New Retroscan - scans all formats!

Machine Design
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One of my friends has been putting a lot of work into improving his RUMkII scanner. He is currently testing prototype gates in it, I won’t share the full details here because he intends to patent his design and then produce it. The idea will be that existing customers with the RUMkII can buy his aftermarket gates, and possibly do some other modifications, to make those things a bit more usable. This scanner has its place in the market and some people like it how it is. If that’s you that’s fine. If this isn’t you please reach out and we’ll be happy to assist you - there are even some mods you can do yourself which are quite easy. If you make any hard modifications then Moviestuff will void your warranty and that will deter many users from making improvements. I do not intend to misrepresent Moviestuff in any way, so if anything I’ve written in this post is incorrect feel free to correct me and I’ll edit this post.

What I can share about this is that we couldn’t find any information on the light that Moviestuff supply, but it’s terrible. It’s too dim to do proper scanning with leading to a large exposure time and consequently motion-blur. If you’re a technical guy we recommend putting in a high CRI YUJILED, you will need to attach a heatsink and then diffuse the light. The cheapest and easiest diffusion method is opal diffusing glass, but the drawback is that less light goes through compared to a true integrating sphere. Putting such a terrible light in a machine that is so expensive is a rip-off.

The scanner comes with a Chameleon 3 CM3-U3-31S4C-CS which is not a bad camera for scanning but it is old and obsolete. Putting it into a brand new commercial scanning machine that costs north of $8K in 2021 is ridiculous. It’s a 2K camera, and all claims about it being “near 3K” are false and misleading, I will be asking Moviestuff to correct their marketing.

35mm scans by taking a photo on every sprocket detection and then the Moviestuff software decimates frames. The maximum speed of the camera is 15fps, so this is why the 35mm scanning speed is about 4fps. 35mm is therefore not properly supported by this scanner, a fact that is not made clear in the advertising. As far as I’m aware we don’t have a design to fix this problem - my idea would be to make an electronic circuit to do it, so if anyone here would like to give it a crack please do. Given the price of the scanner is $10K if you buy it for 35mm (as you’ll need the 2000ft extension), I think Moviestuff should be the ones to offer a free remedy for this undisclosed problem.

I’ll let the users themselves do a full overview of the pros and cons of this scanner, but I would summarise it this way: it’s better than anything cheaper, but it’s very expensive and not good value for the price. It’s the genuinely cheapest scanner that can do 8/16/35mm BUT you may be be better off with a single-format scanner if you intend to scan a particular format (the full tri-format price is almost $12K). Some of the claims made in the advertising are false and misleading and I feel are likely to deceive. If you feel you have been deceived you should reach out to Moviestuff and see if they will offer you a remedy, and go from there. I would recommend before buying one that you think carefully about your needs, and if it doesn’t suit your needs then get a product that does. Think also about whether you need to buy a scanner, you may be surprised at the commercial rates charged by competitive scanning companies these days.

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It has been a good while since I visited and commented here. At the time, I was investigating using a Steenbeck 16mm flatbed as a transport for a machine vision camera triggered by interrupts created by a wide slotted disk. I set up optical solutions which worked into a 2/3" sensor camera (SI2K).

Rolling shutter was going to bring me undone unless I recovered the image through the original prism path to freeze the image and trigger the SI2K to be there for each best image through the prism. For that, the timing of the frame trigger was not going to be as critical as for freezing a moving film with fast shutter speed.

Early on I discovered that it was going to be a dead loss for scanning neg film. Variations of image brightness through the prism and internal reflection artifacts were massively amplified by the inversion of the neg and digital recovery of the contrast and colour densities.

I eventually bit the bullet and restored the Steenbeck to its normal function. I bought Roger’s Mark II scanner and have been pleased with the results. More dynamic range from the camera to deal with high-contrast reversal would be nice. Neg film comes through nicely. The camera seems to have enough dynamic range to deal with it. I need to practice the dark arts related to inversion and reproduction of the colours.

Whilst still in the learning phase, very recently I was asked to scan some 16mm film someone had got hold of the see what was on it. As chance would have it, the vision had been shot by someone who could afford a 16mm camera for “home movies”. It must have been a Bolex because the frame rates though stable were all over the place as settings were apparently changed often.

It was all shot around about 1968-1970. One piece had been torn off by a projector and stuffed back into the reel head out. It had weaved and folded over between the edge of the roll and the side of the reel and had some hideous creases. There were other breaks and tears which had to be respliced. to save frames I joined across tears. I forgot best practice from the days of projecting film of putting black ink across the tear joins which let a flash of light through set off loud pops from an optical sound reproducer. They seemed to set off a false trigger.

That damaged piece of course was the most historically significant but that is the hand the fates offer.

I am satisfied with what the machine does. In the real world, a 4:3 16mm film print is not the sharpest and does not meet HDTV (1920 x 1080) resolution. Super16mm only came up to HDTV resolution in real world terms. I understand that the Blackmagic Cintel scanner achieves framing of 16mm by sensor crop to around about 2K resolution. 16mm reduction prints of 35mm feature films for screening on ships and oil rigs were not sharp. The Mark II camera and its lens can recover available resolution adequately. With a higher resolution scanner you will get finer grain detail which some propose as being a desirable aesthetic which confers a crisper look through that fine artifact being evident.

For sake of interest here is a link to a recovery of some footage which was inverted, balanced for blue hue due to incorrect camera filter having been used but no effort at colour grading or correcting of overexposure. The weather conditions were hot with a hard sky, more grey than blue with dust haze.

It is not representative of the best that Roger’s scanner can yield.

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From my experience with 8mm and Super 8, the film content certainly on the small format exceeds HD (1920x1080). More over, some are well worth 4K specially for having a higher resolution for postprocessing. I haven’t gotten to 16mm yet, but if 8/S8 handle more than HD, so should 16. There are plenty of examples of 16mm 4K scans on youtube, so I would certainly encourage considering a higher resolution/different camera for historically significant material material.

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I would agree. And if these are home movies, they’re not prints, they’re camera originals. The reason you’re not seeing as much detail is probably more the scanner than the film.

We have scanned countless 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm home movies shot on kodachrome, ektachrome, and various black and white film stocks and there is a ton of detail there - way more than HD can resolve.

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Well, I am not so sure. It probably depends on what you are looking for.

Let me explain. The image on the Super-8 film is tiny - as far as I know, the camera frame is specified with 5.690 x 4.220 mm, whereas the slightly smaller projector frame features 5.430 x 4.010 mm as dimensions.

Now, imagine just the perfect optical image cast by the lens of the camera onto such a frame.

The resolution of this optical image will be limited in two ways: for large apertures, various lens defects are ruining the image, for smaller apertures, the image is going to be diffraction-limited. The keyword here is “Airy disk”. Put simply, the best focused spot of light a perfect lens is going to cast onto the film has a diameter of approximately

d [ in micrometer] =  f-stop

That means the image of something like a distant star (which would focus within classical optics onto a single point) will end up as a tiny disk (as the wave characteristics of light are taken into account).

Most lenses have their maximal sharpness around f/5.6 to f/8. Assuming such an f-stop for the moment, our image will be composed of tiny disks with a diameter of about 5 microns. That would be around 1140 x 840 disks placed side-by-side on the full camera’s frame dimension, which is slightly less than full HD-resolution.

Remember, that is assuming a perfect lens; certainly most of the zoom-lenses used at the time Super-8 was en vogue were not that perfect.

Next, consider the resolution of the Super-8 material by itself. I have found different data for Kodachrome, with numbers ranging from 53 lines/mm to 100 lines/mm. Taking the best value into account, we end up with only 569 x 422 pixel per camera frame…

So, in case you are interested in the film’s content (which is, the image as seen by the lens), I think, for the reasons elaborated above, that the Super-8 format does not exceed HD resolution or even reach HD resolution in most cases. Certainly not the old Super-8 material I have available for scanning.

However, if you want to capture the intrinsic properties of film grain, you might want to go even beyond 4k, as film grain has very fine, detailed textures.

Film grain, however, is not a structure related to what is filmed, but rather a structure related to the material and chemical processes used to develop it.

While film grain was primarily viewed as a nuisance in the days of Super-8, today it has turned into an aesthetic statement, often even added in post to grain-less digital material.

And of course, higher scan resolutions give you a lot more latitude for post-processing, which is an important advantage. So I do also scan at resolutions that exceed HD.

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Well aware of the dimensions, see this post.

SMPTE Recommended Practice Specification for Registration Test Film (for 8, and 16) specifies

“The rosette in the center shall indicate measurement from 60 to 240 lines per millimiter”
See RP19-1982 for 8mm, RP 20-1982 for 16 mm.

For clarity, these lines are not the dimensional unit lines.

@cpixip one cannot resolve/render 100 lines with 100 pixels.

Here is an actual DIY scan I made, suffering from youtube compression, and one can see the difference just by switching the youtube resolution to HD, look at the power lines and the increase details of the monument writings.

I know that 4K for 8mm is ongoing debate at Kinograph, count me on the side that more-is-more, And for 16mm, HD resolution is less than what the film can render…

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PS. Manufacturers typically expressed resolution in cycles/mm or lp/mm = line pair per mm.

Found this very detailed overview on the subject of film-lens resolution, will give it a detailed read at later time.

The MTF of Kodachrome at 30% is listed about 50 cycles/mm 2009 datasheet.

One important consideration in determining the cutoff of pixel resolution is that even for a lens-film low percentage response, these would still represent information and details in the picture (like the power lines or small-writing on the sculpture).

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The main problem with the stock RUMkII is the light, not the camera. Building a better light is cheap and relatively easy, we should have a full write-up on how to improve that machine soon. There’s a few of us involved behind-the-scenes there. Changing the camera will also help, but changing the light is more important and less expensive.

Most 16mm prints are soft and low-resolution, but they can still scan a LOT better than off a stock RUMkII. If you get your hands on a TV print or a GOOD 16mm print then it’s a different story, they can be sharp and detailed - it just depends on how they were printed etc.

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As a postscript to my earlier replies, here is a neg scan taken on the Mark 2 machine. The film was neg and learning how to expose correctly in the scanner and finesse it in DaVinci Resolve has been a mission.

There is some vertical jitter in the image which I have not corrected. That is to be expected with 35 year old film which has been less than ideally stored. The lightpin when kept clean and correctly focused upon the film is capable of acceptably steady register with good film.

I have done a mod on the machine whichw as to install a more powerful COB LED as recommended by another user.

One downside with that lamp is that it is a smaller area source and placement of the diffuser took some sorting out. Any falloff of the light towards the edges is massively amplified by a neg scan.

Roger has since also upgraded his machine with a new lamp which has a much more even spread of light and also a new camera.

I have also experimented very recently with a 4K camera. This requires the Spinnaker software to run it and it is nowhere near as simple to operate as the purposed software for the Mark 2.

Whilst it is nice to have that extra resolution from the camera and a little more dynamic range, for practicality and convenience in operating the machine, the reality is that the camera and software as provided is best for the average punter.

My PC is only capable of sustained recording with the 4K camera sensor image cropped to 2880 x 2160. Any more pixels into the bin and the buffer runs out after about 200ft of film.

I imagine that very many of the mom and pop shop users Roger provides to will have PCs incapable of sustained recording of more than 2K and some resistance to upgrading them.

Neg scan with original camera, new lamp, inverted and processed in DaVinci Resolve. No stabilisation.

Positive scan of old film with 4K cropped sensor, new lamp, lightly processed in DaVinci Resolve to recovery slightly faded red and blue channels. No stabilisation. Image shake is due to the camera operator and a small consumer tripod trembling under the weight of the camera and lens. The colour rendition is fairly faithful of the summer lighting conditions, the pastel colours of the vegetation and hard sky. The blue hue indoors is due to the Type 85B daylight correction filter having been removed in the quest for more light into the camera lens.

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Does anyone own a Moviestuff Mark II 4K machine? I cannot find any review for it so curious if any has been delivered at all. I paid for mine a year ago but have not received it. Roger said supply issues so the long delay.

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Possibly, Bowling Green State University received one in May of 2023.

However you need to be a student there to get more information.
I have been waiting for order completion, over a year now also.

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Nice to know he’s actually fulfilling orders. Let’s hope he won’t run away with the money. It’s a huge chunk of change.

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Not so sure about that. He has NOT returned any of my calls or correspondence in 2 months.

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I know for a fact that the latest model has shipped to at least some buyers because I’ve talked with people who’ve received them. I also know that the build quality is sub-par even by their usual standards as Moviestuff have been unable to source all their usual parts so a brand new $12,000 Retroscan Universal MkII with the newer 2K camera that they call “4K” can break down in as little as two or three weeks. Build quality being worse than normal has been a problem ever since the very start of the pandemic. I don’t know for sure if the RetroScan 8162K has been delivered to anyone.

There’s a rumour that Moviestuff lost most of their staff during the pandemic and so now it’s basically a one-man operation. If this rumour is true, then coupled with difficulty in acquiring the correct parts it could help explain the very long delays in delivering on orders.

Delays are not that unusual for made-to-order things like this, but waiting over a year is outrageous. Would suggest pushing for a refund.

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I too suspect it’s a one man operation since he moved to a new location. I will ask for a refund if I don’t get it soon in 2024. Question is will he refund.

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He will try not to, and as it’s been longer than 6 months you’ll likely have a difficult time getting a bank to reverse it.

Roger has an account here, he should just come and answer these questions directly instead of letting people gossip. Anyway if I am going to hypothesise then I’d say it looks like the end of MovieStuff to me. Every company folds at some point, the RTI collapse was also sudden and unexpected.

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There are a lot of people (on the Facebook moviestuff owners group) waiting for their orders to ship unfortunately, and plenty of people waiting for the 2.5K (marketed as 4K) upgrade kits to ship.
What size film formats do you want to scan? if it’s just 8mm, I’d be going for the filmfabriek Pictor. it is a price jump, but it’s also a huge jump in quality.

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8mm and 16mm. I need both. 35mm is nice plus for moviestuff scanner.

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What Andy said above. Buy a Pictor and live without 16mm for a while until the next FF scanner comes out or until they make a 16mm Pictor. If you can’t afford a Pictor then purchase a refurbished Tobin, they only cost $3.5K. Yes they are not frame-by-frame, but really the stock standard you get off the Retroscan isn’t all that much better anyway.

To make the Retroscan actually work correctly and produce professional quality you’ll end up spending USD $20K+ not including the cost of the host computer.

I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I can confidently say that at least 90% of MovieStuff customers have never heard of their main competitors and don’t do their research before purchasing one. But that being said, MOST people that buy the Retroscans are happy with them, which leads you to getting people talking about how great their scanners are rather than a critical pros-and-cons comparing to other hobbyist-budget scanners.

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If you are considering professional and paid for this job, I think it is crucial to carefully calculate your business plan.
The purchase price of the scanner remains very high for the equipment received. You also need to add accessories sold at a high price, the computer, and plan for future updates of paid software, even considering the replacement of the camera. Add up the total and calculate how many films you will need to digitize to repay your purchase.
And at this point, we are not even talking about your salary or any potential store expenses.
Unless you are working for subsidized institutions, it is not commercially feasible.
I am always skeptical when I see these companies offering this equipment at such prices.
How many entrepreneurs have lost money?
Unless you are working for subsidized institutions, this is not easy feasible.
And at this price, people doing it for pleasure alone must not allow these companies to make enough sales.
Self-manufacturing is the only way forward in my opinion… long live this forum!

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