Looking for a facility with Cintel telecine film scanner in the Houston area. Any leads?
16mm film scan in Houston, TX?
- Thread starter Theo Angell
- Start date
Just curious why a Cintel? The original Cintels are way outdated at this point, and the BMD Cintel is kind of meh at best.
It's been a while since I've done telecine work. What system do you recommend?
So telecine and scanning are different things, with different workflows. With telecine you're transferring from film to tape or files, via a color correction system in real time. With scanning, color correction is decoupled from the transfer and it's largely a technical process - making sure nothing gets clipped or crushed in the scan. Color correction is done later in software. This makes the process less expensive, because you're not tying up a couple rooms full of gear and a colorists' time to do the transfer. If you're outputting to UHD, then the free version of Resolve is really all you need to grade the scanned image.
Full disclosure - I'm a little biased because we own one, but what you want it someone with a Lasergraphics 6.5k ScanStation with 2-flash HDR. Best price/quality point in almost all cases, IMO. You can go higher end on a Director or an Arriscan with sequential RGB scanning, but honestly you're not going to see a significant improvement over a 2-flash scan from the ScanStation except in some edge cases.
The BMD Cintel scanner is limited to ~HD resolution for 16mm, which is inadequate and also doesn't make a lot of sense when modern televisions and digital projection are mostly 4k. Those scanners have noisy sensors and the picture quality is ok if the film is perfectly exposed, but if you have under or over exposure, you'll likely end up with a noisy image once it's graded.
Full disclosure - I'm a little biased because we own one, but what you want it someone with a Lasergraphics 6.5k ScanStation with 2-flash HDR. Best price/quality point in almost all cases, IMO. You can go higher end on a Director or an Arriscan with sequential RGB scanning, but honestly you're not going to see a significant improvement over a 2-flash scan from the ScanStation except in some edge cases.
The BMD Cintel scanner is limited to ~HD resolution for 16mm, which is inadequate and also doesn't make a lot of sense when modern televisions and digital projection are mostly 4k. Those scanners have noisy sensors and the picture quality is ok if the film is perfectly exposed, but if you have under or over exposure, you'll likely end up with a noisy image once it's graded.
Perry, how much is a Lasergraphics 6.5k ScanStation with 2-flash HDR?
We bought the first ScanStation Lasergraphics shipped, back in 2013, and have steadily updated it since then. So I don't know what the current pricing is, but I think fully outfitted it's something like $250k. There are a lot of options that affect the price so don't take this as gospel. You'd need to contact Galileo Digital, the reseller for these machines, for the actual price.
