Great stuff.
As mentioned, I’m trying to gauge interest, so anyone interested in seeing this happen, please throw in one or two dollars or something.
If another 20 people made even tiny donations, it would help it feel like there is an audience out there for this.
I, and others will be throwing hundreds of hours at this just for the scanning and transferring, backing up etc. even without any restoration, so it is good to feel like the work is being done because people want to see it.
To go through the process, first the reels are loaded onto a set of rewinds and inspected by hand to look for any splices, broken perforations, or any damage that might cause a problem in the scanner, and then any damage carefully repaired.
Each reel then has leader attached, and is taken to a clean room for ultrasonic cleaning. The technician will load the film into the cleaner, and again supervise the film as it moves slowly through the cleaning bath, buffers and is dried out the other side.
It is transferred onto cores, and then each one is loaded into the scanner one at a time. The hard drive array is initialised, and the reel and job numbers, timecode start points etc. are keyed into the control panel.
The film is then tensioned, the stock analysed and the density set.
The film is then focused and a test scan done.
Any last minute adjustments are done, then each frame is exposed 10 times onto the CCD. 3 passes each of Red, Green and Blue, to ensure that the full latitude is captured (at 16bits per pixel), and the tenth pass is infrared to capture any dust, hair or scratches so that they can be more easily repaired digitally.
Each frame is around 120MB, there are about 172,000 frames, and each are exposed 10 times, and after each is written to the disc, the next frame advances. At each scene change, the film stops momentarily, focus is re-done as on older prints the film tends do drift a bit from the focal plane, and the process continues until the reel is done, it is then rewound back onto its core, and packed away, and the next one loaded.
Each reel takes around 10-14 hours to scan, depending if there are any issues, and a two hour feature has around 6 or 7 reels.
Then the files have to be backed up, they are 20-23TB in size, so this takes many, many hours even with fast drives, and then transferred to HDDs to send out to be worked on.
Cleaning, scanning and transferring the files is over 100 hours of work on its own, on equipment that comes in just under eight hundred thousand US dollars.
This is why commercial scanning is so expensive, typically a commercial scan at this quality will run between $15-25K.
We are so lucky that scanning prints at truly archival quality has come along and that we are able to get this kind of thing done. With some films fading, they would be lost forever if we didn’t take on these projects ourselves.
Anyway, that is a bit of an insight into the process, in case anyone is interested in what goes into it, and why I like to be fairly choosy about which films get archived, we have limited resources, both in time and money and need to try and allocate it to the ones that are most meaningful/important to the community.