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For just over one hundred and fifty years, analog photography - the kind based on chemistry - went unbeaten in range of use as well as in price. No wonder, because in that time it was the only kind of photography available. But since about ten years, photography has been expanded by a whole new technical approach to the medium: digitization. Though it was a slow start at first, with fridge-size paintbox supercomputers and low-res 'still video' cameras, the medium has taken a giant leap as computers advanced. Especially on the amateur market, people are currently rapidly exchanging their film-eating, expensive compact cameras for relatively cheap and easy to use digital cameras. And why not? Disk capacity costs nothing any more now that CD-R's are sold for less than a dollar a piece, and to consumers the facts that digital images are viewable faster than a polaroid, are high in quality and cost virtually nothing because film is made obsolete, add a lot of weight.

A 2K film scan will typically result in 2,048 horizontal pixels per scan line. When a full-aperture Super 35mm film frame (1.33:1) is scanned at 2K, this results in a resolution of 2048 x 1536; while a 3-perf 35mm film frame (1.77:1) produces 2048 x 1157. Both are considered 2K, even though they have different vertical line counts.

  • Scanning film with a digital camera – by Adrien Saint-Pierre Today we have a guest article on how to scan your film negatives with a digital camera. Cutting out the need for a flatbed scanner and making use of what many photographers have at home. Adrien Saint-Pierre takes us through the process in this excellent guide.
  • This film scanner might be the most versatile out of all the scanners we’ve featured here: the F2D TITAN not only scans 35mm, 110, 127, 126, and APS films, but also converts 8mm and Super 8 movies into digital frames. What’s more, scanning or converting your negatives, slides, or film reels will only take a push of a button.

Personally I have a firm and somewhat optimistic Asimov-like belief in the Good of Technology. Perhaps it has something to do with my age. I see technology as a companion to mankind, not as a threat. of course I have my doubts too about things like the Internet and television and worldwide personal databases, but I believe that in general, technological advances are a good thing. And regardless of one's opinion, there's no escaping it anyway. The whole of the West is now online, with the rest of the world rapidly following. The Internet is working miracles for the way people interact and experience the world - this website, written by me in the confines of my own home, but available for all the world to query, is only one small example. But I digress. One aspect of technology is that there is no end to it, and that there will inevitably be a 'next generation'. At this moment in time, we've arrived at the point of the upgrading of photography. As more and more people are bound to their computers in more and more ways, what makes more sense than that they will inevitably want digital pictures to e-mail to their Net friends through their Hotmails, their ICQs and their Messengers? Can analog photography offer that? Sure it can - but you'll need a film scanner. And why buy a film scanner for big bucks when you can buy a shiny small digital camera for half the price?

I don't know, but I have a feeling I might belong to the last generation of photographers who learnt the business the hard way - in the darkroom. As a member of the high school darkroom - the only member mind you, until I finished school in july 2001 - I used to make lots of fine art prints in a small blinded chamber with a red plastic radio on loud in the background. And usually I liked it. I didn't like all of it, like the time and labour it took to get a certain picture printed just the way I wanted, or the fatigue after spending hours and hours in a cramped dark space, or the stress, or the chemicals I spilled over my shirt, but in general I had a ball. I loved to see the images come up out of the developer, and the excitement as I saw a perfect print drying in the buzzing hot air dryer. By developing my own b/w film and by doing all my prints by hand, I learned to appreciate the metier in a way that just isn't common any more. I learned to love grain, after first hating it, and then learned to hate it again. I learned to appreciate the strong points of medium format, and learned to scorn its weak ones. The darkroom work was dirty and often tiring, and not to mention expensive, but for learning, it was great.

All things come to an end though. In my case, my darkroom days were over in July 2001, when I graduated cum laude from high school. Since I didn't plan to give up photography, being my principle hobby, I had to look for an alternative. Going totally digital, by which I mean shooting with digital cameras, didn't make sense. First of all I have tons of analog cameras that I didn't feel like making obsolete, and secondly I have an aversion against digital photography. One of the aspects that I don't like is the fact that you don't have a silver master like you do with analog photography, and another is that I think digital photography tends to trivialise the art. It's probably a personal thing, but to make good pictures I have to have the feeling that I'm doing things 'on the record'. It shouldn't be too easy; I need to have the idea that what I'm doing is somehow definitive. That's also why I never waste or throw away film. With digital cameras there's none of that; all the gravity is gone, and is replaced by a nonchalant feeling of 'if it isn't right now, we'll get it right in the next shot'. Personally I can't work like that. Whatever happened to the decisive moment? To discipline, to the careful eye, to single-frame photographers like Weegee??? Autofocus killed it all. And now digital is going to kill it again. Analog for all eternity!

So to me, the decision wasn't that hard. I wanted to keep shooting analog, on real silver film, but I also wanted to feed my pictures into a computer, so that I could take advantage of a computer's unlimited possibilities when it comes to image enhancement and filing. Plus, I simply needed a way to view my pictures now that I couldn't make any prints any more. So - a film scanner it was.

of course I had a lot of initial doubts. A film scanner would mean my full conversion to digital photography, which was something I was nervous about. A film scanner would above all mean that I would only be able to view my images on a screen, because I didn't have a decent printer; and even if I had one, I knew I wouldn't want to make thirty-six prints per roll. I would be forever dependent on a computer as a viewing device, and I would have to kiss my knack-sharp silver bromide prints goodbye. The latter was already happening because I lost the darkroom, and I thought I could come to live with the former, because about the only time I ever looked at my old pictures, was when I happened to come across old scans somewhere in computer memory. Besides, there were always the negatives to return to, if I wanted to make an enlargement sometime.

In the end I went for a film scanner, but since I didn't, and still don't, have a large budget for things like that, I settled for a slightly down-market model: the Minolta Dîmage Scan Dual II USB. That's a 2820 DPI film scanner, theoretically capable of scanning a negative full-frame, but in practice the negative sled shields off about a millimeter or two on each edge of the negative. So you get an image demarcated by jagged white borders. The resolution is fine though for screen work (the larger the source image, the better the final resized image), and when you get to know some of the scanner's idiosyncrasies (more on them later), it's an agreeable machine.

My experience with scanning film

First of all, if you buy a film scanner to completely replace the printing chain, like I did, how is that going to work out? For me it works fine. I do miss hard copies, and I often don't like the fact that all I have to do with is a lousy unreachable image on a screen, but that's fairly easy to get over, once you imagine that you have an analog hard copy in the form of the negative. That is what sets film scans aside from usual digital photography. If you want to have an analog print done, you have a 25 million DPI original up your sleeve, which is comforting.

Digital from the get-go?

Secondly, after scanning in lots of new pictures, it came to mind that a film scanner is not so much useful for scanning in new work, as it is for scanning in archived pictures. New work could have been made digitally to begin with, but archived negatives are only available in analog form. To digitalise them, a film scanner is necessary, but to import new photos into a computer, a digital camera would have sufficed right away. Often when I scan in new rolls of film, it occurs to me that this scanning business has a huge lot of overhead - waiting for the film to be developed, manually loading the film sleds - when everything could have been so easy if only I had used a digital camera up front. But that's the choice I made. It is, however, a consideration for anybody wanting to get involved with film scanners.

Quality

Thirdly, there's quality. There is no doubt in my mind that a film scanner is the best way to acquire a digitised image from a film original. It's definitely better than scanning in prints, because prints have flaws themselves, let alone your average flatbed scanner. You entirely skip the printing chain, which means skipping a whole range of potential interferences and mishaps. Instead you work straight from the original, like publishers who prefer slides. What that means, is that a scanned image will usually contain much, much more density information than a print. Photo paper scales a negative's latitude down to its own rather poor latitude. Then a flatbed scanner will scale that latitude down even more. A film scanner will capture much more of the original print, both in the low key and high key areas. When processed well, a scan from a negative will yield a much better image than a print - in its confined realm that is, the computer screen. For web use though, there is nothing like it.

Practicality

Fourth, there's practicality. I already mentioned that scanning film and optimizing the results in a paint program is laborious and time-consuming, and I will stress it again. Especially with a lower class scanner like mine, scanning in 36 colour exposures can literally last hours if it has to be full resolution. The time you spend on getting the image ready for viewing roughly depends on the retouche you have to apply to remove all the - usually abundant - dust specs, but it will usually range from anything between five minutes to five hours. Compared to having prints done by the local drugstore, that's a lot of overhead. Scanning film is not for bulk work, and it's not for those who shoot twenty rolls a week either. If, like me, you shoot about a roll a month, then you can take your time, and the work becomes manageable. Otherwise it's probably not worth your while. But if you're used to doing your own printing in a darkroom, then you'll notice that not only is scanning film slightly faster than setting up and using an entire darkroom, but it's also much, much cleaner and more convenient. All that messing around in the dark, it's all gone when you convert to the clean computer world.

Manipulation flexibility

Fifth, there's digital image manipulation. By that I don't mean the kind where you morph heads or alter parts of the image to mislead viewers, but more the kind of manipulation that you used to do in a darkroom but which never really turned out the way you wanted. On a computer it's possible to dodge, burn and mask with incredible flexibility. You can make precise masks, then fill them with gradients, and use that as an alpha channel for dodging the image, to name just one possibility. Skies can be darkened and faces lightened with incredible ease and flexibility.

I don't call thatinfringing a picture's integrity, because it's exactly the kind of thing people were doing in darkrooms for years, but now it's on a computer, and more precise than ever. I admit I was a bit reluctant at first to manipulate pictures, but now that I've acquired some Photoshop skill, I think there's nothing like it. For me it's all about the end result, and on a computer I've finally created the perfect prints I never really could in the darkroom.

Grain

Sixth, there's grain. Yes, grain. Grain can look great on a print, but when scanning film it can be a real bother. Its charm just doesn't come across on a computer screen. Grain often looks like random noise, which is really ugly. So for the best results qualitywise, it's best to use as grainless a film as possible, or scan in any grainy negatives at the highest resolution, and then scale them down using a nivellating resize algorithm like bilinear resampling.

Conclusion

Concluding, I'm pretty happy with my film scanner. It allows me to share my images with lots of people on easy distributed media like CD-ROMs (I made a CD-ROM of my Rome photos, which I handed out in class), and of course over the Internet. I can scan in all my best pictures to make a handsome digital portfolio. I can send new pictures over the globe in virtually no time, and the best thing is, there's always a hard copy as a back-up. Still, I do miss prints and the darkroom. For nice and grainy black and white fine art photography, there's nothing like a nice big print, with deep blacks and luscious fields of sharp grain. Whatever advantages a film scanner has: like e-books vs paper copies, it can't replace that analog romance.

How to create good colour scans

I don't know if all film scanners are like mine, but more often than not, when I try to scan in a colour image on my Minolta Dîmage Scan Dual II, the software completely misinterprets the image and filters colours totally wrong. For example, if a picture is dominantly blue, then the scan will turn out dominantly green. Although that can be corrected easily in Photoshop by adjusting the grey balance, that scan will never be as rich-toned as a negative that was scanned in well to begin with, because you always lose some information somewhere. But how to scan that negative correctly to start with? For colour photographs, this is my recipe. Usually there will be one or more images on a roll of colour film that will be pre-scanned neutrally or very close to neutral. Prescan that calibration negative, and press the AE LOCK button. That will secure the colour filtering data. Then eject the sled and swap the calibration negative for the frame that's giving you trouble. Then scan in that frame as usual, but with AE LOCK on. Voila, the scanner is fooled, and you have a well-scanned frame by using the near-neutral filterings for the calibration negative. Piece of cake once you know how. Then apply some slight tonal corrections in Photoshop through the grey balance adjustment (image>levels>adjust, and then the middle syringe; select it and click it on what you want to be precisely grey), and you're done.

It's important though that you use a calibration negative from the same film, because the colour and density of the orange masking layer will vary from film to film. What may count as a neutral frame for one roll, might well produce blueish results on another. For obvious reasons, the equal density is also important.

Another more laborious, but much better method is to scan in colour negatives as slides. Slides are scanned in 'as is' by the scanner, without applying any corrections. If you scan in a colour negative as a slide, and then invert it, you'll end up with a light blue teinted positive image. I've found that that light blue wash can be very easily filtered out, leaving you with a much richer colour picture than would ever be possible through other methods. Go figure: in 'color negative' mode, the scanner starts with correcting the same light blue image, after which you go on correcting it once more. Each correction step means a loss of image detail, so why not just skip one step? The disadvantages are that this method takes more work than a normal color negative scan, and that you don't have a decent preview image. The advantages are that you keep everything in your own hands, and that you skip the time-consuming prescanning run altogether.

Deck: Although the parade may have gone by for Hollywood’s Golden era, it is only just beginning for those involved in film preservation.

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Starting his career as a documentary film maker in Alaska, North America, film restoration and preservation could not have been further from the mind of Reed Bovee, now Chief Technical Officer at Reflex Technologies (Burbank, CA, USA). However, when the lack of available good quality archival footage of historic events became apparent, Bovee and his colleagues decided to build a film scanner to meet the demand.

First demonstrated at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB; Washington, DC, USA) in 2012, the company’s prototype film scanner was immediately recognized as a valuable film preservation tool, bringing Reflex Technology its first customers.

“In the early days of motion pictures,” says Bovee, “a nitrate film base was used as the transparent substrate for the photosensitive emulsion used to expose photographic images. Degradation of this film results in an amber, brown or yellowish film discolouration, blistering or bubbling of the surface and a film that is possibly stuck together or decomposed into a brittle residue.”

Although nitrate-based film is extremely flammable, it was used in most film-based stock until the late 1940s when it began to be replaced with that made of less-flammable cellulose triacetate (also known as safety film). However, although this cellulose triacetate-based film is less flammable, it is still subject to decomposition.

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“When cellulose acetate film base decomposes,” says Bovee, “it produces a vinegar-like odor which indicates that acetic acid is leaching from the film base and breakdown has begun.” This can cause cloudy images, make one layer of the film adhere to the next resulting in changes in the film’s surface characteristics (known as ferrotyping) and loosen the emulsion from the base. The film can also shrink resulting in individual frames becoming cupped or curved. “Eventually, at the later stages of decomposition, the film becomes increasingly brittle, and transforms into powder,” says Bovee.

Today, polyester-based film has replaced cellulose acetate as the preferred medium for motion picture prints since it is stronger, more resistant to tearing and less brittle. Since such polyester-based film is far more durable and resistant to degradation than cellulose acetate-based film, distribution prints can survive for long periods since the film base does not decay or emanate odors.

Film formats

One of the most important methods to preserve old footage is image digitization. To perform this task, film scanners must not harm the original film or add any new artifacts. Furthermore such systems must be capable of digitizing numerous different types of film stock, ranging from 8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm to 35mm. All of these different film types may contain different image formats. For example, the image area of 16mm film is 10.26 x 7.49 mm while that of 35mm film is 21mm x 18mm.

Figure 1: Numerous film formats have been produced during the last century ranging from 16mm, Standard and Super 8mm and 9.5mm formats. As can be seen, each of these vary in the type and size of perforation pitches, perforation sizes and whether magnetic or optical soundtracks have been incorporated.

Each of these film types vary in type and size of perforation pitches that they use and whether they use single or double perforations with which a camera (in the case of a film negative) or projector (in the case of a film positive) would advance the film. As well as having a variety of image formats and perforation sizes, many may incorporate either magnetic or optical soundtracks (Figure 1).

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“To digitize such film formats,” says Bovee, “conventional digitizers use sprocket-based mechanisms to advance the film over a scanning mechanism. Unfortunately, this necessitates the use of multiple sprocket formats to accommodate every film type. Worse, should a film be shrunken by as little as 2%, or if the film is creased down its length, the use of sprocket-based mechanisms cannot be used. Furthermore, such conventional scanners often limit how much of the film area can be scanned, not allowing the outer edges of the film (that may contain essential information) to be digitized. To convey these different types of film through a film scanner without damage, the use of sprocket less systems allow even very badly preserved film to be handled.

However, it is not just film transportation that plays an important role in accurate film digitization. As each frame is presented to the scanning mechanism, it must lie as flat as possible to ensure that the entire image area is sharply focused, and that there is no reduction of the captured image’s brightness or saturation at the periphery compared to the image center (a phenomena known as vignetting).

As well as capturing fidelity images, today’s film-based scanners must incorporate pick-ups (to capture sound from magnetic soundtracks) and a means of interpreting the optical soundtrack so that it can be converted to digital sound files. Finally, such scanners must be capable of creating digital image and sound files in a number of different formats such as Microsoft’s uncompressed Audio Video Interleave (AVI) format, Apple Inc.’s QuickTime files or as individual bitmapped (BMP), Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) or Digital Picture Exchange (DPX) files for digital restoration or print back to film stock.

Scanning stock

Figure 2: At each scanning station, two monitors are used to display captured images and the image processing software used to perform image restoration. (inset) To perform image digitization, film is first loaded onto a feed reel on the film scanner, threaded through an optical reading head and onto a take-up spool.

To control film transport, film illumination, digitization, color correction and image storage, the Reflex scanner employs both a programmable logic controller (PLC) and a host-based PC. At each scanning station, two monitors are used to display captured images and the image processing software used to perform image restoration (Figure 2).

To move the film through the scanner, the system uses both a supply and a take-up capstan servo drive and a supply reel and take-up reel servo drive. Using dual capstans on each side of the scanning mechanism provides smooth film movement through the scanner and allows the film to travel at a constant speed. While the rotating capstans control film movement through the scanning mechanism, the supply and take-up reel servo-drive systems assist in the movement and stopping of the film when required.

To accomplish this, the capstan is connected to a tachometer that feeds capstan velocity to the reel servo-drive systems. Simultaneously, a supply and take-up film tension tensor ensures that the film is kept under consistent tension during winding, re-winding and scanning. These functions are controlled using the PLC and operated using a graphical user interface (GUI) on the scanner’s control panel.

To illuminate the film, it is backlit using a white light LED source. With a built-in cooling system, the LED array produces approximately 23,800 Lumens of light with a color temperature of 5000K when strobed with an external TTL pulse. “This is important,” says Bovee, “since the film is moving at a continuous rate and by using a 25μs strobe, the image can be imaged correctly without blur”.

Just as important is the need to illuminate the film such that the surface has an isotropic luminance when digitized. To do so, two condensing lenses are used to render the divergent light from the LED panel into a converging beam to illuminate the base of the film. To obtain a near Lambertian reflectance from the film, holographic diffusion material is placed in front of the pair of converging lenses. “If such a material was not employed,” says Bovee, “then vignetting would occur at the edges of the film during scanning.”

Taking pictures

Figure 3: To move the film through the scanner, the system uses both a supply and a take-up capstan servo drive and a supply reel and take-up reel servo drive. To control film transport, film illumination, digitization, color correction and image storage, the Reflex scanner employs both a programmable logic controller (PLC) and a host-based PC.

In the design of the Reflex film scanner, a PC interfaced to the system’s PLC is used to perform film illumination, digitization, color correction and image storage (Figure 3). As the film moves through the scanner it is digitized using a full-frame, global shutter CCD imager. The camera is fitted with a macro lens and positioned in a housing approximately 4ins above the film transport mechanism (Figure 2 -inset). After images are digitized, they are transferred over the camera’s interface to a GigE network interface card housed in the host PC.

To trigger both the camera and the strobe as each frame moves under the FOV of the camera, an optical system consisting of a combined LED emitter and receiver is used to create a red laser beam that then passes through an anamorphic lens.

“The purpose of the anamorphic lens,” says Bovee, “is to spread the laser beam in one axis to shape the beam into a short line, similar to the straight edge of the film’s perforations. “By properly calibrating the system,” says Bovee, “the laser sensor uses the reflected light to detect whether the film is correctly positioned in the scanner.” Once detected, the sensor is used to both trigger the white LED strobe and the CCD camera.

Recreating the past

In restoring historic archival footage and badly preserved nitrate or acetate-based film, it is necessary to produce high-fidelity images. While post-production software packages such as DaVinci Resolve 14 from Blackmagic Design (Fremont, CA, USA), can be used to alter the image quality of digitized negative or positive film, they often lack the tools required to improve the color quality or dynamic range of such images.

Recognizing this, Reflex Technologies turned to NorPix (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) for assistance when developing the image processing software required for its film scanner. To do so, Bovee and his colleagues worked with Philippe Candelier, Vice President of Engineering at NorPix and the company’s StreamPix 7 software. This collaboration resulted in the development of a user-friendly menu-driven graphical user interface (GUI) that scanner operators use to increase the dynamic range of captured images, to perform color space transformation, color correction, exposure level adjustment and gamma correction and output restored image sequences in a number of different file formats.

“While the CCD camera used in the system has a 14-bit analog to digital converter (ADC), the dynamic range of images captured by the camera is approximately 12-bits,” says Bovee. “To increase this dynamic range, a number of different methods can be used. Perhaps the most popular of these is exposing the scene – or in this case the film – at two different exposure settings. This results in parts of the image that appear bright being captured using a high-speed exposure and those that appear dark captured with a lower-speed exposure. Combining the results of these two exposures results in an image with a greater range of luminance levels (and thus higher dynamic range) than can be achieved by simply using a single exposure,” he says.

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In the Reflex film scanner, this is accomplished by starting and stopping the film intermittently and using the photoelectric laser sensor to decelerate and park the film such that images can be exposed at both 25µs and 60µs while the film is stationary (Figure 4). This can be accomplished at approximately 2-3 fps.

Figure 4: To increase the dynamic range of each frame, the scene is exposed at two different exposure settings – in this case at both 25µs (left) and 60µs (center). This results in parts of the image that appear bright being captured using a high-speed exposure and those that appear dark captured with a lower-speed exposure. Combining the results of these two exposures results in an image with a higher dynamic range than can be achieved by simply using a single exposure (right).

Combining the two exposures, however, first requires that images from the CCD camera are interpolated since the sensor used in the camera employs a Bayer color RGB filter. To accomplish this, Bovee used a bi-linear interpolation techniques supplied as part of the NorPix StreamPix 7 software. This results in two images, taken at different exposure times, comprising 4864 × 3232, 7µm square pixels each with an interpolated RGB value.

According to Mihai Ghita, Software Developer with NorPix, a number of different methods can be used to create an HDR image. These include algorithms that first merge the exposure sequences into a single image and then use tone mapping to map one set of colors to another to approximate the appearance of an HDR image (see “High Dynamic Range (HDR)”; http://bit.ly/2zBHRPw).

Rather than use this method, however, Ghita incorporated the Merge Mertens fusion function of The Open Source Computer Vision Library into NorPix StreamPix 7 software since this algorithm does not require the exposure times of the two images to be described or any tone-map algorithm to be used. This results in HDR images that can be viewed and stored in both full-frame or full-aperture modes.

Color correction

With both film positives and negatives, colors within image sequences can shift over time, and thus require color correction. To accomplish this task, Reflex Technologies has incorporated a number of tools within the StreamPix 7 software to provide real-time feedback to the scanner operator. These include displaying different types of color spaces that can be adjusted during the restoration process, reducing the need for single frame color correction. As part of the StreamPix 7 software, four different tools exist to accomplish this task that include an RGB Parade tool, a Waveform Monitor, a Vector Scope, and a Histogram Analysis tool.

To enhance the color of digitized images using the RGB Parade tool, the red (R), green (G) and blue (B) values of the 12-bit interpolated pixels can be each be manipulated to control the color density across the entire frame (Figure 5). One of the most important functions performed by adjusting these RGB levels is color balancing. This is used to render specific colors correctly by first digitizing an image of a Macbeth color chart with known colors and illuminant, then scaling the RGB components to correct the color density across the image.

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Figure 5: To enhance the color of digitized images using the RGB Parade tool, the red (R), green (G) and blue (B) values of the 4864 × 3232 interpolated pixels can be each adjusted (left) to provide control over their color density across the entire frame (right).

In some situations, it may be necessary to alter the brightness of an image without altering its color or vice-versa. In such cases, NorPix’s Waveform Monitor uses a simple matrix multiplication to transform RGB images to those of YUV (a.k.a. YCrCb) where Y represents the image’s luminance value and Cr and Cb two chrominance components. By operating on YUV values, it is then easier for the operator to compensate for, for example, the light intensity across an image, without altering its color values.

Images can also be transformed and displayed from the RGB color space to hue (H), saturation (S) and intensity (I) values using the Vector Scope tool. This allows the hue (color) and saturation (amount of color) and intensity (or lightness) values of the image to be independently adjusted. This is important when adjusting the white balance of the image since, for example, an image taken under incandescent lighting will have more of an orange hue and, by increasing the level of blue in the image, a more neutral image will be produced. Indeed, such HSI models are important in many image processing applications because they represent color as it would be sensed by the eye.

To correct the lightness, darkness, and contrast (or tonality) of images, NorPix’s Histogram Tool can be used. This illustrates how red, green and blue pixels in images are distributed and is computed by plotting the value of the number of pixels at each color intensity level, revealing details in shadows, mid-tones and highlights. Since an image with a full tonal range will have pixels in shadows, mid-tones and highlights, adjusting the RGB histogram allows the user to determine the appropriate tonal corrections that need to be made.

“While the number of image processing tools may at first appear overwhelming,” says Bovee, “ an operator can use known visual cues within images (such as the color of an American flag or a blue sky) to accelerate image adjustment. Then, such settings can be saved for each type of image sequence processed so that an operator can later load known adjustments that pertain to particular effects caused by film degradation and make fine adjustments as required.”

Adding audio

To capture magnetic sound, the scanner features a magnetic pick-up head aligned with the edge track of the film. Since no ferrous metals are used anywhere in the film path, no degaussing (erasing) of the magnetic soundtrack can occur. Indeed, only non-ferrous metals such as aluminum, brass and stainless steel are used for any parts which are in proximity to the film.

To capture sound from an optical soundtrack, Reflex Technologies has also developed a proprietary reader that captures an image of the optical soundtrack simultaneously with an adjacent image frame. Software then stitches each frame of the optical sound image together, interprets this and converts the sound to 24-bit, 96 kHz broadcast wave files. According to Bovee, this method works equally well with both variable area or variable density optical soundtracks—either monaural or stereo.

Data output

After a particular image sequence and/or soundtrack has been scanned and processed, it must be stored to disk and shipped to the customer. This can be accomplished in a number of different ways. If, for example, the customer simply wishes to view the images on a PC, then the image and/or sound sequence can be stored as a Audio Video Interleave (AVI) file, a multimedia container format created by Microsoft (Redmond, WA).

“Even though a film may have been scanned at 5 or 10fps, for example,” says Bovee, “it can be saved in this format using NorPix’s StreamPix 7 software to play at 24fps. Similarly, the data can be stored in QuickTime format, the extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple (Cupertino, CA; USA). In either case, StreamPix software stores these image files along with the scanner settings used to produce the final image sequence.

In many cases, image sequences are stored at 8-bits/pixel since the customer may only want to view them on a computer. In other cases, post-production houses and film laboratories may require the 12-bit camera images to be re-mapped in a 16-bit color space and stored in a Digital Picture Exchange (DPX) file format. This ANSI/SMPTE standard is used to represent the film sequence with all the detail from the film scanner. To do so, each frame of the image sequence is individually tagged and stored which may result in tens or even hundreds of thousands of individual frames.

“Today’s advancements in film scanning technology,” says Bovee, “mean that negatives and positive prints once impossible to scan using conventional sprocket-based scanners can now be preserved for posterity.” With the film creations of the past now becoming increasingly available in digital format thanks to companies such as Reflex Technologies, the people who created them will continue to remain relevant to archivists, film historians and the general public.

Companies and associations mentioned

Apple Computer
Cupertino, CA; USA
www.apple.com

Blackmagic Design
Fremont, CA, USA
www.blackmagicdesign.com

Microsoft
Redmond, WA
www.microsoft.com

National Association of Broadcasters (NAB)
Washington, DC, USA
www.nab.org

NorPix
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
www.norpix.com

Reflex Technologies
Burbank, CA, USA
www.reflextechnologies.com





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