Cine Film Scanning

Our Muller HDS+ scanner offers exceptional quality transfers and is equipped to scan Standard 8, Super 8 and 16mm film up to 4K. We offer 10bit scanning at 2K, 3K and 4K. Our scanner detects the films sprocket holes with a laser for optimal flash and scan timing, creating a digital image for every frame of film with amazing accuracy and stability. It is designed without claws or grabbers so it's incredibly gentle on film and wont damage your precious emulsion.

Film Cleaning

We clean all film using our Lipsner-Smith Excel 1100 film cleaning machine. The Excel 1100 uses 3 different cleaning stages, including liquid solution and 2 separate film drying stations. Film handling is safe and gentle. The wetting liquid used is Isopropanol which is an industry approved solvent with over 60 years of proven performance and film safety. Our scanner also has sticky PTR rollers which removes any dust right before the capture is made.

Log Scans

Colour grading is a very subjective area and we like to give our customer the option to have total creative control over their images. The log files have plenty of leeway to push/ pull the luma and RGB channels for flexible colour correction. Please download the log scan spec sheet to take full advantage of all the options available to you. If you don't send the log scan spec sheet with your film we'll just provide you with a 4:3, 25fps, overscan, ProRes HQ file as this is the most popular option. 

Corrected Scans

The corrected scans are perfect for customers with limited editing experience. We do all that we can to give you the best image possible. This includes necessary scaling, cropping, speed adjustments and scene by scene colour correction. We get a lot of film with extreme over/under exposure issues and we always do our best to save the film digitally. We're very flexible so if you have any special requirements in regards to framing or aspect ratio just let us know on the corrected scan spec sheet. If you don't send the spec sheet with your film we'll supply a 4:3 overscan at 25fps in the ProRes HQ format.

Scan Framing

Bellow are examples of our Full Overscan, Overscan and Crop options. The Full Overscan gives you the entire 8mm width. The Overscan gives you part of the sprocket and the Crop gives you image only. The Full Overscan is not possible at 2K because there is not enough resolution on the image.

Full Overscan

Overscan

Crop

File Formats

We can supply any format required, however the most popular format is ProRes HQ. This is because it's a manageable size and gives great flexibility when colour correcting. The original 10bit DPX files are very bulky and difficult for most computer systems to play. If you do want the original DPX files you must send us a fast SSD drive for transfer that is formatted as exFAT. We'd recommend selecting a compressed format like ProRes if you haven't got a purpose built editing system. We can also send the ProRes HQ files over the web so there is no need to send us a physical drive.

Resolution & File Size

Resolution	DPX File Size	ProRes File Size
2K (2048x1536)	45GB (per film)	7GB (per film)
3K (3008x2256)	95GB (per film)	15GB (per film)
4K (4096x3000)	170GB (per film)	30GB (per film)