![]() It was slow! The process of scanning long shots could take hours and was quite a taxing responsibility for the (mostly very young) operators (Ros Lowrie and Pete Hanson come to mind). Once film reels were loaded onto the scanner, and threaded through the film gate, the scanner could be set in motion. The whole system was controlled by a series of Unix scripts, running off a very basic laptop with a tiny screen. The (hot) white bulb shone through dichroic filters – successively, red, green and blue. The light source in the scanner was quite intense, and I recall that it was described as ‘highly specular’ – which helped reduce the visibility of dust for some reason. CFC designed their own 8 bit log, which was a great improvement on the previous system. Logarithmic encoding was introduced after Kodak/Cinesite announced their log Cineon image format (CFC’s colour scientists were initially sceptical – ‘They haven’t used enough precision for the highlights.’ But they came around). In the mid-to-late 90s, a 5120×3840 65mm scanning capability was created, as used on Bertolucci’s Little Buddha and several IMAX projects.Įarly 90s images at CFC were 8 bit linear, with a special gamma designed to maximize the use of the limited precision. The resolution was later increased to 2560×1920, called ‘x res’. The scanner could be reconfigured for scanning the whole neg area, or the ‘academy’ area, not including sound track area. In the early years, CFC’s images were 1280×960 (‘hi res’) for the 35mm neg area. Some of this might have been safety – if the original neg was going to be damaged, better it happen at the lab than at CFC! But also a factor might have been that interpos has a smaller density range than original neg, making it easier to scan. Interpos, normally used as an intermediate step towards the creation of a duplicate negative, was for some reason the chosen medium for CFC’s scanning. I recall the request to the film lab was that the interpos was ordered ‘3 points light’ (this may have varied from job to job). An interpositive was made prior to the scanning. The scanner didn’t scan negative – at least, not for the early years. I recall conversations about which parts were special, and why – though of course most of it went over my early-20s head. One of the company’s founders, Mike Boudry, was an optical physicist, and so the scanner was very much his baby. I recall one vital adjustment in the scanner being carried out by tapping a wedge shaped metal pencil sharpener into a gap. The scanner was very much a Heath Robinson/Rube Goldberg affair, comprising light source, filters, film transport and pin registered gate, stepper motors and computer control, and it took up the entire room. You had to don a clean ‘forensics’ suit to go in. The scanner at Berwick St was in its own glass walled room, with sticky rubber floor and positive pressure air conditioning to keep the dust out. The whole company was based in a small basement office under Berwick St (after an early pure R&D phase in a shed in Shepherd’s Bush). ![]() It seemed as if this might be a computer nerd joke – with the scanner being treated as a thing along the lines of other input devices such as keyboards, tablets and mice. The scanner wasn’t even called a film scanner – it was ‘the Input Device’. The company had been formed with the aim of using digital imaging techniques on film-originated material. It often felt, in the early days, that VFX work was only carried out in order to earn money to fund scanner R&D! It was CFC’s USP, raison d’etre and chief weapon. He joined not that long after The Fruit Machine was released.ĬFC, when I joined in 1990, was very much based around the film scanner. ![]() BONUS: notes from former CFC artist Paddy EasonĮason shared these notes about CFC’s early digital compositing solutions.
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