Firstly, the United States is not the center of the world, and film distribution patterns may differ elsewhere.
Secondly, you are a highly skilled professional with top-tier equipment, and many institutions entrust you with their films. It’s possible that individual customers feel more comfortable going to smaller local shops.
Do you have data on your competitors?
On what basis do you claim that the distribution figures are the same across the USA and globally?
If a company like Moviestuff (though perhaps not the best example) sold a large number of machines, it wasn’t solely to digitize 50% of 35mm films. This suggests that other businesses in your country may have different format distributions.
Looking at digitization companies in Europe, many—including major players like ‘FamilyMovie,’ ‘Mes Films de Familles,’ and ‘For Ever" don’t even offer 35mm digitization, and some don’t support 16mm either. If 35mm accounted for half the market here, wouldn’t they have invested in scanners for it?
Additionally, independent and institutional cinema has a much smaller presence in Europe. Large film archives often have in-house digitization departments, both for cost reasons and because of subsidies.
I’m not saying the US is the center of the world. But you’re saying that Super 8 is 80% of the film out there, without qualifying where “there” is. I’m asking where these percentages are coming from? Is there a source, or are just estimating?
I eliminated 35mm, 9.5, 17.5, and 28mm from my estimates, which are based on 12 years of data and millions of feet of film scanned, making for a decent dataset. Eliminating those gauges leaves 16, Super 8, and 8mm. I don’t have a good breakdown on how much 8mm we do vs Super 8, because we charge the same price, and until recently we used the same line item in our invoices. Going forward we can generate reports from our invoicing software that will give us some more granularity, but I don’t have enough of that data yet. What I can say is that 8 and S8 account for about 50% of the small gauge film we scan. The other 50% is 16mm and Super 16.
Most small film scanning services I’m aware of offer either 8/16 or 16/35. It wasn’t until relatively recently that machines like the ScanStation came along that could do all three gauges.
But all of this is kind of moot for the current discussion. Matthew has already said that the scanner will be 16/35. The whole goal of this project from the beginning (what? 15 years ago?) was to make an affordable scanner for a film archive. Supporting really small gauge film like S8 and 8mm is a massive challenge because they’re a lot harder to do in some ways. I think it’s smart to keep the focus on 16/35, and let 8mm come later in a different machine, using as much as you can from the 16/35 design and adding to that as needed.
A kit will certainly take out quite a bit of labor from assembly and test and as a consequence, cost. I think, in some ways there is a reasonable corollary to the LitePlacer, which is an open source PNP machine (PNP is a pick and place machine for putting the little components you see on most modern PCBs. Virtually all the components in LitePlacer are off-the-shelf, but to replicate that as an individual would be a lot of work for little benefit.
I think a 35/16mm is in a different realm than an 8mm machine. it probably makes sense to not try and build an all-in-one, particularly give the performance requirements between the two. You are either way over-built for 8mm or underbuilt for 35mm.
Matthiew will make the decision, it’s his scanner.
Personally, I would have chosen an 8mm/16mm scanner, as it covers a larger segment of the market I’m familiar with (especially in Europe—do you know where that stands, friolator ?).
I don’t think it’s significantly more complex from a technical standpoint, but that’s for you to decide.
Wishing you all great design work!
P.S.: In three days, I’ll be celebrating 11 years in business and 283 km of digitized film!
I’m focused on those because the films I want to scan are in those formats. See the “About” page on the kinograph website. There are plans for an 8/S8 machine. If the community decides they want an 8/16 hybrid, we can do that, too! No one is imposing limits here, only providing starting points from which we can build together.
That is exactly what I am doing. Maybe I’m not communicating that effectively.
There are already a number of solutions for 8mm, Filmfabriek sell an affordable dual-8 scanner (Pictor/Pictor Pro) with options for sound and good support from the manufacturer without a costly support contract to pay. The majority of the 8mm market that think a Pictor is too expensive are satisfied with existing cheaper options, and barely any of them actually want a DIY device. For those that do want a DIY device, Film-Digital sell DIY kits for R8, S8, dual8 and 16mm and they can transfer sound.
So, in my opinion a dual8 Kinograph is not required at this time, and the market for it would be vanishingly small.
Perry’s company (Gamma Ray Digital) is a relatively small digitisation house, it’s not a huge company.
Most of the companies you’re looking at don’t know much about film. Some of them are focused on things like video tape preservation (VHS to digital etc) and offer film as a side-hustle, but use anything from a $300 Wolverine clone to projecting it and filming it, Elmos and Tobins ($3,500-$6,000) and other “projector telecines”, MovieStuff devices ($3,000-$11,000), Filmfabrieks ($11,000-40,000), LaserGraphics ($50,000+), or they send out the film jobs to another business partner.
They’re not the best examples to use as anything higher than $5,000 is too scary for most of those “mom and pop” companies to invest in, and especially if it only represents part of their “media digitisation business”. If they do know what they’re doing, then most of those companies you’ve mentioned will know which labs/professional/semi-professional companies they can use.
My proposal was for an 8 AND 16mm scanner.
Prices for the Picto Pro start at $12,000 and it only processes 8mm, not 16mm.
For a multi-format printer, you’re looking at a minimum of $20,000
Film Digital only offers kits for modifying old cinema projectors. The operation of these systems is rather hazardous and the lifespan of a second-hand projector is uncertain.
This is not a good example
??? I’ll leave it to you to really examine the equipment that these companies have. In terms of volume and equipment, it’s a far cry from the local shop, yet none of them process 35mm
This is not the case. What they typically do is to modify a projector, and either do frame-by-frame or realtime video (syncing the projector to the video).
Lots of examples on youtube, reddit and facebook.
Even the cost of these kits is high, compared to the components of a DIY stop-motion scanner.
From what I see in other forums, there is plenty of takers for an 8/16 all in (camera, lens, scanner, and computer) at or under $2000 cost.
Can it be done for under $2000? In stop-motion, yes. Rough cost estimate of components on what I built is under $900 (used enlarger lens from ebay $60).
And let’s not ignore than there are some good designs already published. Gugusse Roller which will do 8/16/35, or Tscann 8mm which does only 8.
There is also plenty of new 8 film being shot, and even old home film has taken a cultural and artistic significance.