See my top level comment for more info on this, but the Aladdin scan used in the article was from a 35mm trailer that's been scanned on an unknown scanner, and had unknown processing applied to it. It's not really possible to compare anything other than resolution and artefacts in the two images.
And it was made by a lab that made choices on processing and developing times, that can quite easily affect the resulting image. You hope that labs are reasonably standard across the board and calibrate frequently, but even processing two copies of the same material in a lab, one after the other will result in images that look different if projected side by side. This is why it's probably impossible to made new prints of 3-strip-cinerama films now, the knowledge and number of labs that can do this are near zero.
TL;DR: Linking to YouTube trailer scans as comparisons for colour is misleading and not accurate.
---
> see the 35 mm trailer for reference
The article makes heavy use of referring to scans of trailers to show what colours, grain, sharpness, etc. looked like. This is quite problematic, because you are replying on a scan done by someone on the Internet to accurately depict what something looked like in a commercial cinema. Now, I am not a colour scientist (far from it!), but I am a motion picture film hobbyist and so can speak a bit about some of the potential issues.
When projected in a movie theatre, light is generated by a short-arc xenon lamp. This has a very particular output light spectrum, and the entire movie process is calibrated and designed to work with this. The reflectors (mirrors) in the lamphouse are tuned to it, the films are colour graded for it, and then the film recorders (cameras) are calibrated knowing that this will be how it is shown.
When a film is scanned, it is not lit by a xenon short-arc lamp, instead various other illumination methods are used depending on the scanner. CRTs and LEDs are common. Commercial scanners are, on the whole, designed to scan negative film. It's where the money is - and so they are setup to work with that, which is very different to positive movie release film stock. Scanners therefore have different profiles to try and capture the different film stocks, but in general, today's workflow involves scanning something in, and then colour correcting post-scan, to meet an artist's expectations/desires.
Scanning and accurately capturing what is on a piece of film is something that is really quite challenging, and not something that any commercial scanner today does, or claims to do.
The YouTube channels referenced are FT Depot, and 35mm Movie Trailers Scans. FT Depot uses a Lasergraphics 6.5K HDR scanner, which is a quite high end one today. It does have profiles for individual film stocks, so you can set that and then get a good scan, but even the sales brochure of it says:
> Many common negative film types are carefully characterized at Lasergraphics to allow our scanning software to compensate for variation. The result is more accurate color reproduction and less time spent color grading.
Note that it says that less time is spent colour grading - it is still not expected that it will accurately capture exactly what was on the film. It also specifies negative, I don't know whether it has positive stock profiles as I am not lucky enough to have worked with one - for this, I will assume it does.
The "scanner" used by 35mm Movie Trailers Scans is a DIY, homemade film scanner that (I think, at least the last time I spoke to them) uses an IMX-183 sensor. They have both a colour sensor and a monochrome sensor, I am not sure what was used to capture the scans linked in the video. Regardless of what was used, in such a scanner that doesn't have the benefit of film stock profiles, etc. there is no way to create a scan that accurately captures what was on the film, without some serious calibration and processing which isn't being done here. At best, you can make a scan, and then manually adjust it by eye afterwards to what you think looks good, or what you think the film looks like, but without doing this on a colour calibrated display with the original projected side-by-side for reference, this is not going to be that close to what it actually looked like.
Now, I don't want to come off as bashing a DIY scanner - I have made one too, and they are great! I love seeing the scans from them, especially old adverts, logos, snipes, etc. that aren't available anywhere else. But, it is not controversial at all to say that this is not colour calibrated in any way, and in no way reflects what one actually saw in a cinema when that trailer was projected.
All this is to say that statements like the following in the article are pretty misleading - as the differences may not be attributable to the direct-digital-release process at all, and could just be that a camera white balance was set wrong, or some post processing to what "looked good" came out different to the original:
> At times, especially in the colors, they’re almost unrecognizable
> Compared to the theatrical release, the look had changed. It was sharp and grainless, and the colors were kind of different
I don't disagree with the premise of the article - recording an image to film, and then scanning it in for a release _will_ result in a different look to doing a direct-digital workflow. That's why major Hollywood films spend money recording and scanning film to get the "film look" (although that's another can of worms!). It's just not an accurate comparison to put two images side by side, when one is of a trailer scan of unknown accuracy.
I stumbled across the article about the ThunderScan in about 2012 when looking for info about ImageWriter II upgrades, and have been slightly obsessed ever since. It's such a brilliant idea - a higher resolution scanner, that was far lower in cost than its competitors, achieved by reusing the paper transport that most customers already had.
I'm lucky enough to own two working ThunderScans now (and one third one that I needed the software driver from). They work exactly as advertised, and it's a joy to see them zip across the page, digitising line by line.
The software by Hertzfeld is another joy to use. The scrolling, which Hertzfeld calls "inertial scrolling" in that article, is now familiar to us all who have used touchscreen devices. It's funny to think that the feature that wowed so many at the 2007 iPhone launch actually existed all the way back in 1984, designed by one of the key creators of the Macintosh.
I wish there were more creative hacks like this - I just know that if a company tried to do something similar today, the printer manufacturer would instantly roll out an update to break this functionality.
I wonder why the system didn't caught on and why it's not used today by manufacturers of multi-functional printers. Seems like a huge opportunity to use the existing paper handling mechanism - with an autofeeder, a feature most flatbeds lack! - and get a more compact device.
The entire device consists of a single, cheap CMOS image sensor, a lens focused at a fixed distance and a RGB led. Everything else, stitching the resulting scanbands, correcting for mechanical and optical distortions, etc. is all in software. The native optical resolution you could expect from, say, a 1080x720 px sensor would be something like 2400 DPI.
The only downside i can think is that you can't scan IDs, passports etc. and the location near the inkjet head tends to get dirty.
Canon tried with some Bubblejet printers, like BJC4300. It needed three passes per line (R,G,B) slow and lower quality.
I think also it was expensive, since I wanted to get it, but failed to find it.
OTOH, a 10 year old HP multifunction can scan things at 600DPI in acceptable quality and detail, in a very reasonable amount of time.
If you want to go compact, but fast, there's Kodak Alaris' "i" series scanners which can scan both sides at the same time. Scan time is ~4 seconds per double sided A5 page at 600DPI, and less than a second for ~200 DPI.
Interesting. The drawbacks you describe seem to be limitations of the sensor and image processing technology available almost 30 years ago.
For example, my Epson inkjet printer can do about 10ppm at it's lowest print quality, so it can mechanically move and scan a page against the printhead every 6 seconds; a 1Mpx sensor with a 60Hz frame rate will generate 360Mpx in 6 seconds. Even if you throw away 50% of the data (overlap areas, next page load, motion or optical blur at the edges etc.), that's still enough data for a ~1400 dpi raw resolution of an A4 page at the fastest speed. If you are willing to go slower, the resolutions the system could achieve seem outside the range of any flatbed.
Of course, you would need e very beefy image processor to handle the multiple Gbps raw video data and process in real time down to the final scan image, but the actual corrections seem very achievable with modern algorithms.
Outside of the cost of the image processor, another showstopper I can see is motion blur on the sensor, stopping the heavy printhead from its inertia, so that you can have a still image, will kill your total scan speed. But perhaps you can just pulse the LED, or a gas discharge lamp, and impress the sensor with near instantaneous flashes of light.
I had a Canon scan cartridge around 1999. It was slow, but worse, it was very finicky about the printer cable being used - which at the time could be very expensive and were not included.
It worked, but there was a clear linear pattern across scans. It worked for some things, but wasn’t the best for photos.
I have an HP All In One and I was quite disappointed when I first used it to digitize photos. It's nowhere near 600DPI. The quality I got from the scanner was worse than taking a picture with my phone!
Of course taking a picture with the phone requires good lighting and the photos you want to scan need to be flat.
You can get cheap, compact scanners that just feed the paper through instead of laying it on a flat pane of glass. Almost the same thing except not multifunctional and with a page width sensor instead of one that would scan back and forth.
It precludes many of the advantages of a flatbed scanner (such as scanning book pages without requiring removal of the pages), which existed at the same time as the Thunderscan. Things like hand scanners established themselves at the low-end by the early 90s.
People today (or maybe just businesses) seem thoroughly uninterested in interoperability or upgradability.
It's a fantastic ideal for nerds who like to repair and upgrade and Frankenstein tech bits into new shapes, but I'm not sure I've ever met a normal person who was interested in adding a feature to an existing widget instead of buying a new widget.
I'm absolutely certain this is because it's less profitable for businesses to offer upgradable or interoperable parts.
It's fantastic work you've done. As someone who works at a older software company (founded early 80s), I'm sad that there isn't a push internally for us to make our old software source available, or even just the binaries available!
What sort of tactics did you use to convince them? Maybe I can apply them to where I work too...
Sometimes it's forced upon cinema owners. There's only one company making non-laser cinema projectors these days, and so laser is really the only tech in town when it comes to replacing an ageing or broken projector.
Oh you worked on How to Train Your Dragon? That's my favourite movie in the world!
Really random follow up question - there's a How to Train Your Dragon advert that I assume played before the first film in cinemas, advertising the cinema's popcorn and other concessions, but the only two copies on YouTube are in really terrible quality. (one in English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f37fI14Ne0I, the other in Finnish I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0Hr4mD3G1Q). I really really want a high quality version of this, and I'm wondering if you know of anyone at DreamWorks who I can contact about this? I've tried tweeting at a couple of people but unsurprisingly heard nothing back, so I'm maybe looking for someone in marketing?
Thanks for the advice, it's appreciated! Any ideas how to get in touch? If not I'll try my luck at public twitter (which has had a 50/50 success rate for me in the past...)
There was no demand, because you can't buy 35mm prints, unlike 16mm and 8mm. And additionally, in order to finance the purchase of digital projectors, many cinema owners went with something called "Virtual Print Fees" (VPFs), where the cost was paid off in time. However, most of these mandated that the film projectors were either removed and destroyed, or disabled so they couldn't run film. Why? Well this ensured that everyone switched to digital and couldn't go back, so the VPFs were still paid. Very sad, hearing about all these machines being damaged.
