Info: 35mm Film Preservation with the BlackMagic Cintel Film Scanner...

On the other forum Poita pointed out that it's not really designed for print scanning (notice nowhere on the product info page does it ever say it is for scanning prints), it's really just suited for negatives. If the product even gets released that is.

RU.08 said:

(notice nowhere on the product info page does it ever say it is for scanning prints)

 Yeah, because in the U.S it's actually illegal to own a 35mm copy of a copyrighted movie.

ilovewaterslides said:

RU.08 said:

(notice nowhere on the product info page does it ever say it is for scanning prints)

 Yeah, because in the U.S it's actually illegal to own a 35mm copy of a copyrighted movie.

 There is still an international convention protecting motion pictures i thought.   They don't enforce it anymore? 

I heard that although it is illegal that in the United States they simply no longer enforce the law.  Not that i am wealthy enough to own the equipment and or films and would be willing to test the waters to see if the NSA and FBI would not come after me.

My local theater still plays 35mm of new releases, so it's not entirely dead yet.

mj0012 said:  So, say for example you get your hands on a 35mm copy of Back to the Future from the 1985 U.S. theatrical release

Erfff... if only it were true...

:)

Anyways, thanks for completing my post I've learned something new today!

I think this scanner should work like a charm with 35mm copies but they're not going to tell: "Now you can finally scan all your 35mm theatrical copies for a reasonable price" on their site since it's not completely legal to own one. That was the goal of my initial post.

ilovewaterslides said:

I think this scanner should work like a charm with 35mm copies but they're not going to tell: "Now you can finally scan all your 35mm theatrical copies for a reasonable price" on their site since it's not completely legal to own one. That was the goal of my initial post.

All I did was quote poita and he said that the scanner won't work for old negatives or for prints and that it is only suited to newly shot material. In any case it doesn't matter since he, team -1 and others have their own film scanners that are much higher quality and that renders this scanner useless at least for preservationists (it might be useful for other uses though).

You're wrong about the legality - at the very least the studios own the prints, and many DVD and BD releases are mastered from prints and not negatives so I would think that given the target consumer they would want to advertise the full potential of their scanner.

Interesting how my comments have aged! Haha. I’d like to correct a mistake I made - I said it wasn’t designed for prints - that’s partly correct, but it’s not the full story. The scanner has a setting for prints, that isn’t it’s purpose though and it was designed to scan good condition negatives not for film older than 30-40 years. Take a look at what Blackmagic said it was designed for in 2015 when they launched it, and also the 2014 pre-launch tech preview.

ilovewaterslides said:

I think this scanner should work like a charm with 35mm copies but they’re not going to tell: “Now you can finally scan all your 35mm theatrical copies for a reasonable price” on their site since it’s not completely legal to own one. That was the goal of my initial post.

Actually, most professional scanner manufacturers are the ones that really don’t care about prints since they’re owned by archives instead of by wealthy rightsholders who can afford to pay for premium scanning, and in most cases you never need to scan a print for restoration. So if it did do a fantastic job for prints then Blackmagic would not be shy about using it as a selling point (Lasergraphics uses it as a selling point), prints are much more difficult to scan well compared to negatives so if a scanning machine can scan prints well then it can definitely scan negatives well.