Has anyone tested Retro-8 from MovieStuff yet?

[prtprt]

I saw that MovieStuff is now shipping their new Retro-8.

Has anyone on this forum tested it yet?

Charlie

[Tscan]

I just had mine delivered on Friday but have been too busy to set it up yet. The unit is super cool and real solid. It reminds me of a high end piece of studio equipment. I'm real happy about the fact that it has an exposure control knob as opposed to auto exposure. I plan on setting it up tomorrow night and scanning some 100D... I'm also shooting some sample rolls of V3 50D, 200T, and 500T. Once i get things dialed in here in the upcoming months, i hope to be offering low cost scans of negatives... stay tuned for my new website and services coming soon under the name Silent Filmworks!

[Will2]

I have to say that it looks better and better as a great alternative for Super 8/Regular 8 film enthusiasts. Quality telecine is at least 1/3rd of the cost of what we do if not more...to own your own unit would be a great investment.

I'd really love to see apples to apples comparison of quality vs. the higher-end HD scanners. Even if it's 80% of their quality, it's 95% less money to own.

Also, running it through Fred's AVISynth script would probably put it over the top on quality.

[prtprt]

Oh, so the Retro-8 does not have auto exposure? On MovieStuffs web it says "Automated scanning", and also "full automation means set it and forget it", so I thought that included auto exposure.

If you must manually adjust the exposure i realtime, then it will be very time consuming, because Retro-8 scans about 2 frames a second...

Charlie

[MovieStuff]

Oh, so the Retro-8 does not have auto exposure? On MovieStuffs web it says "Automated scanning", and also "full automation means set it and forget it", so I thought that included auto exposure.

If you must manually adjust the exposure i realtime, then it will be very time consuming, because Retro-8 scans about 2 frames a second...

Charlie

Actually, anyone with experience scanning movie film knows is that, regardless of how much you pay for a scanner, whether $2500 or $250,000, there is no auto-exposure circuit that is going to make aesthetic decisions that the user will always agree with. So this means that, even with the very best auto-exposure system, there will be errors if the telecine unit is left unattended. This is due to a variety of factors. First is that reversal was never, never, ever meant to be replicated. Ever. It has a high D-max for deep blacks and thin whites which make for a nice, snappy projection of original material but these same traits that make for a beautiful projection also make it the worse choice ever for telecine work. So even if you have an auto-exposure system that is well balanced and you have film that is perfectly exposed, the auto-exposure sensor will get fooled time and time again by high contrast situations such as a little girl in a white dance tutu in a spotlight surrounded by darkness. Or a birthday cake with candles or a Christmas tree with lights on it. Or a guy wearing black jeans with a white T-shirt standing in the sun at noon while their girlfriend stands in the shadow of the nearby tree wearing a dark blue dress, etc. In all these instances, the auto-exposure circuit, left on its own, will try to correct a problem that does not really exist. If there is an abundance of blackness, it will try to increase exposure to compensate and, suddenly, the little girl in the white tutu is blown out. If it sees an abundance of white, then the shadows are plunged into super darkness. In reality, if the telecine camera had enough range, you could simply lock a median exposure and then the whites would remain white and the blacks would remain black because the camera will no longer be searching. But this is hard to do with typical video cameras that capture only in 8 bit or with cameras that have a preset gamma range designed to capture the real world and not capture high contrast movie film frames.

The Retro-8 captures in full 24 bit plus we have preset the gamma to take into account the deeper shadows and brighter whites of reversal. In addition, there is a brightness adjustment on the unit and a gamma adjustment in the software during capture. So, rather than have an auto exposure that will try to correct problems that don't exist, you can turn down the exposure to protect the whites and then use the gamma adjustment in the capture software to bring up shadow detail and then let it run. The end result is that you compress the contrast range during capture and then expand it in post on your NLE to look the way you want. Will there be errors if left unattended? Of course. But there will be fewer unrecoverable errors than using auto-exposure. Auto-exposure will always "search" from scene to scene and, if information in the whites and blacks are lost due to high contrast, they are gone forever. At least, this way, you have the option to attenuate the look of the film in post rather than living with what auto-exposure gives you. Can you punch up the contrast during transfer to look the way you want? Sure. But then you are doing grading during capture at 2fps which, as you say, would be time consuming. Ultimately, there are exposure, color and gamma tools in the Retro-8 system that can be user-defined to suit one's needs when transferring reversal. When the software is switched to color neg, the image can be flat as a pancake or you can use the gamma controls to punch up the contrast during the transfer. It just depends on how you want to work. But the last thing you want on a scanner like this is auto-exposure.

Roger

[Tscan]

Running a transfer on auto exposé would be a disaster. Having full manual control of how to light your frames is a very good thing.

[prtprt]

Roger, thank you for your informative answer on this very interesting product. I fully agree that manual exposure gives better result than automatic exposure. But I think it would have been great if you could choose between manual and automatic exposure in Retro-8. Just as you can with other fine equipment from Moviestuff (such as Sniper-HDL). Roger, would it be more exposure errors with a auto exposure feature on Retro-8 than on DV8 Sniper-HDL because of different ways of working?

Manual exposure will always be better, but sometimes people want the scan result to be just “good enough”, for example a private person who “just want it done”, or a business owner who need to have automatic unattended functionality to be able to earn some money.

Or perhaps you mean that the way Retro-8 is working (where you can correct the scan result in the post the way you want) is another (better) way of scanning, that will give a better end result, even if left unattended?

Another question: You compare Retro-8’s 24 bit capture with video cameras with only 8 bit. Sorry for not being so good at theese technical details, but isn’t 24 bit the result of 3 * 8 bit, that is: 8 bit for each color?

Charlie

[MovieStuff]

You can have a color in many variations such as 8 bit (4:2:2) or 16 bit (8:4:4) as well as color that's 24 bit (8:8:8). Many regular video cameras capture in 8 bit 4:2:2 and even 4:1:1 which can look just fine but doesn't have the range of full 8:8:8 on the color channels. The Sniper-HD units record in 8 bit 4:2:2 and produce a terrific image for the money but the camera must have auto exposure to keep the image within the limitations of 4:2:2. By comparison, the Retro-8 has greater range because we are recording in a full 8 bits per color channel. If you were to lock the exposure to a median position on the Sniper and just let it run some film, the more limited range would mean loss of detail in the highlights and shadow areas. That same median position on the Retro-8 would maintain the shadow and highlight detail because of the wider range and also because, unlike the Sniper cameras which are designed to capture the real world and can't be altered, we are able to recalibrate the Retro-8 camera's gamma settings specifically for the higher contrast characteristics of reversal film. In addition, the gamma level can be user defined to add even greater range.

As I pointed out before, any unattended telecine capture session will result in errors because there is no exposure system that will make aesthetic decisions you will always agree with. So the relevant question is how many of those errors are recoverable later in post because the highlight and shadow information is still there and how many are fatal because that information has been lost. Auto-exposure doesn't know what in the image is important to the user and will often try to correct for a problem that doesn't exist. Based on our research, at least for the Retro-8, auto-exposure would do nothing but bring more unrecoverable errors to the capture process which is why we removed it from the unit during our design and testing process.

[prtprt]

Thank you, Roger.

Tscan: It will be very interesting to hear about your experiences when you have tested your Retro-8.

Charlie

[Will2]

Before HDR was the all the rage, I had a colorist friend that used to experiment with doing multiple exposure passes on film then "HDR"ing it together with some amazing results.

Perhaps something like that could be done with the Retro-8; do a pass for blacks, a pass for highlights and a pass for the middle then combine them with HDR. Since the Retro-8 is frame by frame, you would just need to perfectly align them temporally and run a batch software program. Just a thought...

[MovieStuff]

Before HDR was the all the rage, I had a colorist friend that used to experiment with doing multiple exposure passes on film then "HDR"ing it together with some amazing results.

Perhaps something like that could be done with the Retro-8; do a pass for blacks, a pass for highlights and a pass for the middle then combine them with HDR. Since the Retro-8 is frame by frame, you would just need to perfectly align them temporally and run a batch software program. Just a thought...

It has crossed our mind. The registration is pretty much perfect and repeatable so it would be pretty easy to run it once for the highlights and once for the shadows and combine them. Don't think you would need a separate pass for the mid tones. Again, the range on the camera is pretty good. In fact, once you start working with it, I think you will find that the gamma adjustment on the software is a real life saver for tough scenes.

Roger

[Will2]

Roger, what's you're current turn time once an order is placed on these?

[hirudin]

I just want to know when the 16mm version will be hitting the showroom floor... I have a growing archive of ultrapan8 that I'd love to be able to scan 'in-house', along with super16 and reg16.

-Jesse-

[MovieStuff]

Roger, what's you're current turn time once an order is placed on these?

We were pretty far out beause we delayed the release until the second quarter to incorporate a butt load of requested improvements. So we had tons of orders from Jan-March to wade through. We're getting caught up so anyone is looking at the normal 60 day lead time from when the order is placed until we ship. As we go along, that time will get shorter and shorter because, unlike our previous units based on projectors, there are no "surprises" during production. Everything is made from scratch so we have an economy of scale that makes production more efficient. Honestly, I have been surprised at the big response because we've really done no advertising.

Roger

[MovieStuff]

I just want to know when the 16mm version will be hitting the showroom floor... I have a growing archive of ultrapan8 that I'd love to be able to scan 'in-house', along with super16 and reg16.

-Jesse-

We are currently working on a Retro-16 as well as a Retro-9.5. Actually, we've been working on the RetroScan series for the better part of three years. The Academy of Motion Pictures Archive asked us back then to design a 16mm unit that was gentle on film, had no image area contact, no sprockets, claws, no pinch rollers, etc. Also, it needed to be easy for untrained interns to use and needed to output both SD and HD. And, oh by the way, it needs to work with an off the shelf PC, they said. We decided to build it for 8mm first beause we knew that would pay back the R&D faster due to higher demand. Also, building it in 8mm would be harder so we knew it would "scale up" to 16mm applications if it worked in 8mm.

Roger