is Moriel. My main interest in 16mm film (and Kinograph) lies with the fact that my late grandfather used to constantly film using this format. He was an avid film maker, working both professionally (filming medical instructional and educational films) and as a hobbyist. After he sadly passed away, he left us a very large collection of 16mm film reels (around 50 reels, all black and white with no sound, ranging from ~10 minutes all the way to ~50 minutes). He led an incredible life as a fighter pilot in the USSR during WW2 and as a film maker - a hobby that I tinkered with when I was younger as well.

Currently I am looking for a method to digitize all of his film reels at a high enough quality to honor his work. Sadly digitizing services are very expensive for this amount of footage (quotes range from $4.5k and upwards), so I’m now looking into a way of procuring a 16mm film digitizer. Sadly, all the ones I have found for sale are professional grade and are way too expensive - while building a DIY system based on Kinograph’s specs is unfeasible due to time and material constraints.

If anyone has knowledge of a high quality 16 mm scanner/digitizer that can be purchased for hobbyist use, I would love to discuss the possibility of purchasing it.

Cheers!

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Welcome @Mr_Muki!

Please be aware that with your B&W film for best results you want to use a monochrome camera, not a colour scanner. So if hypothetically you had a colour Kinograph I would highly suggested buying a monochrome camera for B&W film, and likewise I’d advise against scanning commercially on a bayer-sensor scanner.

Whereabouts are you located? It’s possible that a film archive may be able to help you, especially if you have material that is in the public interest to be preserved digitally.

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Thank you for your reply. I am from Israel. Most of the footage is family related, but there are some unknown films in the mix that had their labels damaged. I know there is footage of Yuri Gagarin in there playing volleyball with his wife that my grandfather filmed during a holiday, but other than that I doubt that there is something there that is of public interest.

We do have a 16mm film projector and we thought about filming directly from the lens. It won’t be as high of a quality as a frame-by-frame scanner, but considering the prohibitive pricing of scanners and commercial digitizing services, it seems quite appealing.

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Welcome, @Mr_Muki! I hope Kinograph can help keep your grandfather’s films accessible for generations! We are hoping to have a prototype of version 2.0 ready by Spring of 2021, and kits for sale in Summer/Fall of 2021. If you have any questions, please let me know.

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Hi! Thank you for your reply. This is very encouraging to hear! I assume you don’t have an estimated price point yet if the project is still in development though. On a side note - I’m a Mechanical Engineering student and I work on Solidworks. I have yet to acquire experience in real world CAD work, but if you need any help in the CAD aspect, I can do parts, assemblies and drawings as well.

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You can build a functioning scanner from a projector. You just take out the light, replace it with a decent LED light and a diffusing cone like you can find in hobby stores (the commercial scanners probably get their diffusing cones 3D printed or something), a USB3 camera (monochrome!!) and a lens (the second-most expensive part), a hall-effect sensor and a magnet to trigger the camera to take a photo, and the most expensive part, a workstation PC so you can edit and encode your scans. You also need to mount the camera on a track so you can focus it precisely as these cameras have a shallow focus. All up maybe about $1500-2000 plus the cost of the PC if you’re buying a projector to use as the film transport. If you have colour film then you can either pulse the LED light C/M/Y to get a triple-flash scan but this will be much slower, or you can buy another USB3 camera. You are limited by the speed of USB3, or if you had a 6K camera with a faster connection to your computer somehow, then you’re limited by the speed of the SSD array. So keep that in mind. There’s no point in buying a 60fps 2K-USB3 camera if you can’t send the raw frames over USB3 at that speed.

One of the hardest parts will be getting the gate in focus, as projection is more forgiving, this is why an engineered polished steel film gate for a commercial scanner might cost $10K, because the job of the film gate for a scanner is to keep the film flat and at the correct focal distance. As an engineering student though I expect you’ll be able to solve this problem when you come across it with a gate modification engineered to keep the film at precisely the same distance from the camera.

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Thank you very much for the reply! Really a treasure trove of information! I have considered this solution, but the information you provided really boosted the possibility of actually doing it. I saw another project similar to what you suggest on IEEE Spectrum using a jerry-rigged Raspberry Pi based solution which churned out really high quality digital frames. This would be a serious undertaking indeed. We are currently waiting on delivery on another 16mm projector of the same model we already have, so it might be a great chassis for experimentation for this idea.

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I would love your help with CAD. Especially when it comes to assembly diagrams. I have no idea how to do that. Do you have any familiarity with Fusion360?

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That paper is actually really bad. It’s got so many technical errors that are easily fixed with a simple google search, and their methodology on some of the testing is deeply flawed. Some examples:

At one point they go on about only one or two of the scanners being able to reproduce a certain tint on a tinted B/W film. Yet, they use an iPhone and a lightbox to show you the correct color. As if a commodity phone camera has better sensitivity than a $200,000 purpose-built film scanner. The problem with this test is that it wasn’t performed correctly. If you look at the sample images that show the picture as B/W with little or no tint, look at the color of the white in the film perfs. Those are tinted. That’s because the scanner operators did an automatic base calibration on the film, and it “corrected” the tint out of the picture, simultaneously tinting the perfs kind of pinkish. This is scanning 101, and shouldn’t have ever made it into the paper. I know for a fact our ScanStation, which is a color bayer sensor, can reproduce similarly tinted films. You just have to know what you’re doing.

Another example is in the specs for the scanners: Many of the specs that were listed are either incorrect or outdated, and were at the time the paper came out. In some cases they were grossly wrong on things like sensor type and light source.

I think kinetta was the only manufacturer to perform tests themselves. The others were done at individual archives, some of whom specialize in B/W and don’t know how to properly scan color (this was confirmed by one of the paper’s authors to me). So you don’t have a good baseline of scanner operators - the manufacturers know their machines best and know how to deal with all different kinds of oddball situations. The operator of a scanner that hasn’t been updated in 5-6 years and is running outdated software (the Lasergraphics Director sample), shouldn’t be running the tests. That model didn’t even have the same sensor as current versions of that same scanner have.

Sorry, this one is a sore spot for me. I politely brought up about 3 pages of specific technical mistakes and issues with the authors of that paper and they corrected a handful of them. They continue to publish that with many of the same errors and it makes the rounds every few months as people discover it.

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Thanks for your thoughts Perry. Yes I am aware of some of the limitations you mentioned, I don’t think they had a good idea about how much “the same” models can vary over their lifetimes as the manufacturers made changes. As you say the Director 4K (and some of the others) changed a lot over their lifetimes, different light source, different camera, lens, different film transports, different software, gate options and so-on they may as well be totally different machines. Don’t apologise I think they could do a better job and include more real-world scanners, and also a better variety of materials. They included some Dufaycolor film which was interesting, but what about Technicolor with a misaligned dye layer, or badly faded negative and positive material that is difficult to recover colour from? Film that is shrunken and warped - does it stay in focus, etc.

What’s cool now is that we’re seeing sensors coming out that can do HDR in a single flash, I believe the Arri XT’s purpose-made sensor is capable of this, and so too are some of the more Kinograph-friendly priced USB3 sensors and others. The Scanstations I think vary a lot, their 4K and 5K HDR sensors had a lot of issues as you’d be well aware, one operator I know who did the upgrade from 2K told me it took two weeks of technical support from Lasergraphics before they determined that they should send back the sensor! At least they got it fixed, but I do wonder how many units have less than ideal sensors, and that’s using current-model spec so I do think there’s value in their approach of using real-world machines, but I certainly agree they could have done better in identifying up-to-date models.

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I do some astrophotography so I tend to follow those camera manufacturers and what they’re up to. There are some cameras that use an 8k (mono) sensor, binned to get double the pixel size and a 4k output. there are lots of interesting things that can happen when you have that many pixels to play with.

Lasergraphics has used a few different camera manufacturers, but they do need to be pushed a bit if you really want to squeeze all the quality out of your setup. We worked with them - a lot - to address the issues in the 5k sensor, which was inherently flawed. It just wasn’t as good as the original 2k in terms of noise or dynamic range. With HDR a lot of that went away. With the new Sony 6.5k sensors, the picture is as good as it was with the original 2k CCD, but at much higher resolutions. It seems to me that there are several factors that play into the image quality, some of which are unrelated to the camera (like older, slower PCs that have newer cameras and can’t keep up - we had that issue with the 5k until we upgraded the PC). But they do all need to be individually calibrated and sometimes it just takes real-world stress tests to find the weak spots. They’re good about getting that stuff dialed in though, in our experience.

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I think the Scanstation range overall is very good, and the best when it comes to continuous-motion scanners (for the casual reader, the speed the 5K is 15fps in HDR not 24/30/60fps). I just looked up the sensor specs for the 6.5K, and it indeed delivers HDR in a single-flash, meaning scanning speeds (if not down-sampling) of 30fps in 10-bit and 25fps in 12-bit mode is that right? Their entry model, the Scanstation Personal is very nice and easily outperforms anything in a similar price bracket. With intermittent scanning though there’s a good range of scanners out there, the Arriscans (XT designed for maximum colour recovery from fade), Directors, Northlights, Kinetta (designed specifically for damaged/fragile film), and so a broader range of options there depending on the needs for the film material.

I feel it’s worth pointing out though with the film material paper, when you say the Director was ‘5 years out of date’, clearly the upgrades are options and the owners were obviously still paying the service contract to Lasergraphics so it’s still a current scanner regardless if it has an older sensor and software. One would hardly expect every operator to upgrade to the latest options, especially where they’re expensive and are in archives rather than commercial businesses or where they don’t feel they need them.

I agree the 5K sensor was flawed. While the casual observer may care more about resolution, capturing a cleaner image with low digital noise and a high dynamic range is really far more important, and that’s where the Kinographs and home made scanners can outperform some of the low-end equipment like the Cintel and the Retroscan. They can certainly come close to the Scanstation now given that the 4K equivalent of the Scanstation’s 6K sensor is only $3,000 - putting it well within the reach of the DIY scanner. :slight_smile:

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The scanstation 6.5k still uses 2 flashes to do HDR, not one - the speed drops in half for HDR. So your SDR speeds are 60, 30, 15 for 2.5k/5k/6.5k modes respectively, and HDR speeds are half of that: 30/15/7.5fps. I believe the sensor may be able to do single-flash HDR, but only in monochrome versions (and this is a bayer sensor), and when it does that, it typically uses adjacent photosites with different exposure lengths (basically like taking two pictures in one exposure, then splitting up the pixel grid to separate the pictures. One is ready to offload from the sensor before the other. but this insn’t how the ScanStation does it.

All modes are 12 bit native. With HDR and the requisite image processing, the resulting bit depth before writing out the file is about 14, according to lasergraphics. On the Director, which uses the same method for HDR but an intermittent motion, the output bit depth is 16bit, full RGB.

My beef with that paper is that the Director they tested on (according to my sources) hasn’t been updated in ages - that’s both Software and Hardware. This also shows in the way they describe the limitations of the software, which haven’t been there for 10+ years. If they have a paid support contract, they just need to ask for the latest version and it’s free from Lasergraphics. Basically, the paper’s authors used a Director they could find, it was old and not up to date, and they drew conclusions about the capabilities of all Lasergraphics Director scanners based on that. It’s not representative of the vast majority of Director scanners out there, since they were looking at one of the oldest. For the kinetta, they had Jeff do the tests, which is the right way to do this. They did not have Lasergraphics or a Lasergraphics-chosen representative do the test, they went with an archivist who the papers authors told me wasn’t even used to dealing with color film. To test color scanning capabilities. To my mind, that alone disqualifies most of that paper’s credibility (not to mention all the other technical mistakes they make)

The age of the machine isn’t the issue really - we have the first ScanStation to roll off the line, but it’s been consistently updated so it has all the features you’d get in a brand new one, even though there have been some minor hardware changes since then. The problem is that if you have a machine that’s old, and hasn’t been kept up to date, it has no business in a shootout used to determine general capabilities of brands/models of scanners. Because that archive may be the only one in the world with that exact out of date version.

Sony’s sensors are really pretty amazing. Last night I was taking photos of the Bubble Nebula from my deck in Boston, under horribly bright light polluted skies, and the IMX264 in my camera managed to get a nice, low-noise image from 11,090 light years away!

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Hi, I have been a film collector for many years. My collection exceeds a thousand reels of film with some unique prints. Recently I have started scanning some of my films, I have a couple friends who have scanners. I will eventually be buying my own machine. I am a mechanic with a fair amount of fabrication skills. If I can find a design that works then I would rather fabricate my own machine. I think you have a solid design and would like to add my experience and skills to help your design become better.

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Welcome, @Jeffcrowl! Can’t wait to hear what you have in your collection. I could definitely use the help improving this design. This is a good place to start. It gives an overview of the components and major design decisions so far. There’s also the wiki, and of course these forums.

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Didn’t have a chance to use it, but I know Solidworks pretty well (got a certificate from Dassault and all). I don’t mind learning how to use it though if its necessary for the project :slight_smile:

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Hello everyone !

I’m Jeremy from France. Some years ago i digitalised my inlaws super 8 movie by projecting them right onto my MkII sensor, it worked quite well with some post production. At that time i was also a member of Zebralab, an associative darkroom based in Geneva (i still am, and i live on the border between france and switzerland), both for photography and cinema. As regulations and film cost evolved, it was difficult and expensive to shoot/process. So we built two machines to turn 30m of double super-8 films into 4 15m super-8, we also found a way around chemistery to lower the total cost. Zebralab purchased a Moviestuff Retroscan, so we can digitalize what we are shooting and processing, but, i’m not quite satified with the quality, so here i am, looking to build a Kinograph with a full frame sensor and some macro lense with extenstion tube to have super-8 in 4K !

what brought you to Kinograph ? Google and the need of better resolution than retroscan.

what are you most excited about ? Building it and craft some amelioration if i can.

what skills/knowledge can you offer others on the forum ? I can share knowledges about the two machine we built (its crafty, it work, but i’m no engeineer, so there is probably a better way to buil i do not know) as well as for black and white darkroom, bleaching process, etc.

Happy new year as well !

Cheers,

Jeremy

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Bienvenue toi dis donc ! Welcome my dear Jeremy !

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Welcome, @jeremysp! We’d love to see your machines if you’re willing to share some pics. Can’t wait to see what you build next :slight_smile:

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Hi,
I had been toying with digitising my S8mm films for a long time and finally started work on my own machine about 2 years ago. The project has been on the back burner as other things took over. Anyway I have finally finished the “prototype” (they all are really…) and produced my first scans a few days ago. I intend posting details so won’t bore you here…

I worked for the British Antarctic Survey from 1978 to 2007 with some time off for good behaviour. The cine film cover the first few years and contains a lot of memories. I recently finished scanning my slide collection (approx 15k) and I want to combine these, recent video and the cine onto a set of dvd’s for posterity. A really big project but plenty of time available at the moment !.

It would have been easier (and much cheaper) to have the cine scanned for me but being a retired engineer I welcomed the challenge. My scanner has some features that may be of interest.

Cheers

Pat