|
|
|
|
|
|
by lcrs
3734 days ago
|
|
|
I occasionally see Spirit 2k's destined for the dump and wonder what would be entailed in running one. Since they were a little notorious for poor frame-to-frame registration I wonder if that will get worse as the mechanics age. It's a strange time for telecines, with so many companies having disappeared but newer, much more compact designs appearing, for archival scanning presumably. If you haven't discovered it already the archives of the TiG mailing list are a great resource for TK stuff - e.g. this thread about the new Blackmagic/Digital Vision/MWA/Kinetta scanners... http://tig.colorist.org/pipermail/tig/2016-February/thread.h... |
|
|
Pin registration is not what telecine is about. That's where you get scanners and their area sensors vs telecine's linear array. We operate a few telecines (Cintel, MWA, Spirit) and a scanner (Arri), and tbh I've seen that "wobble" only on older telecines like FDL series, also from Philips/Thomson/Grasva.. they've changed quite a few companies in the past :) This particular telecine has a sprocket for film and is rock solid.
Telecines are extremely useful, even to these days. There's a difference between scanners and telecine, of course. Telecine's strength is that it's fast. It's realtime and, in case of this machine, it can work all day in shifts and not break a sweat. This is extremely useful if you have a lot of material. Not all of material on film is feature film. There is a ton of material out there on 16mm and 35mm, most from TV stations. This machine can do 35mm, 16mm, optical audio, magnetic audio. All in realtime and gives you 1080p/10bit with sound. Sensor isn't all there in 1080p as it could be, but for most material it's more than fine. 2K is important if you're doing 4:3 material from film since you get 1556 pixels of vertical resolution which is more than 1080. So, in a sense, you get a machine, for relatively cheap, that can be operated all day for all kinds of archival work.
There are better machines now, of course. Newer Spirits, Scanity, and you can even retrofit some of the older machines with Xena: http://digitalcinemasystems.net/?page_id=348
There was a lot of talk about Blackmagic's buying of Cintel and their mini telecine. Personally, considering it's Blackmagic and experience I have with their products, I would avoid their stuff in a wide arc. Especially if I would to run it all day long or, god forbid, run a business that relied on their stuff. They are just not reliable, both on product basis and as a company. MWA (https://mwa-nova.com/) has interesting small scanners for 16mm, something which we also have. It's a nice machine, but Datacine/Spirit is on another level hardware-wise/reliability.
Kinetta is an interesting approach, and something I've had my eyes on. I would consider that for fragile/sensitive material considering that's what it's all about anyways.
Cool thing about modern workflow with film is that hardware is more or less the same. Telecine, 16mm/35mm optical blocks, light filters, scanners, (re)winders, wet gate system, audio heads, Lipsner smith film cleaners.. it's all the same. New things are new light sources (LED vs Xenon - though there's a debate which one is better), camera/sensors, and software. Software replaced a lot of "boxes" around the hardware. If you have a reliable machinery that outputs a good image base then it's all about software. Especially in restoration area. It got a bit competitive in that area over the recent years. Everybody seems to have some sort of restoration software as an offering now. Heck, even I have some of my own software that I wrote a few years back for automating most of the tasks cleaning up images that come through from film.