Copyright (C) 1986-2009 by Daniel H. Hudgins, All Rights Reserved.
No part of "This Web Site" (HTML document), including associated files, may be: distributed, sublicensed, transmitted, copied, archived, mirrored, modified, bundled, embedded, sold, given away, rented, loaned, or shared in any form without express written permission in a formal Vendor agreement contract dated and signed in ink obtained directly from Daniel H. Hudgins by registered postal mail. All agreements for permission to distribute expire after a period no greater than one year from the date of the signing of the agreement by Daniel H. Hudgins. See the current "EULA" for information regarding limited copying and storage for the purpose of "Beta Testing" "This Web Site."
To view or use the current version of this Web page you may need to reload or refresh the display of this page by your browser. Just clicking on the browser's [Reload] or [Refresh] icon may not be enough to insure that all of the page's most current contents have been cached and displayed. Some browsers may have additional commands to help display the page's most current contents such as: holding down the [Shift] key and clicking on the [Reload] icon, holding down the [Control] key and clicking on the [Refresh] icon, holding down the [Control] and [Shift] keys and clicking on the [Refresh] icon, pressing the [Control] and [F5] keys, pressing [Control] and the [R] key, or some other combination of keys or clicks. Check to see which commands your HTML browser uses to load the most current page contents into its cache and then to display them onto the screen.
This Web site is dedicated to the thousands of "users" of my programs, those who have helped test my programs over the last 23 or so years, and especially those who shared their experiences with me.
You must read this notice: This is a licensed Web site (HTML document and associated files). You must read and agree to be legally bound in contract by the Terms of Use and conditions given in the End User License Agreement ("EULA"), Legal Notices, Instructions, Warnings, Disclaimers, and all other text in "SECTION: 0" of "This Web Site" (HTML document and associated files) before reading or using any of the information, software programs, and or files, contained in, linked to, and or associated with, "This Web Site" (HTML document and associated files). Any use or "Beta Testing" of "This Web Site" constitutes your acknowledgment of your full agreement with the current End User License Agreement ("EULA") and your decision to have this current license supersede all prior and contemporaneous agreements and understandings. Information and files in "This Web Site" (HTML document and associated files) have been placed here so that long time users of "The Author's" programs DANCAD3D.COM (tm) , DANCAD87.EXE (tm), DANCINEL.EXE (tm), DANCINES.EXE (tm) , DANCAM.EXE (tm) , or DANPLOT.EXE (tm) could help proofread the text of the documentation files or screens displayed, and also help test data files, example files, and or any software programs that might be made available from time to time, to aid "The Author" in finding mistakes, bugs, and other errors, omissions, defects, mistakes, and faults. Everything in "This Web Site" (HTML document and associated files) is "Beta Test", "Beta Code", Experimental, Preliminary, requires proofreading, or is being evaluated for possible revision, and is NOT warranted to be free of defect. To help "The Author" report any bugs, foul-ups, defects, or mistakes that you find, see "SECTION: 8" for instructions. "This Web Site" (HTML document and associated files) and all other files and programs by Daniel H. Hudgins are made available "AS IS" without warranty of any kind express, expressed, or implied. All offers and specifications are subject to change or discontinuation without notice of any kind. Please look over "SECTION: 8" of "This Web Site" before contacting "The Author."
This section has text mostly about revisions to a "Beta Test" version of DANCINES.EXE (tm), and might be looked to for updated information relating to changes in v1.xx, regarding some of the revised or added program features. There may be changes made in versions subsequent to the revisions of version of v1.xx that alter what is described in this section as it applies to that subsequent version. See also any other documentation files, and pages in this Web site (HTML document) for additional and or any more recent information.
The HTML documentation in this SECTION: 3.85.0.0 was derived from the text in the file DANCINES.TXT that is, or was at one time, included in my *.ZIP file archive DANCINES.ZIP (tm). You may find the current revision of DANCINES.ZIP (tm) to download by going to SECTION: 9.75.71.0. My file DANCINES.ZIP (tm) may also archive some other types of files like the ones described in this section, so check the current *.ZIP file in its current revision to see what exactly might be in it.
You may not distribute, sell, rent, share, or give away these HTML documentation files or printed copies of them. You may not extract text from these HTML documentation files for distribution, sale, rent, sharing, or giving away. You can use the [Print] option in your browser to make one copy for yourself to mark up in order to help me proofread the text for mistakes.
Documents may be available to download from time to time, you can check SECTION: 9 to see what the current situation with regard to downloadable files is. The names of these documentation files may change, and they may be edited, combined, or eliminated in the future, without notice.
You may need to adjust your browser for best viewing of the pre- formatted text by changing the "font" size using the commands in your browser (see the help in your browser, or use the pull-down menus in your HTML browser.) If some letters in words on the screen appear to be missing or scrambled try changing the font size in your browser as this sometimes happens even though the words are spelled correctly in the HTML code.
Use the "Edit, Find in page Ctrl+F" or "Edit, Find (in this page)... Ctrl+F" command in your browser to search for keywords within the documentation text in this HTML page. You will need to search over again in the other pages in this HTML document for the same keyword since your browser may not search for a keyword beyond the current page that is loaded.
My current file DANCINES.ZIP (tm) is a *.ZIP file that holds a current "Beta Test" version of one of my programs and associated files for "Beta Testing." This section refers to the preliminary revision of the DANCINES.EXE (tm) program v1.xx version, look for other sections or documentation relating to any subsequent revisions.
The use and copying of the programs and files is governed by my current Terms of Use and End User License Agreement ("EULA") which are located in SECTION: 0 of this "Beta Test" Web site. You must read and fully agree to be legally bound by the current End User License Agreement ("EULA") before you use or "Beta Test" any of the files in my file DANCINES.ZIP (tm). If you are unable to read and agree to the current End User License Agreement ("EULA") do not use or "Beta Test" any of the files in my program distribution, the DANCINES.ZIP (tm) archive file.
Be sure that you scan the program and files in my DANCINES.ZIP (tm) for virus or other contamination since you are responsible for checking them before you use them. These programs and this information are made available "AS-IS" and are without warranty of any kind express, expressed, or implied. Since these programs are "Beta Test" you must agree to become a "Beta Tester" before you make any use of them, see the End User License Agreement ("EULA") in this "Beta Test" Web site for more information. Be sure to read the current instructions in this "Beta Test" Web site regarding procedures for reporting program bugs and other such problems.
Thank you for helping test the "Beta Test" CAD and CAM programs and their utilities.
A *.TXT file version, similar to some of the text in this Section, may be included in the v1.xx revision of my DANCINES.ZIP (tm) distribution archive file (see the "downloads" SECTION: 9 of this "Beta Test" Web site). See the text in any files like README.*, FILES*.TXT, and *.TXT stored in my current DANCINES.ZIP (tm). You should check for the current types of document files because they may be more up-to- date than this *.HTM file, or it is possible that this HTML file could be more up to date, depending on which one got worked on last.
Below is text from file DANCINES.TXT that was written to be included in a preliminary revision of version of v1.xx of my DANCINES.ZIP (tm) distribution for preliminary information about changes in version v1.xx of the programs. You should read this information before you try to use or "Beta Test" the original or revised programs. This information is in addition to any previous documentation on the subject, i.e. a supplement to, and does not go into detail about many of the previously documented concepts, so you should therefore review the other sections and documentation as well.
The text of DANCINES.TXT was derived from some notes I made to myself as I worked on the code for v1.xx, so you should check this document, and the other documentation, against the programs before you do any "serious" testing of the programs since there may be some differences between the descriptions here and the current state of development of commands and features in the programs. Please report any discrepancies between the documentation and the programs or files that you find. Some of the text from this section may have been incorporated into the other sections of this Web site, in doing that some of the text may have been further revised, and so may contain additional information, therefore after reading through all of this section you should also read through all of the other portions of this Web site, even those portions that might seem to be duplicates.
I have kept this preliminary information in one long file so that you can use the "find in page" feature of your HTML browser to search for a keyword relating to some new command or feature you are looking for more information about, otherwise you might have to search through more files.
See also the This Section and About DANCINES.ZIP (tm) sub-sections above, as well as SECTION: 9.75.71.0 for more information about v1.xx.
DANCINES.TXT (tm) Copyright (C) 2008 All Rights Reserved.
This document may not be reproduced or shared without first obtaining a written
distribution agreement signed in ink by Daniel H. Hudgins.
This file is Preliminary Documentation for DANCINES.EXE (tm) v1.00 BETA.
This Document and the program DANCINES.EXE (sm) are governed by the End User
License Agreement a.k.a. "EULA" located at the Author's web site
www.DANCAD3D.com (sm). You must read and agree to the terms and conditions of
the current "EULA" before using or testing this document or the programs.
DANCINES.EXE (tm) is made available free of charge only for "Beta Testing" with
the current revision of DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) and may not be distributed for other
purposes. DANCINES.EXE (tm) uses the Borland (tm) files DPMI16BI.OVL and
RTM.EXE to load the 16 bit code under DOS, and will not run without those files
being in the same directory as DANCINES.EXE (tm). If you have problems with
the program loading see file DPMIFIX.ZIP (tm) in DANCAD16.ZIP (tm), it may help
you configure the memory on some older computers.
Please do not re-distribute DANCINES.EXE (tm) or DANCINES.ZIP (tm), if you know
someone who would like to help "Beta Test" them, please have them visit
www.DANCAD3D.com (sm) and download the current version after they agree to the
"EULA". You should also check that you are "Beta Testing" the current version.
Trade marks mentioned belong to their respective trade mark holders.
Information about products does not imply an endorsement or recommendation for
purchase, you should make your own purchase decisions based on information
taken from other sources including but not limited to the manufactures
literature.
DANCINES.EXE (tm) has been undergoing development and testing and is not
finished yet, so features described in this document may not have been tested
adequately or may not have been tested in the current revision and therefore
may not work as described here. If you find any discrepancies between the
program operation and the descriptions in this document please report them to
the Author, instructions for reporting things are located in Section: 8 at
www.DANCAD3D.com (sm).
---
OVERVIEW: WHAT DOES DANCINES.EXE (tm) DO
DANCINES.EXE (tm) is a computer utility used to automate the exposure of
Digital Images of motion picture film negative or positive by triggering a high
resolution Digital Camera to make frame shots of about 2K or 4k resolution.
The numbering of the frame shot files is taken care of by the Digital Camera or
the software that downloads or acquires the Digital Camera images. The Digital
Camera used can be a DSLR such as the Canon XTi (tm), a high megapixel
industrial CMOS monochrome camera that uses some kind of computer interface and
image capture utility, or a USB camera like a Web CAM that has 1600x1200 pixel
resolution and manual exposure.
Because of the limited tonal range of CCD or CMOS Digital Cameras, DANCINES.EXE
(tm) has a provision to shoot more than one exposure of each frame of Movie
film, these "duplicate" exposures can have slightly different exposure to
extend the tonal range of the Digital Camera or can have the same exposure and
still result in improvement because of random noise in the images of the frames
shot. The Fuse option of the Insert command in the Edit list command in
current versions of DANCAD3D.EXE v3.7 (tm) and DANCAD87.EXE v3.7 (tm) would
then be used to "Fuse" the group of exposures of each frame to make a single
higher quality frame image, normally the Fused frame image would be saved as a
48bpp file to ensure that the high quality is available for color correction
and filtering.
DANCINES.EXE (tm) is a program to automate the operation of a home made motion
picture film scanner. In order to be able to edit motion picture film in
current DANCAD3D.EXE v3.7's (tm) Edit list as a Digital Intermediate you need
high quality high resolution digital image files of each frame of your shot and
processed motion picture film. Since you would make mistakes shooting the
300,000 or more frame images manually, DANCINES.EXE (tm) was designed to
automate the task of advancing the stop motion film projector, shooting the
images of the film frame, then advancing the film again. DANCINES.EXE (tm)
also adds some more advanced features such as the ability to skip over frames
in a film roll for bad takes or parts of a take that do not need to get
scanned, and to be able to switch the color and brightness of the stop motion
film projector light house to give the best exposure for movie film frames that
may have been over or under exposed when shot in the movie camera.
To get the best color it is better to use Red, Green, and Blue filters of lamps
and make separate exposures with the Digital Camera for the Red, Green, and
Blue pixels in the digital scan of the motion picture film. The Fuse command
mentioned above would then be used to Fuse the separate Red, Green, and Blue
exposures into a single 48bpp RGB digital image file, such as the *.NIP file
formats supported by DANCAD3D.EXE v3.7. Because of the limited tonal range
setting DANCINES.EXE (tm) to shoot three Red, three Green, and three Blue
exposures, nine digital exposures for each movie film frame, should be used to
improve the results. In fact if you have the time and computer power and
space, better results might be obtained by exposing 16 exposures in the Red,
Green, and Blue, but such over-sampling would slow down the film scanning
process and take a great deal of computer power and space to process. After
the RAW scans of the movie film have been Fused into a single 48bpp RGB file of
good quality you could delete the RAW scan files to recover disk space.
DANCINES.EXE (tm) also has a provision to shoot an IR or Infrared exposure,
although this feature and how it will be used has not been fully worked out as
of the initial release. The IR or Infrared exposure would be used when
scanning color motion picture film to make images that isolate the dust and
some other blemishes on the motion picture film as an aid to spot or remove
dust from the RGB exposures. The color dyes in color motion picture film are
mostly transparent to IR or Infrared light, so if you put an IR or Infrared
filter over the light house, or use IR LEDs, the Digital Camera which has some
IR sensitivity will make an image of everything IR opaque on the film other
than the image. Since silver is opaque to IR light, if the color film has been
"bleach bypass" or "skip bleach" the image cannot be "removed" in the IR
exposure. If the bleach was exhausted in the film lab there may be a "ghost"
image in the IR exposure since some of the silver did not get removed. And if
you have Black and White film the IR exposure is not of much use since the IR
exposure would look like the Red exposure just maybe a little softer and out of
focus. The lens used to shoot the film needs to be stopped down since most
lenses are not designed to focus IR light and will make an out of focus image
if used wide open. If you re-focus the IR exposure the image will not be the
same size as the RGB images, and would need to be re-sized to fit.
DANCINES.EXE (tm) automates the movie film scanner and shoots the Digital frame
images of each movie film frame, DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) is used to color correct,
edit, mix sound, preview at 24fps, and output the edited frames order list.
DANCINEL.EXE (tm) operates the film recorder to put the edited frame images
scanned with DANCINES.EXE (tm), or obtained in some other way, onto motion
picture print stock by controlling the 35mm animation camera to shoot off a
monitor displaying the digital frame image usually by making separate Red,
Green, and Blue exposures to get better results in the finished 35mm motion
picture print.
The source code for DANCINES.EXE (tm) was derived from an earlier program I was
developing for in-house use to control an ACME step contact printer with a Bell
and Howell dichroic additive light house. The idea was to zero cut the
negative into A, B, C, and so on rolls as needed, have the software turn the
light house light on and off as needed to avoid having to frame line cut the
negative. The A roll would be printed the light would come on for the frames
that where to print and off for the frames to skip. Then the B roll would be
printed so that the light would be on for different frames on the print stock.
Other rolls would be printed when there were conflicts between the A and B
rolls to avoid cutting the negative close to an edit cut (shot change). This
would allow the film print to be printed from the camera negative without
destroying the negative by cutting on the frame line at the edit points thereby
allowing edit changes later. The contact printer light and the ACME animation
motor mounted in place of the continuous ACME sync motor where (are) controlled
by pins of the computers parallel port going to solid state relays and such.
Two problems arose with this setup, the first was that the shutter shaft and
transmission in the ACME motor have too much play so the exposure frame to
frame is not uniform enough and a constant flicker results in the print. The
other issue is the print stock cannot be contact printed onto print stock
because "Newton Rings" occur due to the surface of the films being too smooth
and shiny. A third issue is that the light valves in the Bell and Howell light
house are very old and do not always set the right light colors since their
parts stick and fail to move on each command (I wonder how much film was wasted
in film labs because of those cantankerous light valves...).
To overcome the serious problems with contact printing it was decided to alter
the code that became DANCINES.EXE (tm) to operate an Optical motion picture
film printer made with parts from an Oxberry (tm) optical printer. This
required two motor pulses to be sent from the parallel port, one to advance the
projector's animation motor and another to advance the camera's animation
motor. To get rid of the flicker a third motor hooked to the camera would be
required to work as a capping shutter triggered by a cam on the cameras shutter
shaft so that the capping shutter would open when the camera's shutter was also
open and the capping shutter would close before the camera's shutter would
start to close. The Optical Printer plan was put on indefinite hold because of
problems with the Bell and Howell additive light house not working properly on
every light change.
Since DANCINES.EXE (tm) can operate the projector and camera advance, it was
decided to go 100% Digital Intermediate, this solves most of the image quality
issues,
1) Optical shooting of the film frames does not produce "Newton Rings".
2) The DSLR shutter does not flicker like the 35mm printer camera.
3) Color correction can be done in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) rather than with the Bell
and Howell additive light house for each shot change. So the light house can
be set for "one light" printing and color changes made using DANCAD3D.EXE (tm)
after the frames are shot. DANCINES.EXE (tm) can also make light house color
changes from light numbers in the *.SCF cue file for the film roll being
scanned, if needed.
Also the dust and scratches can be re-touched manually if need be on the scans
of each frame, something that is not practical for film to film printing. Also
the digital color correction can compensate for over or under-exposed shots
better, and can also correct for bad processing and foggy out of date film much
better than film to film printing.
The main drawback from going to a Digital Intermediate is the problem of
storing the many TB of frame files, and the long times to process, backup, and
move the many very large files. To keep as much quality as possible in the
film scans so as not to lose too much quality over film to film printing the
work-flow from DANCINES.EXE (tm) to DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) to DANCINEL.EXE (tm) is
fully UN-COMPRESSED, this avoids double compression losses and other
compression artifacts and provides a TRUE 24fps un-compressed work-flow system.
Because DANCINES.EXE (tm) supports A, B, C, and so on, rolls it requires a
*.SCF type Scan Cue File to tell it which frame numbers to expose or shoot and
which frame numbers to skip over. You can look at the sample file DANCINES.SCF
to see how the dot codes are used, the help screen in DANCINES.EXE (tm) lists
the dot codes. The SCF file can be named to go with the roll you are scanning,
and you can burn a CD of SCF files to keep with film rolls in case you need to
re-scan the same roll at some point in the future. If you are editing the
*.SCF files under a Windows (tm) OS you may want to rename them *.TXT since
NOTEPAD.EXE (tm) and the folder display may not show the *.SCF file extension.
Although DANCINES.EXE (tm) is primarily intended for use in automating a motion
picture film scanner now, it might still be possible to control a step contact
printer or step optical printer with it, if you have specific questions about
the options of the commands in DANCINES.EXE (tm) you can contact me, see
SECTION: 8 at http://www.DANCAD3D.com for support details, email may work best
for such questions (make sure your subject line is clear since I get a great
deal of junk mail and if you do not get a reply try again since your mail may
have been deleted as junk by accident.)
---
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
Since DANCINES.EXE (tm) is a 16 bit program, its requirements about the same as
what DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) v3.7 requires.
OPERATING SYSTEM: DOS 6.22 or equivalent, with memory manager configured.
Because this program requires close timing, even though it
might run under W95OSR2 or W98SE it would be better to boot
those in "Safe Mode" command prompt or with a system
formatted floppy to reduce the noise in the CPU. To make a
DOS95 or DOS98 floppy disk to boot your computer with use the
DOS command FORMAT A: /S under those OS. FREEDOS (tm) may
work as well with DANCINES.EXE (tm) if configured for the
computer's memory.
VIDEO BOARD: Should support CGA, EGA, or VGA 80x25 color text mode.
SYSTEM MEMORY: At least 16MB of system memory may be required. 128MB or
better may be required under Windows (tm) if any other
programs are loaded.
HARDDISK: A Harddisk is not required, a single 1.44MB floppy may be all
that is needed if you can put DOS 6.22 and the program and
other needed files all on one floppy disk.
CPU: 80286 or better. There may be issues with CPU faster than
2.8GHz, but I do not have specific information as I write
this. Please report such issues.
MOUSE: Mouse support is not needed since many of the commands are by
key-press. Under DOS a mouse driver would be needed to get
the mouse to work in the CAD programs.
PARALLEL PORT: LPT1, LPT2, or LPT3 can be used for the control signals. For
PCI cards you may need the cards driver, for ISA cards no
driver is usually required. If you are running under WIN98SE
(tm) you would have installed the PCI Parallel Port driver
already. Watch out for Windows (tm) (or other) resident
printer drivers that capture the parallel port data, you may
need to install a second parallel port and tell all the
printer drivers not to use it. Do not use parallel port pass
through devices, connect directly to the port pins.
MONITOR: Monitor capable of CGA, EGA, VGA or better. DANCINES.EXE
(tm) does not display graphics images of the frames shoot off
the film in v1.00 since the RAW frame images need to be
processed and color corrected before they can be viewed. If
you wish to view the edited frame images at full resolution
up to 2048x1536x32bpp or so use DANCINEL.EXE (tm) not
DANCINES.EXE (tm), see the download file DANCINEL.ZIP (tm)
and read DANCINEL.TXT for more information about displaying
the edited frame images at full resolution. Depending on
what digital camera you use to shoot with you may be able to
use a third party program like DCRAW (tm) to convert the
camera's RAW mode frame files into *.TIFF or *.TIF images you
can look at with some third party image viewer. To view
frame images at 2048x1536 with a third party image viewer you
may need to set the Windows Desktop to 2048x1536 24bpp or
"32bpp" resolution beforehand. The computer running
DANCINES.EXE (tm) only needs a monitor showing 640x200 to
640x480 color 80x25 text mode.
---
INSTALLING AND CONFIGURING DANCINES.EXE (tm)
DANCINES.EXE (tm) is supplied in a zip file named DANCINES.ZIP (tm). In this
zip file are these files:
DANCINES.EXE Digital Cinema motion picture film scanner automation program.
DANCINES.CFG Default configuration file, may be changed using menu.
DANCINES.SCF Sample Scanner Cue File for testing your port interface.
FPLUSF.SCF Sample SCF file using 35mm Feet plus Frames values.
SMPTE.SCF Sample SCF file using SMPTE Time plus Frames values.
SPERF.SCF Sample SCF file using audio Samples per Frame values.
DANCINES.TXT Documentation for DANCINES.EXE (tm).
DMPI16BI.OVL Needed by DANCINES.EXE (tm) for 16 bit memory use.
RTM.EXE Needed program used by DANCINES.EXE (tm) to load.
DCRAWBAT.COM Small program to make batch file to process raw scan files.
Normally you would unzip these files directly into your DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) sub-
directory and run them from there. If you need them in another sub-directory
remember to change to that sub-directory before running DANCINES.EXE (tm).
You need to change the program directory with the DOS CD command before you run
the program.
EXAMPLE: C:\>CD C:\DC37
C:\DC37>DANCINES
DANCINES.EXE (tm) has its own configuration file named DANCINES.CFG. If you
are updating or want to back up your current configuration use the COPY command
at the DOS prompt to make a copy with another name, such as DANCINES.C01 and
such. Future versions may use different configuration files, so if you copy an
old configuration to use with a newer version some of the configure options may
need to be manually configured. You should not copy a configuration file from
a newer version for use with an older version since some of the command options
may have been expanded and the older version may not work with those changes.
---
IMAGE FORMAT AND DIGITAL CAMERA ISSUES
The size and shape of the sensor should be kept in mind when selecting the
Digital Camera for your motion picture film scanner. A camera like a Canon XTi
(tm) has a sensor that is about 3:2 ratio, so if you scan 4:3 movie film you
will need to crop of the sides of the digital frames shot, and if you scan your
movie film for 16:9 you would need to crop off the top and bottom of the
scanned frame digital images.
If you have shot 'Scope anamorphic 35mm film you need to think about if it is
better to optically unsqueeze the film image onto the digital sensor in your
camera to use its full width, or to shoot the movie film images squeezed and
use the sensor full height. If you keep the images squeezed 2:1 they will take
less disk space, and not need to be re-squeezed for output in DANCINEL.EXE (tm)
if you are going to make a 'Scope print. You can maybe turn down the monitor
height if you are using an analog monitor to view the 'Scope images about in
their wide screen format even though they are still in squeezed image files.
DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) can crop, re-size, and squeeze or unsqueeze the scanned
images as needed, it can also crop and letter box, so you do not need to have
the film frame fully fill the digital camera sensor all the time.
To get high quality from a monochrome camera you can scan at exact pixel
dimensions by adjusting the scanner image lens to get the film image exact size
on the sensor. When using a digital camera with a Bayer filter the OLPF filter
degrades the resolution and the camera has Bayer filter artifacts so you will
probably want the image larger than needed on the camera sensor and then down
res the digital frame images after scanning to get the required resolution
frame files for use in color correction, editing, and for output in the film
recorder.
---
FILM ISSUES
The best color results might be obtained by making "monochrome" color
separation exposures. Color separation exposures can be made in two forms, in
the first you run the film scanner/printer to just shoot/expose the red images
from all the frames, then just the green images for all the frames on another
roll of film, then just the blue images for all the frames and end up with
three sets of frame files, three exposed black and white film rolls to be used
for printing in a step contact printer as A, B, and C rolls, or three exposures
per frame on the same roll of color film. This makes a sequence like: RRR...R,
GGG...G, BBB...B.
The second separation method is to scan/expose the red then the green then the
blue image frames in sequence as single roll/frame sequence three times as
long, that roll/frame sequence would then be printed in an optical printer
using a color filter wheel and print three exposures for each frame in the
optical printer's camera advancing the camera once for each three advances of
the projector, or have the three color frame files fused together into a single
48bpp RGB frame file with the Fuse command in DANCAD3D.EXE v3.7N (tm). This
makes a sequence like: RGBRGBRGB...RGB.
Using a stabilized power source for the scanner/printer Light House is
recommended since variations in line (mains) voltage can produce flicker and
density variations in the scanned/printed frames.
Sequential separations can be scanned/printed using a dichroic or wratten
filter wheel, this can be a very slow process since the motor needs to rotate
the filter wheel. If Light House mode 3 is used, colored LEDs can be switched
to the right color very quickly, so the Light House might switch on Red snap an
exposure in the camera, then switch on Green snap an exposure in the camera,
then switch on Blue and snap an exposure in the camera. To get higher quality
in the Digital images of each frame you can snap several exposures of each
color then use the Fuse command in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) to fuse the color images
together to get a better tonal range, the more exposures the better the color
quality in the resulting scan generally, though at the expense of greater time
and wear on the equipment.
Three pass roll separations can be scanned/exposed in turn on (triple
scanned/exposed by rewinding the film to scan/expose twice) a fixed pin
movement in the scanner projector or printer using the appropriate separation
filter (wratten 99, 98, or 70) in the printer Light House filter slot.
The use of a narrow band absorbing filter to block yellow and cyan light from
the white light Light House may also improve primary color saturation. The use
of an ultra-violet and infrared blocking filter may help in printing from a
tungsten light. Digital cameras are usually IR sensitive even if they have
some kind of IR filter built in, so a extra IR filter may help, especially if
other filters are used in the light path since filters that block visible light
may also transmit IR.
The color dyes used in color motion picture film pass Infrared or IR light
which Digital CMOS or CCD cameras can be sensitive to which will de-saturate
colors or cause colors to be off balance, so heat absorbing glass and
interference filters such as hot or cold mirrors should be used if the light
source emits Infrared or IR light for the Red, Green, and Blue exposures. For
the Infrared or IR exposure some Infrared or IR light would be needed to make
an Infrared or IR exposure. Making the IR exposure as a forth pass of the roll
to scan is not a good idea since the dust would be in different places, it is
better to scan all four colors while the film frame is in the projector gate.
A wratten 2E filter can block UV if you are using DANCINES.EXE (tm) to operate
a film to film printer such as a step contact printer or optical printer for
zero cut printing from A-B rolls and such.
DANCINES.EXE (tm) can be used to shoot images that are Mirror (flipped) images
in the scanner, these can later be Mirror (flipped) back in the Insert command
of DANCAD3D.EXE (tm)'s Edit list to come out the right way around. Generally
you would want to scan the camera film going through the scanner film projector
from bottom to top, but you would also want the film emulsion on the camera
lens side and the film base (cell) on the Light House side, so if you are
scanning rolls that are prints and such the image may be reversed side to side
even when right side up in the projector. Since marks, scratches, and dirt on
the film base can degrade the image of the emulsion in the scanner you would
want to scan the emulsion side, always scanning the emulsion side also helps
reduce the number of times you need to re-focus the scanner lens since the
thickness of the film base would make the images out of focus.
Be careful when you focus your scanner that the constant heat from the light
house has not made the film pucker and cause you to set the focus off of where
it should be when cool frames are loading into the projector gate while the
scanner is scanning. Always advance a few test frames and re-check the focus
to make sure that the scanner is focused all right for un-buckled frames.
---
ADJUSTING EXPOSURE IN THE SCANNER OR PRINTER
Keep in mind that ND filters may pass some IR light, and so using heavy ND or
other gel filters when scanning to a Digital Camera may require additional IR
blocking filters.
Because Digital Cameras that use a Bayer filter on their sensor may be balanced
for daylight 5500K the light used in the scanner may need to be extra blue
green to compensate not only for the Daylight balance of the sensor's Bayer
filters but also for the orange mask tint of the color negative or master
positive film stock. Although the Digital Camera may have a auto white balance
or 3200K setting, using those may result in increased noise in the blue pixels
because the blue gain would be increased when in 3200K setting over the 5500K
setting. To get the lowest noise the EI setting of the Digital Camera should
be set to one of the lowest EI values, like EI 100, and the color temperature
set to the natural balance of the Bayer filters blue to red balance. Then use
colored filters or adjust the color of the light house to get a neutral balance
rather than use the camera's adjustments for color balance. If you are
scanning a color negative shot of a standard 18% Gray card shot under the right
color light, your digital image of that film should look neutral gray when
viewed and read equal values with the digital densitometer in DANCAD3D.EXE
(tm)'s Grading command (in the Edit list). If the Red, Green, and Blue
histograms are unequal or the gray value is unbalanced, adjust the color of the
light used for scanning with CC filters or by adjusting the voltage to the
LEDs. If you have the vane values from the SCF file automatically adjusting
the Red, Green, and Blue LED brightness in the light house (type 3) you can
adjust the values in the SCF file to bring the scans to neutral color balance.
You should expect motion picture lab consistency to produce some variation from
day to day so tests of exactly the same studio setup run through the cine film
scanner may not match. On the head of each roll of motion picture film you
shoot and you send to the lab you should shoot several frames of a gray card
and gray step card that you know how they look, so that you can figure out if
the timing errors are do to some mistake you made, or the lab processing.
There are some variations in film stocks from one emulsion batch to another.
Film manufactures mark their film cans with the emulsion batch number so you
can use rolls from the same batch to reduce variation when you change from film
shot on one roll to another roll. Processing variation is usually greater than
film variation. Lab films such as print stock do not have a fixed color
balance, so rolls you purchase one year will probably be slightly different
from rolls purchased another time. You need to keep notes about what CC
filters or other timing changes you are making for a given emulsion number.
Film color balance changes as it ages, so you should do tests if the film has
been sitting around for a while in a warm place. Film should be kept in a dry
cool place, but freezing it may produce spots from ice crystals, try 40F and
50%RH or follow the manufactures recommendations. Film can develop shiny spots
if kept in a damp place for prolonged periods, these make an uneven density to
the image and such film is not much good for anything, you can see the shiny
spots if you look at the film by reflected light, they are generally larger
than several mm and can cover most of the film when very bad. Shiny spotted
film may also make a ticking or clicking sound when unwound from one roll to
another on rewinds in the dark. You should keep your processed film in a
humidity controlled room to avoid getting shiny spots, which can happen both
before and after processing.
If the light house is hooked-up to change the amount of light it puts out
according to the light number vane values you entered in the *.SCF file for the
roll being scanned or printed you can do some scene to scene color correction
with the light house automatically, otherwise you can insert console messages
into the *.SCF file with the .ms dot command that tell you what CC filters to
insert into the light path. See the information below about the light house
hook-up options. If the film you are going to scan is consistent you may be
able to adjust the light house once, then scan the frame images and do all the
color balance and correction using DANCAD3D.EXE (tm).
---
SPEAKER ISSUES
DANCINES.EXE (tm) can produce sound effects for each operation that give you an
audio cue as to what the scanner is doing. You can turn off the sound effects
with an option in the config you get in the DANCINES.EXE (tm) main menu. Since
the sounds come out of the computer's small speaker the Windows (tm) volume
control will probably not affect the volume of the sounds made. Also if your
computer's case did not have the small speaker installed, you will not get
sounds even if you have configured them on since there is no hardware speaker,
DANCINES.EXE (tm) does not use the sound board output, just the hardware
speaker inside the computer's case.
---
PARALLEL PORT CONNECTIONS
The pin numbers referred to here are the pins on the 25 pin parallel port
connector on the parallel port card, not the pins on the 32 pin end of the
printer cable.
Because DANCINES.EXE (tm) can be used with more than one type of light house,
and can be used as a step film scanner, step optical printer, or step contact
printer the use and meaning of some of the Parallel Port pins can vary with
some pins having different use when different modes are set in the
configuration file, so if signals do not seem correct check the configuration
settings. Do not run DANCINES.EXE (tm) on a computer that has a Windows (tm)
printer driver installed, since some printer drivers loaded resident into
Windows (tm) can capture signals going to the Parallel Port or coming back from
the Parallel Port and prevent DANCINES.EXE (tm) or your circuits and devices
from operating properly. It is best to run DANCINES.EXE (tm) on a clean DOS
6.22 computer system.
The parallel port connections are similar to those used by DANCAM.EXE (tm) and
DANPLOT.EXE (tm), see SECTION: 3.2.40 at www.DANCAD3D.com (sm), but are used in
different ways. The chief difference is that there were not enough output pins
to control the Bell and Howell additive light house, so the six lower bit pins
of the output data byte were used for two functions, those six bits being
stored in two latch memory chips to get twelve outputs from the eight data
bits, that is the lower 6 bits are stored in two six bit latches, and the upper
two data bits are used to select the latch the lower six bits are to be stored
in. Type D flop flops can be used to latch the twelve latched data bits. The
other output bits and input bits are not latched in external chips. The input
pins should be pulled up to a +5 volt DC supply through a 2.2K ohm 1/4 watt
resistor.
Because of EMI/RFI you should low pass the data set latch pins of the D type
flip flops and the six data lines going into the latch chips with 0.1mf through
100 Ohms. If you do not do this the two latchs may not operate reliably, and
reset at random times with random values causing harm or havoc.
Because the meaning of the pins on the parallel port change depending on how
you have DANCINES.EXE (tm) configured, mostly regarding the light house type
selected, more than one pin out is shown below, be sure you understand which
pin out your scanner or printer should be using, and have DANCINES.EXE (tm)
configured and running before you turn on any power to your scanner/printer.
In other words run DANCINES.EXE (tm) from the DOS prompt and wait until its
main menu is displayed on your computer monitor before you turn on power to any
part of your movie film scanner/printer. If you turn the power on before you
have the program running the relays may be in the wrong state and could cause
the scanner projector to start running or the camera to shoot. The computer
boots with the printer port bits in some random or undesirable state, so the
DANCINES.EXE (tm) must be run in order to clear the parallel port bits to set a
stable state to the pins so that when power is turned on the relays will,
hopefully, be in their ready or standby state.
You can configure DANCINES.EXE (tm) to use any of the three LPT parallel
printer ports for its basic I/O, but LPT1 would be the usual choice since many
computers only have one parallel port.
On the parallel port there are three bytes that the computer can access, two
for output and one for input. These will be called DO for Data Out, CO for
Control out, and CI for Control In. The pins on the 25 pin parallel connector
associated with the port byte will be indicated as a number after the port two
letter name, i.e. DO02 or IO10 and such. Other pins on the parallel port are
not used or serve as a common ground connection.
The data bits used to read and write to and from the parallel port are:
Pin No.
13 * CI13 Control Input Bit 4 of 3 of 7
TIE TO COMMON - 25
12 - CI12 Control Input Bit 5 of 3 of 7
TIE TO COMMON - 24
11 - CI11 Control Input Bit 7 of 3 of 7
TIE TO COMMON - 23
10 - CI10 Control Input Bit 6 of 3 to 7
TIE TO COMMON - 22
09 - DO09 Data Out Bit 7 of 0 to 7
TIE TO COMMON - 21
08 - DO08 Data Out Bit 6 of 0 to 7
TIE TO COMMON - 20
07 - DO07 Data Out Bit 5 of 0 to 7
TIE TO COMMON - 19
06 - DO06 Data Out Bit 4 of 0 to 7
TIE TO COMMON - 18
05 - DO05 Data Out Bit 3 of 0 to 7
17
04 - DO04 Data Out Bit 2 of 0 to 7
CO16 Control Out Bit 2 of 0 to 4 - 16
03 - DO03 Data Out Bit 1 of 0 to 7
CI15 Control Input Bit 3 of 3to7 - 15
02 - DO02 Data Out Bit 0 of 0 to 7
CO14 Control Out Bit 1 of 0 to 4 - 14
01 - CO01 Control Out Bit 0 of 0 to 4
* Pin 13 is used for both Output and Input, Output Control Bit 3 of 0 to 4, and
Input Bit 4 of 3 to 7, so it is both CO13 and CI13.
The 8 data bits are marked 0 to 7, their data value for I/O bit masking is:
Bit 0 of 7 = 0 or 1
Bit 1 of 7 = 0 or 2
Bit 2 of 7 = 0 or 4
Bit 3 of 7 = 0 or 8
Bit 4 of 7 = 0 or 16
Bit 5 of 7 = 0 or 32
Bit 6 of 7 = 0 or 64
Bit 7 of 7 = 0 or 128
The data values for the three bytes used to read and write to the parallel port
pins are:
Pin No.
13 * CI13 Control Input = 16 (Out = 8)
TIE TO COMMON - 25
12 - CI12 Control Input = 32
TIE TO COMMON - 24
11 - CI11 Control Input = 128
TIE TO COMMON - 23
10 - CI10 Control Input = 64
TIE TO COMMON - 22
09 - DO09 Data Out = 128
TIE TO COMMON - 21
08 - DO08 Data Out = 64
TIE TO COMMON - 20
07 - DO07 Data Out = 32
TIE TO COMMON - 19
06 - DO06 Data Out = 16
TIE TO COMMON - 18
05 - DO05 Data Out = 8
17
04 - DO04 Data Out = 4
CO16 Control Out = 4 - 16
03 - DO03 Data Out = 2
CI15 Control Input = 8 - 15
02 - DO02 Data Out = 1
CO14 Control Out = 2 - 14
01 - CO01 Control Out = 1
* Pin 13 is used for both Output and Input, Output Control Bit 3 of 0 to 4
(=8), and Input Bit 4 of 3 to 7 (=16), so it is both CO13 and CI13.
The pins of the parallel port output about +3v to +3.5v without a pull-up
resistor to a +5 volt supply. This is enough to control some solid state relays
that have a rating of +3v input. Although the input pins tend to float high,
they should be pulled-up through a 2.2K ohm 1/4 watt resistor to a +5 volt
supply. It should be all right to pull-up all the active data pins on the
parallel port through 2.2K ohm 1/4 watt resistors to ensure both logic high and
logic low voltages.
The meaning of the "Data Out" pins changes depending on the type of light house
used in the scanner or printer. Also the "Data Out" pins need to be wired to
D-flip-flop type latches to hold the data value of 6 of the data bits. Two 6
bit latches are required for the data out bits to latch, the other two data out
bits (of the 8 bits total on the parallel port) are the latch strobe for the
two six bit latches. In other words, the 6 data bits go to the input pins of
the two 6 bit latches (three 4 bit chips) and the 7th data bit goes to the set
pin on one of the two latches, and the 8th data bit goes to the other of the
two latches. The set pins on the two latches are never active at the same
time, so they control which latch will hold the current value on the 6 lower
data bits when the 7th or 8th bit is strobed by DANCINES.EXE (tm). This gives
you a total of 12 data output bits that can be set 6 at a time, that is one
half can change at a time. The 12 data output bits from the latches go to
relays or solid state relays to control the lighthouse and or scanner/printer
along with the other output pins on the parallel port that are not latched with
external chips. Each latch chip has four type "D" flip flops, so you need
three chips to latch 12 bits (3x4=12).
In DANCINES.EXE v1.00 four types of light house are supported:
Light House 0, this is for a single lamp light house probably using CC filters.
Light House 1, Bell and Howell additive using automatic light valves.
Light House 2, Bell and Howell additive manual vane type.
Light House 3, Colored LEDs using relays and or D2A converters.
Light House 3 mode can use other types of colored lamps or solenoid shutters
over colored lamps to get more light than you could get from LEDs, but since
LEDs switch on and off fast they are the intended type of lamp for that light
house mode.
The information below goes into more detail about how the pins on the Parallel
Port are used for each light house type. Future revisions may alter this hook-
up information or allow for additional connections, please report any issues
you find with this hook-up information.
The pins used to read and write to the parallel port pins are for Light House
type 0 (Single White lamp) are:
Pin No.
13 * CI13 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 25
12 - CI12 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 24
11 - CI11 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 23
10 - CI10 - Hold While Not Ready
TIE TO COMMON - 22
09 - DO09 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 21
08 - DO08 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 20
07 - DO07 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 19
06 - DO06 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 18
05 - DO05 - Not Used
17
04 - DO04 - Not Used
CO16 - Light House Lamp On/Off - 16
03 - DO03 - Not Used
CI15 - Not Used - 15
02 - DO02 - Not Used
CO14 - Camera Shoot Expose Pulse - 14
01 - CO01 - Projector Advance Pulse
So you can see from this that you only need to use CO01 and CO14 signals plus
ground to run your scanner if you are sure that the camera will always be ready
to shoot or expose. To save on the Light House lamp life you can wire a solid
state relay to CO16 to have the Light House lamp turned On and Off as needed.
If you are going to use DANCINES.EXE (tm) to do zero cut printing in a contact
printer or optical printer where both the projector and camera advance one
frame regardless of if that frame is to be printed, such as in A-B rolling, you
need to wire up the Light House lamp relay so that the light can be blocked for
the frames that are not to be printed. Also when printing A-B roll the room
the printer is operated in should be dark to avoid weak ghost exposures, that
is why their is a delay after the lamp goes dark, because the high wattage
lamps take a few seconds to go dark. The CI10 hold not ready input is used to
hold the program until the red light on the back of a DSLR goes out to make
sure that the next camera shot expose pulse will be clear to make another frame
image. Since the red light on the back of the DSLR does not stay on while the
DSLR is busy there is a delay and digital filter used to try to keep the
program in hold until the DSLR is finished saving the last exposure frame and
is really ready. Because the DSLR red busy light is not always on while the
DSLR is busy some extra delay needs to be added in the program configuration so
that you do not lose frames or exposures, i.e. that the camera is always ready
for the shoot expose pulse.
Solid state relays can be used on the CO01 Projector Advance and CO16 Light
House Lamp On/Off signal pins to amplify the signals to switch 120/240VAC
directly, or DC as needed. For inductive loads such as the Projector Animation
Motor you should use a Solid State relay with a rating of 240 Volts at 30 Amps
even though the motor does not need that to reduce the impact of the inductive
spikes caused by switching the projector motor on and off hundreds of thousands
of times.
Because you do not know the voltage used in the DSLR camera's remote trigger
switch you should use a solid state relay to drive a mechanical relay to open
and close the mechanical relay contacts for the DSLR. Because DSLR sometimes
have two switch contacts that close in the order: both open then ring closed
tip open then tip and ring closed then ring closed tip open then both open, you
may need to wire up two mechanical relays with some delays and logic to make
sure that the ring and tip on the DSLR remote trigger input operates as was
intended.
If your camera on the scanner is shooting by pressing a key on the computer's
keyboard or mouse, you may need to wire a mechanical relay across the contacts
on the keyboard or mouse so that the additional computer running DANCINES.EXE
can trigger the shoot key to make the cameras software shoot a frame exposure
and save it to the computer's harddrive through the USB cable or whatever is
being used. This method could be used to wire to the shoot contacts on a Web
CAM to shoot frames as well, maybe for doing a fast workprint scan.
The pins used to read and write to the parallel port pins are for Light House
types 1 and 2 (Bell and Howell additive light house) are:
Pin No.
13 * CI13 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 25
12 - CI12 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 24
11 - CI11 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 23
10 - CI10 - Hold While Not Ready
TIE TO COMMON - 22
09 - DO09 - Latch Brightness Pulse
TIE TO COMMON - 21
08 - DO08 - Latch Relay Pulse
TIE TO COMMON - 20
07 - DO07 - Blue or 20 Vane
TIE TO COMMON - 19
06 - DO06 - Green or 16 Vane
TIE TO COMMON - 18
05 - DO05 - Red or 8 Vane
17
04 - DO04 - Unlatch or 4 Vane
CO16 - Light House Lamp On/Off - 16
03 - DO03 - Zero Close or 2 Vane
CI15 - Not Used - 15
02 - DO02 - Vane Select or 1 Vane
CO14 - Camera Shoot Expose Pulse - 14
01 - CO01 - Projector Advance Pulse
Note that this is mostly the same as for Light House type 0 except that the
Data Output pins DO02 through DO09 are used to set the light valves in the Bell
and Howell light house. Note the unusual brightness code used, values from 0
to 31 are Binary, but since the next bit codes for 20 rather than 32 light vane
values above 31 follow a special sequence of bits that use 20 plus some of the
lesser bits in the 6 bit brightness value for the vane opening in the three
light valves.
For Manual Bell and Howell additive light houses, the program should stop for
light changes and display the vane settings that you should set the knobs on
the light house to manually. In the config you select light house type 2 to
have the program stop and tell you the vane values read from the *.SCF file.
The lighthouse trim values would normally be set before the *.SCF cue file is
run in DANCINES.EXE to compensate for the normal lab or stock variation, the
trim values need to be written on a piece of paper and kept with the roll of
film so that you can reset the light house trims to the same value if you need
to re-scan or re-expose later.
For automatic operation 12 solid state DC relays are used to control the
solenoids in the light valves and to select the light valve to operate. Nine
relays are used for the light valve's nine solenoids, D0 to D5 plus Unlatch,
Zero Close, and Vane Select. The three other solid state relays are used in
series with the ground on each light valve so that the Red, Green, or Blue
light valve can be selected. Since the nine solenoid wires from all three
light valves are wired in parallel to the nine solid state relays that control
them, DC blocking rectifiers and reverse diodes need to be used to keep the
spikes and stray signals from going into the light valve that is not grounded
by the Red, Green, or Blue select solid state relays. High voltage 0.1mf
ceramic capacitors should also be arranged across the solid state relays along
with reverse diodes to bypass the high voltage spikes coming out of the light
valve solenoids when the power is switched on and off.
The pins used to read and write to the parallel port pins are for Light House
type 3 (Colored LEDs or maybe filter wheel) are:
Pin No.
13 * CI13 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 25
12 - CI12 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 24
11 - CI11 - Not Used
TIE TO COMMON - 23
10 - CI10 - Hold While Not Ready
TIE TO COMMON - 22
09 - DO09 - Latch Brightness Pulse
TIE TO COMMON - 21
08 - DO08 - Latch Relay Pulse
TIE TO COMMON - 20
07 - DO07 - Blue or 32 Vane
TIE TO COMMON - 19
06 - DO06 - Green or 16 Vane
TIE TO COMMON - 18
05 - DO05 - Red or 8 Vane
17
04 - DO04 - IR or 4 Vane
CO16 - Light House Lamp On/Off - 16
03 - DO03 - Not Used or 2 Vane
CI15 - Not Used - 15
02 - DO02 - Not Used or 1 Vane
CO14 - Camera Shoot Expose Pulse - 14
01 - CO01 - Projector Advance Pulse
The pin connections for Light House type 3 are like those of type 1 except that
DO04 is used for IR lamp relay rather than Unlatch, DO02 and DO03 are not used
for relays only brightness, and the brightness range for the Vane settings is 0
to 63 rather than 0 to 51. If the D6 value was kept 20 rather than 32 a look
up table would be required before the brightness data was sent into the D2A
converter to control the voltage of the LEDs used for each color.
Because the brightness range is linear Binary 0 to 63, that does not correspond
to the Log type brightness range of the Bell and Howell additive light house.
If you want the brightness values of the LED output to correspond to the Bell
and Howell light valves you would need to burn a 16 bit EPROM for a look up
table and have that drive a 16 bit D2A converter. For simple LED brightness
control you only need a 6 bit D2A or to use the upper 6 bits of an 8 bit D2A
with the lower two bits wired low. The output of the D2A can be scaled with
resistors (a pot) and feed through a power darlington wired as an emitter
follower to give automatic voltage control to the voltage feed to each LED
color. To save on parts you might be able to use one D2A and use the color
relay lines to switch the ground leads like was done to save on relays for the
Bell and Howell light house, i.e. one D2A, one power emitter follower, and
three (R,G,B) or four (IR,R,G,B) ground relays.
It may be possible to wire up stop switches on a filter wheel and use Light
House type Mode 3 by connecting relays to the IR, Red, Green, and Blue color
select relays such that the filter wheel rotates until one of four micro
switches trips on a notch in the outside edge of the filter wheel. By
switching to the next of four switches on the color change the filter wheel
will rotate one color. Since the location of each switch relates to a specific
color filter in the wheel the filter wheel will rotate until the right color is
selected if enough time is allowed for a full rotation of the filter wheel
before the next exposure is made. In other words, one of the four color select
relays connects one of the four micro switches spaced 90 degrees around the
color filter wheel, and that micro switch passes power to the motor that
rotates the filter wheel until the switch opens when the single notch on the
outer edge of the filter wheel rotates to be at the selected one of four micro
switches. If only Red, Green, and Blue filters are used then the filter wheel
could be surrounded by three micro switches spaced 120 degrees. If only IR and
White filters are used then the micro switches could be spaced 180 degrees.
The hold pin on the parallel port should be held in hold state while the filter
wheel motor is powered on rotating the filter wheel so that the camera on the
scanner would wait if need be.
Another configuration possible is to change the brightness of a white LED or
other voltage or current controllable light source by using the Green vane
value in the *.SCF file (rather than the average of the Red, Green, and Blue
values).
The Parallel Port Data Byte mask values for the Latched bits are:
For White light house (type 0):
The bits masks 1 through 128 are undefined for type 0 light house, and may
change so should be ignored by the scanner/printer circuits in this case.
For Bell and Howell additive light house (type 1 and 2):
1 = Vane select (moves light vanes to current vane setting)
2 = Zero close (moves light vane setting to smallest opening)
4 = Unlatch (lets light vane data keys move to new setting)
8 = Red select relay (not part of light valve, just ground for Red valve)
16 = Green select relay (not part of light valve, just ground for Green valve)
32 = Blue select relay (not part of light valve, just ground for Blue valve)
64 = Store control bits listed above in 6 bits of 12 bit latch circuit.
128 = Store brightness data for vane in other 6 bits of 12 bit latch circuit.
The bit masks for the relay latch in the Bell and Howell light valve are:
1 = Vane select, Pin 2 latched by Pin 8.
2 = Zero close, Pin 3 latched by Pin 8.
3 = Unlatch, Pin 4 latched by Pin 8.
8 = Red select relay, Pin 5 latched by Pin 8.
16 = Green select relay, Pin 6 latched by Pin 8.
32 = Blue select relay, Pin 7 latched by Pin 8.
The bits masks for the brightness latch in Bell and Howell light valve are:
1 = +1 value, Pin 2 latched by Pin 9.
2 = +2 value, Pin 3 latched by Pin 9.
4 = +4 value, Pin 4 latched by Pin 9.
8 = +8 value, Pin 5 latched by Pin 9.
16 = +16 value, Pin 6 latched by Pin 9.
32 = +20 value, Pin 7 latched by Pin 9.
Note odd counting system 32 bit equals +20 value, not like binary.
For LED or Filter Wheel type light House (type 3):
1 = Undefined for DANCANES.EXE v1.00
2 = Undefined for DANCINES.EXE v1.00
4 = IR select relay signal, Pin 4 latched by Pin 8.
8 = Red select relay signal, Pin 5 latched by Pin 8.
16 = Green select relay signal, Pin 6 latched by Pin 8.
32 = Blue select relay signal, Pin 7 latched by Pin 8.
64 = Strobe pulse to latch the color select signals above.
128 = Strobe pulse to latch the 6 data bits above in the brightness latch.
The bit masks for the relay latch in the type 3 Light House are:
1 = Undefined in v1.00, Pin 2 latched by Pin 8.
2 = Undefined in v1.00, Pin 3 latched by Pin 8.
3 = IR select, Pin 4 latched by Pin 8.
8 = Red select relay, Pin 5 latched by Pin 8.
16 = Green select relay, Pin 6 latched by Pin 8.
32 = Blue select relay, Pin 7 latched by Pin 8.
The bits masks for the brightness data for D2A in the type 3 Light House are:
1 = +1 value, Pin 2 latched by Pin 9.
2 = +2 value, Pin 3 latched by Pin 9.
4 = +4 value, Pin 4 latched by Pin 9.
8 = +8 value, Pin 5 latched by Pin 9.
16 = +16 value, Pin 6 latched by Pin 9.
32 = +32 value, Pin 7 latched by Pin 9.
Note the 32 bit is not the same for Bell and Howell light house, for the D2A it
is simple binary counting from 0 to 63 for the vane value. The vane value can
be put through a hardware look up table to get an "exact" 16 bit brightness
value for Log and other brightness curves to compensate for the type of lamp
used in the light house.
The way the latches are used is that the lower 6 bits of the Data Output a.k.a.
DO byte on Pins 2 through 7 are set all together with the values to be latched,
then a strobe pulse is sent to Pin 8 or Pin 9, to Pin 8 if the particular
lighthouse relays are to be changed, or Pin 9 if the light house brightness or
vane value is to be changed.
The Bell and Howell light valve key values (that set the vane plus trim values
to the light vanes) may be inverse so the values in the 6 vane value data bits
may also be inverse, ones equal to LOW and zeros equal to HIGH.
The common output signals used for the scanner/printer that do not require a
latch circuit are on the Control Output Port byte:
1 = Projector motor advance pulse, port Pin 1.
2 = Camera Shoot pulse, port Pin 14.
4 = Light House Lamp ON or Lamp OFF relay state, Pin 16.
8 = Undefined in v1.00
16 = Undefined in v1.00
32 = NC
64 = NC
128 = NC
Bit masks 1, 2, and 8 are set to default to logic 1 to output TTL LOW on the
output pins when the program boots since those pins have a hardware invert.
Bit masks 4 and 16 default to logic 0 since those pins on the TTL output are
not inverted on program boot. Because the state of all of the output pins of
the parallel port is not safe or correct, you should not turn on the scanner
circuits or motor power until after DANCINES.EXE (tm) has booted and the main
menu has finished loading.
The common input signals used for the scanner/printer that do not require a
latch circuit on the Control Input Port byte are:
1 = NC
2 = NC
4 = NC
8 = Undefined in v1.00
16 = Undefined in v1.00
32 = Undefined in v1.00
64 = Camera not ready when HI, ready when LOW, Pin 10.
128 = Undefined in v1.00
If you find any errors in this hook up information for DANCINES.EXE (tm) be
sure to let me know about them, this information is preliminary and subject to
change without notice of any kind.
The input pin 10 may need to be pulled up to a 5 volt supply through a 2.2K ohm
0.25 watt resistor. A micro switch or relay can be used to short pin 10 to
ground in order to signal the computer. You could also use a 7414 or other
74xx series TTL IC to buffer the signal going to pin 10. If you do not need to
use pin 10 to hold the computer for camera ready, you can disable the pin 10
checking in the General configuration options of DANCINES.EXE (tm).
To ensure good signals both the input and output pins used should be pulled up
to +5 volts through 2.2K ohm 0.25 watt resistors. Pins 18 through 25 are used
as common ground. The +5 volt supply should be isolated, three "D" cells in
series may work for a while since +4.5 volts will read as logic HIGH on the
parallel port, but do not use more than +5 volts since that may damage the
parallel port.
Making connections to your parallel port can damage your computer's mother
board, so you may wish to install a second parallel port card board and use
that card's 25 pin connector for the port to connect to, that way if you
destroy that port board you can replace it without replacing your mother board
(provided the damage did not extend beyond the port board and damage the mother
board.) You can add opto-isolators or TTL buffer chips between your parallel
port and the film scanner/printer circuits if you want more protection to your
computer. Be careful that all power supplies are isolated since you do not
want AC line current being accidentally sent into your computer through the
parallel port. It may be a good (or bad) idea to plug your computer into an AC
isolation transformer rather than the wall to have the computer ground
isolated.
See configuration commands in the DANCINES.EXE (tm) Main Menu for information
about the values that affect the Parallel Port pins.
The delay values are approximate, so when the camera exposure is controlled by
the computer, such as when printing film-to-film, it may be better to control
the exposure with a capping shutter operated from a crystal timer. Variations
in exposure can cause flicker in the scanned or printed film at sound speed.
Driving cine cameras one frame at a time can produce flicker because of
backlash in the shutter shaft and animation motor, these backlash problems do
not show up much if the camera runs continuously, only when it is made to start
and stop. A capping shutter can be used after the camera shutter has opened in
this way, close the capping shutter, advance the cine camera until its shutter
is open, stop the cine camera, open the capping shutter, time the exposure with
a crystal timer, close the capping shutter, advance the cine camera until its
shutter is closed, stop the cine camera, set pin 10 for clear to change the
image frame to scan/print, and so on. When using a CMOS or CCD camera and the
exposure is controlled inside the camera, DANCINES.EXE (tm) only needs to be
configured so that it holds the exposure pulse and post exposure pulse delay
long enough for the CMOS or CCD camera to finish each exposure and saving the
exposures, that is delay errors from DANCINES.EXE (tm) do not matter as long as
they are too long when a CMOS or CCD camera is used with internal exposure
control.
There is an option to use pin 10 as a hold for the program to keep the program
from getting ahead of the cine projector or scanner/printer camera i.e. closed
loop, if this option is not used be sure you give everything plenty of time to
settle before the next frame image is advanced in the projector. If you set
the delays too long that generally just makes the scanning/printing total time
longer, but if you set the delays too short you may get errors, bad frame
images, frames not saved, or skipped frames.
---
IMAGE FRAME FILE CONSIDERATIONS
For editing images that are scanned or taken from nature it is best to use a
file format that stores the brightness values as 48 bpp even though the noise
from the sensor will make the color resolution less than that. Because the
image contrast in the mid-tones of the image will normally have its contrast
increased storing images in a single 24bpp frame image will result in gaps in
the tonal range, for instance if mid-tone contrast is doubled then only every
other image tone would be present doubling the stair-stepping of the image
tones, and since 256 image tones per primary color is just barely adequate
decreasing that to 128 image tones may result in a visible degradation of the
frame images.
To reduce the increase in stair-stepping of the image tones when the contrast,
gamma, curves, and color balance are adjusted with DANCAD3D.EXE (tm)'s Grading
commands more than one 24bpp scanned image of each frame can be Fused together
to increase the color bits. For instance two 8 bit images fused give about 9
bits of color, then doubling the contrast in the mid tones would result in that
part of the curve having about 8 bits rather than 7 bits resolution. So it is
best to make three or more exposures of each frame with the Digital Camera,
then use the Fuse option in the Edit list Insert command to store the frame
images in a 48bpp file format such as the NIP file format.
Other frame file type options may be introduced later.
The file numbering format is that used by DANCAD3D.EXE (tm). The Short format
ranges from SOMEFILE.-99 to SOMEFILE.999. Since Windows (tm) programs like the
file extension BMP on BMP files they will not read files numbered using the
Short format. The Long frame format ranges from -9999999.BMP to 99999999.BMP,
but the OS will not let you store that many files in the same sub-directory, so
in practice each 35mm 2000 foot reel's frames would need to be in a separate
sub-directory, so you would number Long format frames 0.BMP through 32000.BMP.
If you want the whole 88 minute or longer film to have its frames consecutively
numbered you can use the Divided numbered name format, it breaks the frames
into groups of about a thousand frames per sub-directory and makes a series of
numbered sub-directories to hold the frame sets in. When you enter a Divided
name in you use the Long format to the master directory that the Divided sub-
directories are in, not the path to the actual files, e.g. if the Divided files
start with C:\FRAMES\BMP0\1.BMP you would enter C:\FRAMES\1.BMP at the prompt
for the BMP filename. The Padded file naming format is like the Long format
but the filename numbers are Padded to the left with zeros, that is useful in
two ways, Windows (tm) directories sort the Long format out of order, Padding
with leading zeros helps get the folder directory to display sorted in order,
and also when doing drag-n'-drop into some Windows (tm) programs of frame sets
the Padded format may be more likely to have the frames loaded in the right
order since if you are making an AVI file or something the Long format frames
may get sequenced out of order whereas the Padded format frame images should
load in the right order, perhaps.
There are utilities in the Files Utilities sub-menu in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) to
convert numbered filenames used by other programs into the Short, Long, Padded,
and Divided numbered filename formats used by my programs. Likewise those
utilities can do some backwards name conversions as well, in case you need to
edit frames in my numbered name format in a program that uses a different
numbering scheme.
Most Digital Cameras or image capture programs used with Digital Cameras can
save shot image frames in some kind of a numbered format like, IMG_4567.RAW or
IMG_8765.CR2 and such. To convert such mixed type numbered filenames into one
of my numbered file name types you can use the commands in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm)'s
Files Utilities sub-menu. For use with the Edit list Insert command most frame
sets should be renumbered to start with 0, so if you scan frames IMG_4567.RAW
to IMG_5567.RAW those would be renamed and renumbered to 00000000.RAW to
00000999.RAW since there were 1000 files scanned. The utility program
DCRAWBAT.COM (tm) included in the DANCINES.ZIP (tm) archive can do the
renumbering when the X.BAT batch file it makes is executed to convert Canon
*.CR2 files into 48bpp 16 bit RGB *.TIF files using the third party program
DCRAW (tm). The original DCRAWBAT.COM (tm) used DCRAW (tm) to make 24bpp 8 bit
TIF files, the revised version makes 48bpp 16 bit TIF files since 48bpp 16 bit
TIF support was added to DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) and DANCAD87.EXE (tm), the use of
48bpp 16 bit TIF may result in fewer histogram gaps and better results.
You may need to use some third party programs to convert RAW scans from your
Digital Camera into 48bpp 16 bit RGB TIF, 8bpp or 24bpp BMP, or whatever else
my programs can read in the revision you have. You can use www.Google.com to
find download links for Freeware image conversion programs. Three programs you
can download from the Internet you should look into are: DCRAW (tm) to convert
*.RAW or *.CR2 image files into *.TIF or *.TIFF type, IRFANVIEW (tm) to batch
convert images files like *.TIF to *.BMP, and VIRTUALDUB (tm) to convert *.BMP
frames and *.WAV sound into an un-compressed AVI file that you can convert with
other Freeware into *.MPG MPEG2 type Media files for viewing of your frames in
Media Player.
---
PROCESSING RAW FRAME IMAGE FILES
DANCINES.EXE (tm) automates the shooting/exposing of your cine film scanner or
printer, it does not in v1.xx process the image files shot.
A third party program you can Google (tm) on the internet called DCRAW (tm) is
designed to convert RAW Digital Image files shot with the DSLR camera you are
using in your cine film scanner into image files of a type that can be loaded
into many kinds of image file conversion software or image editing programs.
I would advise against using the JPG image save mode in your DSLR to shoot film
frames because the compression of color negative images can result in artifacts
showing up after color correction, and RAW mode images are generally sharper
and do not have the tone blocking that JPG images can display.
A small utility program called DCRAWBAT.COM (tm) is included in DANCINES.ZIP
(tm) to generate a batch file called X.BAT that automates the conversion of up
to thousands of motion picture frame images by making instructions in the batch
file X.BAT that invoke the third party program DCRAW (tm) like a command line
utility as many times as required for the number of frames to convert from raw
to a readable type, in this case from IMG_1234.CR2 to IMG_1234.TIFF the X.BAT
file then renames the IMG_1234.TIFF files to 00000000.TIF so that some programs
that do not recognize the TIFF file type can read them as a TIF file. For use
with my programs Edit list Insert command it is best to have image frame sets
start with the count of zero in the filename of the first frame.
DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) v3.7 was revised to read 48bpp 16 bit TIF files, if you have
24bpp 8 bit TIF files you may need to use another image file conversion program
may need to be used to convert the 24bpp 8 bit TIF frame image files into 24bpp
BMP type image files for import through the image Insert command in the Edit
list. The third party program IRFANVIEW (tm) can do batch conversion from
*.TIF to *.BMP, you can look into downloading it from the internet.
If more than one exposure was made of the motion picture frame to get extended
or better tonal range, the Fuse option of the Edit list image Insert command
would need to be used to Fuse or combine the separate exposures into a single
image file that can be used for color correction Grading and re-sizing. The
Fuse command can take three separate exposures made through color separation
filters, i.e. Red exposure file, Green exposure file, and Blue exposure file
and make them into one color file. The Fuse command can also take more than
one color file and fuse them to get a longer or better tonal range, e.g. you
can set the camera to "auto bracket" so that it shoots sets of three exposures,
the first +1 stop, the second on exposure, and the third -1 Stop. The "auto
bracket" feature is found in your DSLR's built in menus. If you combine the
"auto bracket" feature with making Red, Green, and Blue filter separation
exposures you can then get 9 exposures per frame, three Red, three Green, three
Blue and thereby get better tonal range and color purity, perhaps. The over-
sampling can be done further by making three sets of bracketed exposures in
each primary color to get 27 exposures per motion picture frame. Going beyond
27 exposures per motion picture frame would probably going beyond the point of
diminishing returns as far as image quality is concerned unless your Digital
Camera has a high internal noise level. To reduce the internal random noise of
your Digital Camera set the gain or EI index to the lowest or a low level.
Fusion of several exposures can help reduce the random noise in Digital Camera
exposures, but may not help with "fixed pattern noise" such as burned out
pixels, or with film grain in the motion picture film being scanned, although
getting a longer tonal range can render the grain smoother since the Digital
Camera noise is single pixel and the film grain spans several pixels.
To get the third party program DCRAW (tm) to be able to convert frame files
shot with a Canon XTi (tm) DSLR in its CR2 filetype using my DCRAWBAT.COM (tm)
program you need to make a sub directory (folder) on your C:\ drive in the root
directory called C:\DCRAW and put DCRAW.EXE (tm) in it along with any other
files it requires such as cygjpeg-61.dll, cyglcms-1.dll, cygwin1.dll, these or
other dll files may also need to be in the Windows (tm) directory where dll
files belong. If you do not have the needed dll files you may be able to find
them on the internet.
File conversion of large file sets of frames can take several days or longer,
and require a great deal of harddisk space. Storing all the frames from a
feature in their RAW format, converted formats, color corrected and re-sized
forms, and the final edit and Blu-ray (tm) or DVD size can take 25TB (25,000GB)
or more. To be able to process and store all the frames you will probably need
several computers loaded with large harddisks and maybe wired to a network to
be able to swap files around.
To store the frame image files made while scanning, you first should use the
Files Utilities Kinema Structure command to create a film project directory
structure. You can then use your memory card reader and the Windows (tm) file
manager to copy the CR2 files from the memory card into the I01 resolution
level for the shot the frames belong to. At some point you need to rename the
frame files so that the frames for each shot start with frame number zero.
Normally frames in the shots of the project structure are saved in the Divided
file name format, but since that format is not supported in Windows (tm)
programs the Padded numbered file name format should be used, unless the Long
numbered file name format is required. Remember what file name numbering
format is used for frame images at various levels of processing and resolution
since you may get "File not found" error messages if you select the wrong file
name format.
It is best to import images into DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) and DANCAD87.EXE (tm) Kinema
Edit list using the 48bpp 16 bit TIF file type since it can hold more image
tone and color data. If you only have 8bpp or 24bpp 8 bit image data then the
BMP file type can be used, or you can convert what you have into BMP type. If
you have Cineon or DPX files it would be best to convert those to 48bpp 16 bit
TIF before use with my system since you may get better results. It does not
matter much if the source files are Log, Linear, or video Gamma since you will
be able to adjust the Gamma and curves with the Color Correction commands.
To convert the frame images you get from using some third party program into
24bpp BMP frame files a third party programs like IRFANVIEW (tm) might be used.
IRFANVIEW (tm) has an internal batch process mode and can automatically
renumber the frame images. IRFANVIEW (tm) can also batch re-size, sharpen,
gamma adjust, negative to positive, and such but may be limited in its ability
to do full color correction which is probably best done with DANCAD3D.EXE v3.7
(tm) for use with my system. There are many other programs that can convert
frame image files from one file type to another, you can search for "Freeware"
using Google (tm) and such. When converting frame images you should use UN-
COMPRESSED image types such as 24bpp BMP rather than compressed image formats
like JPG, or JPEG since compressed formats degrade images and alter the
brightness and color of individual pixels in the frame image files.
If you are short on disk space you could shoot JPG images in your DSLR then
convert those to 48bpp TIF or 24bpp BMP for loading into DANCAD3D.EXE v3.7 (tm)
but if you try to lighten the shadows or sharpen compressed images the
compression artifacts may become more noticeable. Scanning to RAW sensor
images can let you use more extreme image tone manipulations before sensor or
histogram artifacts become visible. If you are making a Black and White film
saving the edited image frames that will go to the film recorder in 8bpp Gray
scale BMP can reduce the disk space required for that frame set to 1/3, but at
the expense sometimes of a little tonal quality since 24bpp BMP files can have
noise in the tones between the Red, Green, and Blue exposures, so the eye sees
the mixing of color values that are not the same for all three primary images,
like in an 8bpp file R=128 G=128 B=128 but in a 24bpp file you might get R=128
G=127 B=128 so the brightness range on average would be a little smoother using
24bpp BMP files to store the edited graded frame images in.
When you re-size frame image files it is best to use the highest quality method
that the software supports since the "nearest pixel" or "quick" method can make
reduction images look noisy, grainy, and jagged. Some graphics programs may
not do an acceptable job of re-sizing images. If you need to reduce the size
of images by a large amount you can sometimes get better results by using the
image soften or blur command with a radius of one to maybe five pixels, then
re-size in reduction, then sharpen the smaller image. Another trick is to
reduce the images in steps of only making the image 2/3 of original size on
each pass until you get to the size you need.
Enlarging small images such as 720x480 up to 2048x1365 should turn out well if
you use the "Quad pixel" re-size option in DANCAD3D.EXE v3.7 (tm)'s image
Insert command in the Edit list since the output will interpolate between
pixels rather than show blocks of pixels like some other programs might.
---
ISSUES AND PROBLEMS
If the program is run under Windows (tm) some programs can force a pop-out to
the desktop, that might ruin your scanning or printing, be sure not to have any
programs running or installed on your system that can force a pop-out from a
DOS program running in a DOS window.
The same goes for the "Windows (tm)" key on the keyboard, if this gets bumped
while the film scanner or printer is running your job could be ruined. You
should use an older AT style keyboard that does not have the "Windows (tm)" key
on it.
The [Pause] or [Ctrl]+[NumLock] keys on the keyboard could also cause problems
if pressed while film is being exposed.
Programs or things running in background in Windows (tm) may alter the timing
and cause flicker or cause frames to be exposed incorrectly.
Running the program under DOS may reduce some of the Windows (tm) issues, but
may slow down some operations.
If you accidentally have the program select a video mode your monitor cannot
display and you see scrambled or distorted images on your monitor turn the
monitor off immediately. If the monitor is Plug-and-Play it may go into
"safety protection" and then give a black screen, under Windows (tm) you can
press [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] and then tell Windows (tm) to force a shut down of the
program. Only use the configuration to select a video mode or resolution values
to ones that your video card and monitor can safely support. Under DOS you
will need to reboot your computer if you select an invalid video mode.
Do not select the Parallel Port Pin 10 pause mode if you do not have Pin 10
connected properly since the program will wait forever for the correct signals
which will never come.
Power going to your cine film scanner/printer may fluctuate causing flicker and
image color changes in the scanned or printed images You should use a regulated
inverter operating off of a bank of storage batteries being continuously
charged to operate the film scanner/printer in order to have a UPS that gives
very constant power.
Harddisks that automatically park or power down can freeze the system, which
might affect the exposure of a frame. To avoid problems related to system
timing issues it is best to have the film advance and exposure triggered by the
computer but timed by an external crystal timer. Care needs to be taken to
make sure that the camera or projector do not get ahead of the computer, or
that the computer does not get ahead of the camera or projector. The parallel
port signal mode has an option for a hold in pause until OK signal on Pin 10 of
the parallel port, so you can wire up your film scanner/printer to take
advantage of that option.
Be sure to disable any programs running in background, especially anything that
can write to the screen. Be sure to disable any task scheduling program. Be
sure to disable any power saving features. Be sure to disable any screen saver
program that might blank the screen after a period of time. Be sure that there
are no pending print jobs that could activate the pins on the parallel port.
Do not turn on your film scanner/printer control electronics until after you
have booted DANCINES.EXE (tm) and configured the program, since tones may be
generated by various programs, or the state of the parallel port pins may be
such that the film scanner/printer could start advancing film before the
projector has any image loaded, and maybe ruin a whole magazine of film or set
of digital image frames. The same problem can happen if the computer reboots,
the parallel port pins can get set to various patterns, which might start the
film scanner/printer running wild. So always turn off the film scanner/printer
when the last frame is shot, and do not turn the film scanner/printer on until
DANCINES.EXE (tm) has cleared the parallel port signal pins. You can put LED's
with series resistors on the parallel port signal pins to check and see if they
are clear (all outputs set low, and the input is set as you need).
DANCINES.EXE (tm) may be able to be stopped by pressing [Ctrl] and [C] at the
same time, i.e. ^C aka Control C. On some keyboards this may be done with the
[Break] key. The ability to "break" DANCINES.EXE (tm) may vary from one
revision to another, and when it is working you may need to press ^C more than
once and or hold it down for it to work since the program only checks the
keyboard after certain tasks.
---
SCF FILE SCAN/SHOOT CUE FILE DOT COMMANDS
To control the frames that are scanned or shot from the roll of film in the
projector DANCINES.EXE (tm) reads a cue file with the extension *.SCF that
stands for Shoot/Scan Cue File. Under Windows (tm) you may need to rename that
*.TXT for editing with NOTEPAD.EXE (tm).
The commands in the *.SCF file start with a dot or period and are called "Dot
Commands". They all have a dot followed by two letters, the case of the
letters does not matter. You should not put anything on lines in the *.SCF
file other than the dot commands.
The dot commands available in DANCINES.EXE v1.00 (tm) are:
.ms [message text to console, i.e. displayed on screen]
.lv [initial IR] [initial red] [initial green] [initial blue]
.pa [startframe] [endframe] [IR] [R] [G] [B] [F1] [F2] [F3] [F4] [F5] [F6] [F7]
.pb through .pz like .pa, rolls A to Z, start and end are in frame numbers.
.cc [comment text notes just in file not displayed on screen]
.zz ; End of file.
Dot command .ms must be followed by a space then a text message to display on
the computer's screen when the *.SCF file is executed in DANCINES.EXE (tm). .ms
can be used to confirm that you are executing the right *.SCF file for the roll
of film to be scanned or printed. The dot command .ms can also be used to give
instructions to the scanner/printer operator to change settings such as the
lamp voltage, etc.
Dot command .cc is like .ms in that it must be followed by a space then some
text. If you just want to add some space to the *.SCF file to make it easier
to read when you are editing it you can use a period or dash as the text.
Dot command .lv sets the initial light valve settings, that lets you follow it
with a .ms dot command to tell you to check the light with a light meter or to
let you make a test exposure or something with the light vales set to a
selected value. Dot command does not advance the projector or make an
exposure.
Dot commands .pa through .pz are the "print" dot commands, the p stands for
"print", the letter after the p is the film roll letter for A/B rolling, such
that .pa prints or scans frames from the "A" roll, .pb prints or scans frames
from the "B" roll and so on. Since in the real world you would never have a
"Z" roll the dot command .pz can be used to tell DANCINES.EXE (tm) to advance a
number of frames without printing or scanning, i.e. fast forward over so many
frames as indicated. Since there is one *.SCF file for printing all rolls you
cannot double expose, in fact the program simulates the *.SCF file looking for
errors such as gaps or overlaps before it will execute the scanning or
printing. If you need to double expose you would need to make a copy of the
*.SCF file and edit the in and out frame numbers for the rolls you wanted an
overlap at. If you are printing and want black frames onto print stock you
could print a "X" roll without a negative in the printer, i.e. the lighthouse
would go directly onto the print stock (with a filter added to the filter pack
so that the light would be the right color even if you print black to avoid
over exposure and flair in the sound track area.) When the dot commands .ap
through .pz are executed the program checks to see if any of the filter names
have changed, if so it will stop the scanning/printing and put up a message
onto the computer's screen asking the scanner/printer operator to change the
filter. The operator then changes the filter and presses the key indicated to
have the program continue executing the *.SCF file. Normally for making up
*.SCF files that will just be used for scanning or workprinting film rolls you
would only use .pa for the parts you want to scan or print and .pz for the
parts you want to skip over. You would only use .pb, .pc, and so on if you are
zero cut printing film to film since when you scan you will be using the Pick
command in the Kinema Edit list to set the first and last frames in the
editing, although there is nothing to prevent you from A/B rolling in the
scanner if you have a reason to do so such as saving time by not scanning the
frames at high resolution that will not be used.
Dot command .zz marks the End-of-File and should be on the last text line in
the *.SCF file. Do not put anything after .zz or on the lines below it. Avoid
using a text editor that inserts ^Z (Control Z) at the end of the file, since
if you open the file several times it might add ^Zs several times and if you
get a ^Z in the middle of your *.SCF file the execution might stop before all
the dot commands have been read. You can look for ^Z and other "invisible"
characters with the Binary Editor in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm), and remove them if you
need to.
Some example *.SCF files are included in DANCINES.ZIP (tm) for you to use in
testing your scanner/printer. Because DANCINES.EXE (tm) can accept the frame
numbers in different formats, Frame numbers, SMPTE tome and frames, Feet plus
Frames, and audio Samples, more than one example is given. Frame numbers are
always right, but the other frame number formats require you to have the values
in DANCINES.EXE (tm)'s configuration set correctly.
Before the *.SCF file is executed with command 2 from the DANCINES.EXE (tm)
main menu the scanner/printer operator would set the counters on the camera and
projector to zero. The first frame counted is the frame in the projector gate
at the time the *.SCF file is started, the projector is then advanced the first
time to frame 1 which is the second frame. The *.SCF file always starts with
frame 0. When making the *.SCF file you would need a sync block with a frame
counter and need to note the frame count at the ins and outs as you wind
through the film roll or rolls. If your sync block has a footage counter plus
frames marked around the sprocket you might find entering the values into your
*.SCF file easier as Feet plus Frames. If you have transferred a workprint
scan of your rolls to video tape with SMPTE time plus frames window dub burn in
you may find it easier to use the SMPTE option of the *.SCF file for the ins
and outs of the rolls. Making a fast "workprint" scan of your rolls can be
easier on them than running them through a sync block and maybe get less dust
and scratches on them. If you use DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) with a SVGA to composite
converter to make the video tape of your workprint you can select Frame
numbers, Feet plus Frames, or SMPTE Time plus Frames for the count displayed
over the frame during the 24fps playback (the video rate is not important since
the SVGA to composite converter can make NTSC or PAL/SECAM from the 24fps since
the video card will be running at 60Hz or faster probably, giving you one or
more fields that are right to look at on the single frame advance of the video
tape. You should check the ins and outs in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm)'s Edit list by
single frame advancing over the edits to be sure the correct frame numbers are
being selected. You do not need to make a video tape, it just might be easier
to give that to the director and editor to play with, they can then give you
back the edit points on lined paper that you can enter into the Edit list to
make them a confirmation video of the edited footage, or they can have a
duplicate set of proxy frames and their own computer setup to run DANCAD3D.EXE
(tm), but using a VHS playback is cheaper and simpler is several people are
going to be making edit reviews. You can also make a MPG2 or DVD but I am not
sure how many dropped frames you would get in a compressed format, VHS is not
compressed.
To make understanding what the *.SCF file looks like so you can may your own
their text is reproduced here,
Example file: DANCINES.SCF 964 Bytes 03-12-08 11:34p
.ms SCF (Scan Cue File) test file #1 for DANCINES.EXE (tm)
.lv 25 25 30 35 ; set initial light vanes
.cc .
.cc First part,
.pz 0 11 20 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run in
.pa 12 26 21 22 23 24 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 1 comment space
.pb 27 40 25 0 26 51 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.40 . . ; shot 2 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pb 41 45 25 25 25 28 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 3 comment space
.pc 46 50 25 29 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.60 . . ; shot 4 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pa 51 55 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 5 comment space
.pc 56 70 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 6 comment space
.cc .
.cc Last shot,
.pa 71 73 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 7 comment space
.cc .
.cc Run out,
.pz 74 80 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run out
.cc .
.cc End SCF (Scan Cue File) test file #1.
.zz
Example file: FPLUSF.SCF 1,141 Bytes 03-12-08 11:35p
.ms For 24 frames/sec, SMPTE SCF test file #1 for DANCINES.EXE (tm)
.lv 25 25 30 35 ; set initial light vanes
.cc .
.cc First part,
.pz 24T00:00:00:00 00:00:00:11 20 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run in
.pa 00:00:00:12 00:00:01:02 21 22 23 24 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 1 comment space
.pb 00:00:01:03 00:00:01:16 25 0 26 51 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.40 . . ; shot 2 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pb 00:00:01:17 00:00:01:21 25 25 25 28 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 3 comment space
.pc 00:00:01:22 00:00:02:02 25 29 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.60 . . ; shot 4 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pa 00:00:02:03 00:00:02:07 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 5 comment space
.pc 00:00:02:08 00:00:02:16 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 6 comment space
.cc .
.cc Last shot,
.pa 00:00:02:17 00:00:03:01 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 7 comment space
.cc .
.cc Run out,
.pz 00:00:03:02 00:00:03:08 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run out
.cc .
.cc End SCF (Scan Cue File) test file #1.
.zz
Example file: SMPTE.SCF 1,141 Bytes 03-12-08 11:36p
.ms For 24 frames/sec, SMPTE SCF test file #1 for DANCINES.EXE (tm)
.lv 25 25 30 35 ; set initial light vanes
.cc .
.cc First part,
.pz 24T00:00:00:00 00:00:00:11 20 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run in
.pa 00:00:00:12 00:00:01:02 21 22 23 24 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 1 comment space
.pb 00:00:01:03 00:00:01:16 25 0 26 51 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.40 . . ; shot 2 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pb 00:00:01:17 00:00:01:21 25 25 25 28 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 3 comment space
.pc 00:00:01:22 00:00:02:02 25 29 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.60 . . ; shot 4 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pa 00:00:02:03 00:00:02:07 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 5 comment space
.pc 00:00:02:08 00:00:02:16 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 6 comment space
.cc .
.cc Last shot,
.pa 00:00:02:17 00:00:03:01 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 7 comment space
.cc .
.cc Run out,
.pz 00:00:03:02 00:00:03:08 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run out
.cc .
.cc End SCF (Scan Cue File) test file #1.
.zz
Example file: SPERF.SCF 1,039 Bytes 03-12-08 11:36p
.ms For 2000 samples/frame, SAMPLE SCF test file #1 for DANCINES.EXE (tm)
.lv 25 25 30 35 ; set initial light vanes
.cc .
.cc First part,
.pz 2000S0 S22000 20 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run in
.pa S24000 S54000 21 22 23 24 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 1 comment space
.pb S56000 S80000 25 0 26 51 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.40 . . ; shot 2 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pb S82000 S90000 25 25 25 28 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 3 comment space
.pc S92000 S100000 25 29 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.60 . . ; shot 4 comment space
.cc .
.cc Start of next part,
.pa S102000 S110000 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 5 comment space
.pc S112000 S128000 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 6 comment space
.cc .
.cc Last shot,
.pa S130000 S146000 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; shot 7 comment space
.cc .
.cc Run out,
.pz S148000 S160000 25 25 25 25 . UV 2EPACK . ND0.20 . . ; run out
.cc .
.cc End SCF (Scan Cue File) test file #1.
.zz
Note that the filter names need a place holder in the empty filter slots, you
can put a period or dash there, but keep a space on both sides of all values
and strings. The IR vane value needs to be included even if it is not being
used so that the *.SCF file will be valid for later use. Do not use light vane
values over 51 if you are going to use the *.SCF with a Bell and Howell light
house, otherwise you can use light vane values 0 to 63. Mid-light vane value
is normally 25 but some labs use other numbers since they are running their
printers faster than they have light for, they might use 30 as mid light and
put a 1200 Watt lamp in the light house to run the printer faster. Notice that
you can put comments to the right of the .pa through .pz dot commands as notes
to yourself as to what shot those printing lights are for.
There may be some changes to the contents of the *.SCF files in future
versions, so some editing might be required for use with future versions of
DANCINES.EXE (tm). When you edit your *.SCF files you should avoid getting
Control Z ASCII values in the files or other non-standard ASCII 32-127 values
since only LF and CR, #10 and #13, are defined, others such as form feed are
not defined. If you get problems try retyping the *.SCF file using the Write
command in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm), since the text editor you are using may insert
formatting codes into the text file, also save as DOS *.TXT type text file not
a *.DOC or other type.
---
SCANNER DIGITAL CAMERA ISSUES
Ideally you would want a Digital Camera, CMOS or CCD, for your movie film
scanner that has a resolution of better than 4096x3072, 4:3 ratio, 12 bits of
true tone, and is monochrome without a Bayer filter. There are industrial
cameras like that that can download images at maybe 2fps through USB or some
other cable. The sensor should also be about 22mm wide so you can use a 1:1
printing lens on your scanner.
If the industrial camera does not have enough dynamic range to capture the full
density range of your camera negatives you will get a loss of tonal values in
your scans. If the industrial camera has a high noise level you can try making
several exposures, maybe with a filter wheel to shift the exposure a half stop
between exposures, and use the Fuse image command in the Insert command in the
Kinema Edit list command in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) to extend the tonal range of the
Fused image beyond what a single exposure can obtain and to reduce the random
noise from the sensor through pixel averaging.
If the industrial camera has fixed pattern noise such as burned out pixels or
uneven columns or rows that are the same in all the exposures using the Fuse
command will not help much. You would need to subtract the fixed pattern
"blemishes" in the image, and interpolate over the bad pixels. The software
that came with the industrial camera may have fixed pattern noise removal built
in, you should ask about the fixed pattern noise issue before you purchase the
industrial camera.
The reason you would want a monochrome camera is that you will be making three
or more exposures through color separation filters or with colored LED lamps so
having the Bayer filter on the sensor just reduces the resolution of the camera
to about half. Not having the Bayer filter on the sensor can also reduce some
of the fixed pattern noise since the filters are not perfect and may introduce
some speckle to the image.
Another advantage of using a monochrome industrial CMOS or CCD camera is that
it does not have a mechanical shutter like some DSLR cameras. If you use a
DSLR the mechanical shutter and reflex mirror will probably wear out before you
have shot even half the frames from a feature film. To scan a feature film you
will need to make 300,000 to 600,000 or more single exposures, and if you are
making 9 exposures per frame you would need 2,700,000 to 5,400,000 exposures.
If your DSLR is rated for 100,000 exposures and you need 5,400,000 exposures
you would need to purchase 54 DSLR cameras to get all your footage scanned for
just a single feature. If the DSLR costs $600 then 54 of them would cost
$32,400! If the monochrome industrial camera costs $5000 it may end up being
cheaper in the long run. You could sell the DSLRs on ebay.com when they get to
maybe 75,000 exposures, but you would still have a loss from the new to used
price drop.
That said, the dynamic range of a DSLR like the Canon XTi (tm) is quite good
and more than enough to get adequate movie film scans if you Fuse three or more
exposures. Also the Canon XTi (tm) has built in exposure bracketing so you can
turn that on and when you make three exposures of each film frame the camera
will take one on exposure, one at plus a stop or so (as you set the bracket
range in the camera's menu), and another minus a stop or so. The electronic
cable release is easy to wire to two relays that can be controlled by the
parallel port pins, since the current draw is low you can use some TTL buffer
chips with open collector and two 5 volt DIP relay. You need to add some
delays and logic so that the ring on the sub-mini phone plug closes first then
the tip closes while the ring holds then the ring opens.
If you are using a DSLR to shoot in your scanner you can save the frames to the
camera's Compact Flash card (or SD etc.) or use a USB cable (or FireWire etc.)
to download the images to your computer's harddisk.
DANCINES.EXE (tm) has a built in exposure counter so that it will pause after a
configured number of frames are shot and wait for you to do something like
change the Compact Flash card in the DSLR. On the Canon XTi (tm) a 2GB Compact
Flash card will hold about 170 RAW images, so you set DANCINES.EXE (tm) to
pause after each set of 170 exposures so that you can swap the memory cards.
If you use the JPG file type you could hold more frames but you would get
compression artifacts in your scanned frames. The time to download the frame
exposures from the memory cards to the harddrive in the image processing
computer may be longer than the time to shoot in the camera so you may need
several computers downloading and organize the file sets later on a network
connection or by putting two or more harddrives in a single computer so you can
move the files into a common directory.
If you use the USB feature in the Canon XTi (tm) when DANCINES.EXE (tm) sends
the shoot signal to the parallel port on the computer that it runs on, the
relay for the shutter release fires, then the image is saved not in the camera
but on the harddisk of another computer. Because of the numbering system used
in the DSLR you may be limited to 10,000 exposures before you need to reset the
camera to count from 0, i.e. it numbers the frames IMG_0000.CR2 through
IMG_9999.CR2. You can configure DANCINES.EXE (tm) to pause after shooting
10,000 exposures. You should use two computers one running DOS for
DANCINES.EXE (tm) and another running Windows (tm) for the image download
utility that comes with your DSLR. Since you are going to be shooting TB of
RAW frame exposures you should arrange the computer you will be saving frame
exposures to to have hot swap harddrive bays so you can keep feeding in more
and more 500GB harddrives without having to turn off the computer and fiddle
with the wires inside the computer.
The harddrives with the RAW frame exposures need to be processed into RGB files
for Color Correction in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm). To keep the workflow going as fast
as possible you should have separate computers for the scanner frame exposure
downloading, the RAW to RGB conversion, and the Color Correction, with the
harddrives with the frame exposures moving from one processing step to another.
After Color Correction of the Key frames, you need to make Proxy resolution
frame images that can be used with the Pick and View commands in DANCAD3D.EXE
(tm)'s Kinema Edit list. The Proxy frames are required to display the real
time play back at 24/25/30fps while editing, and being smaller allow all the
frames scanned to be accessed at random while editing so you can see all the
frames and shots without having to swap disks or move files around (once you
have all the proxy frames in a Edit list structure for access while editing).
The proxy frames are not used for output, except maybe for conversion to BMP to
make a quick check un-compressed AVI with VIRTUALDUB (tm) to check the sync of
a sound mix or to burn a DVD so you can show someone the edit/mix away from
your editing computer.
The Canon XTi (tm) seems to be able to download its RAW images through about a
30 foot USB cable, how much longer of a cable might work I have not tested yet,
but you should keep the cables as short as you can normally. Since it takes
about 4 to 5 seconds to download the RAW images to the computer's harddisk
using the utility that comes with the camera you may need to configure extra
time after the post exposure delay to make sure the projector does not finish
advancing until after the last image has finished downloading.
---
SCANNER LENS ISSUES
The best lens to use on your scanner is generally a lens off of an old 35mm
Optical Printer such as an Acme (tm) or Oxberry (tm). The Kodak Ektar 103mm
(tm) was popular before the Nikon Nikkor 105mm and Nikkor 150mm were
introduced. The Printing Nikkors are about the best lens you will find to put
in your scanner, but they are not cheap expect to pay more than $1000 each.
The Nikon Nikkor 95mm was a blow-up lens for 16mm to 35mm, the other mentioned
are for 1:1 printing, so the sensor in the Digital Camera should be the same
size as the film frame to get best results. If you need to enlarge or reduce
you should stop the lens down and not shoot wide open.
The f-stop rings of printing lenses may be marked like a normal lens, except
that they are never used for infinity focus, they are used at equal distance
1:1 magnification so the f-stop markings are two stops larger than what is the
real f-stop, in other words if it says f/8 on the lens the real f-stop is f/16.
Because of diffraction you do not want a real f-stop smaller than f/11 most of
the time, unless the film is very grainy and you want to use f/16 as a optical
low pass filter to blur the image a little. To get f/11 you would set the lens
to f/5.6, so a printing lens marked f/2.8 wide open is really f/5.6.
Because it is a problem to get film to lay flat in the projector gate in your
scanner/printer you should not use the printing lens wide open, stopping the
lens down as much as you can without getting resolution reduction from
diffraction will help keep all parts of the frame in equal focus, another
reason for setting the lens to f/5.6 or f/8 to get f/11 or f/16. The highest
resolution of the scans may be on setting the printing lens between f/4.5 and
f/6.3 but you may just be focusing on the film grain better and making your
film scans more noisy, particularly if you need to sharpen the scans a little
because high speed lenses were used and were a little soft in focus on the
negative. If you stop the printing lens down too much you can reduce the grain
in your scans so that if you sharpen later you will sharpen the image and not
mostly the grain which is smaller than the circle of confusion of the camera
lens when high speed camera lenses are used, such as at f/1.2 camera lens.
If you cannot afford to purchase a true printing lens, you can use a Macro lens
made in a mount that will fit on your Digital Camera. A 60mm Macro lens will
be 120mm when extended to 1:1 magnification, and when set to f/8 will really be
f/16. Some Macro lenses fit into bellows that have rack-and-pinon focusing,
while others have a double helix lens mount. The double helix lens mount may
be a little floppy when run out to 1:1 magnification, which could be a problem
since any movement of the lens will show up as misplacement of the image on the
sensor which could be bad if the image moves between frames from vibration of
the movie film projector advancing, or the lens getting bumped by the scanner
operator while doing test exposures or changing the Memory cards etc. If you
are doing composites you want your scanner rock solid so that the foreground
with scan in register with the plate, if anything moves like the floppy lens
your scans may not register later or the edge of the gate will drift into frame
and such.
You may be able to get better results than using a Macro lens by putting two
f/1.4 or f/1.2 58mm SLR lenses face to face. This will give you a twelve to
fourteen element 1:1 lens, a bit like the Printing Nikkor. You would leave one
of the lenses wide open, and stop the other one down to f/11. When you have
two lenses face to face like that one acts like a close up lens for the other
one, so there is no "bellow extension" to reduce the f-stop, i.e. f/11 will be
f/11. Both 58mm SLR lenses would be focused at infinity. If 58mm lenses do
not give you enough "working distance" you could use 85mm or 135mm SLR lenses
just as well if they are very sharp lenses to start with. You should make some
kind of ring to hold the two fronts of the two lenses together so that the
optical axis of the two lenses is straight.
If you are going to blow up or reduce you can use two lenses face to face that
have different focal lengths. Very good enlarger lenses can also be put face
to face. To blow up 16mm to a Digital Camera sensor about 35mm movie size you
might put a 58mm lens on the 16mm side and a 135mm lens on the Digital Camera
side with "film" end of the two lenses away from each other. To scan Vista-
Vision (tm) or 65mm camera negatives you might put a 150mm 2 1/4 camera lens on
the film projector side and a 85mm or 58mm on the Digital Camera side.
If you are using a Digital Camera with a sensor larger or smaller than the film
being scanned, you can adjust the focal length of the two lenses to make up for
the size difference, in other words if the sensor is half as big as the film
you use a lens half the focal length as on the film size, if the sensor is
twice as big as the film size you use a lens on the Digital Camera side that is
twice as long. You just need to use lenses that are open enough that you do
not get vignetting or dark corners. The lenses should also have enough
"coverage" to allow some shifting of the lens to center the image on the sensor
and still have sharp corners. Putting the two lenses so that their "front"
elements are almost in "contact" can help reduce light loss in the corners of
the frame.
If you use a single Macro lens to "blow up" and the sensor is larger than the
film, such as going from Super16 to DSLR, you would do better to "reverse
mount" the Macro lens so that the end that normally fits to the camera now
points to the film projector. Most Macro lenses focus up to 1:1 but not past
that, to go past 1:1 you need to turn the Macro lens around. Some Macro lenses
made for use on Bellows are already mounted "backwards" in their lens mount,
and are ONLY for use at "blow up" magnifications greater than 1:1, so if you
use them for reduction they need to be turned around.
Because the sensor in the Digital Camera may not be the right shape for the
film you are scanning, you may need to adjust the lens magnification so that
the film image does not completely fill the sensor in one or more direction and
later crop the converted RAW scan images to cut out the part of the image you
want. Because you will need to crop the images it is best to use a sensor as
large as you can, then crop and down res the images to the required size after
or during color correction. Since Digital Cameras using a Bayer filter have a
resolution about half a monochrome camera for all colors, if you use a DSLR it
should have 10 Megapixels or more to start with even though your frames for
output may just be 3 to 5 Megapixels RGB.
The Sigma SD14 (tm) may be a good alternative to a DSLR using a Bayer filter to
reduce the Bayer artifacts from your scan images if you are using a DSLR.
---
SCANNER MOTOR ISSUES
Since the motor that advances the film projector in your scanner/printer will
need to advance single frame 300,000 times or more just to scan one feature
film the use of a 72RPM Sync motor or Stepper may be a good idea since they do
not have brushes to ware out and run at constant speed.
EMI/RFI from DC brush motors might get into your Digital Camera and make spots
in the frame images. If you use a 72RPM Sync motor off 60Hz AC line you might
want to bypass the micro switches on the cam that stops the motor open and
closed to reduce sparking from the contacts opening and closing with high
voltage ceramic capacitors of about 0.1mf 1000 volt.
An alternative to using an Animation motor stopping and starting is to use a
slower AC Sync motor to run the film projector continuously at maybe 6 to 10
frames per minute, and fire off the camera while the film is motionless in the
gate even though the projector is still running. This can work, but if the
camera gets busy too long the projector will not wait for the camera unless you
cut the power to its motor with a relay. You may need to set some extra delay
for the projector speed so that you are sure the Digital Camera is always ready
to shoot.
---
WORKFLOW ISSUES
DANCINES.EXE (tm) is intended for making a full high resolution Digital
Intermediate of your feature film project. A Digital Intermediate replaces the
traditional work flow.
The steps for Traditional workflow were:
1) Shoot camera negative film with B&H perfs in the movie camera.
2) Print camera negative to master positive stock with B&H perfs in ACME (tm)
step contact printer making color corrections with a punch tape and a Bell and
Howell additive light house.
3) Print color corrected master positive to duplicate negative with B&H perfs
stock on a ACME (tm) or OXBERRY (tm) optical printer "one light" or making a
few color corrections using CC gel filters.
4) Print the color corrected duplicate negative one light in a Bell and Howell
type "C" continuous contact printer to KS perf print stock.
The steps for Digital Intermediate workflow using my programs is:
1) Shoot with anything, Movie camera, Digital Cinema camera, DSLR, flat bed
scanner, generate computer graphics frames with a computer. If a Movie camera
is used to generate frames DANCINES.EXE (tm) is used to automate the movie film
scanner to convert the movie film frames into digital frame images by operating
a digital camera to shoot exposures of each movie film frame. So for Movie
camera use the first step to to Shoot, Process, and Clean the movie film.
2) Make a *.SCF file to tell your DIY movie film scanner what frames to shoot
as digital images and what frames to skip over. Digital images take a lot of
time to make and take up a lot of hard-drive space, so you only want to make
digital frame images of the frames that will be needed for editing.
3) Run DANCINES.EXE (tm) and adjust the configuration, then turn on your movie
film scanner and thread up the film to scan. Normally in the first projector of
an optical printer the film feeds from bottom to top so the image on the film
is right-side-up in the projector gate. Be sure to zero the counter on the
projector in your movie film scanner, you will check this at the end of the run
against the end of run count displayed by DANCINES.EXE (tm).
4) Boot the second computer that will be running the utility for your Digital
Camera that downloads the digital images shot to its large capacity hard-drive
for storage. Before you execute the *.SCF file to shoot the exposures you may
want to makes some test exposures so that you can put CC filters in the light
house to get your color balance as close to neutral and thereby get the longest
tonal range for all colors. Bayer filter cameras and Digital Cameras in
general have a high Kelvin color balance, you may need to add CTB bluish
filters to your light house to push the K degrees up from 2800K to 5500K or
higher. Also the orange base color in color negative drops the Digital Camera
K, so you need to add even more bluish or greenish filters to make up for the
color negative film base tint which can vary from one type of camera negative
to another so you should not mix Kodak (tm) and Fuji (tm) color negative on the
same roll to scan, probably.
5) Select command "2" in the DANCINES.EXE (tm) main menu to execute your *.SCF
file to have the movie film scanner operate. The shot frames should then be
seen to be stored on the second computer running the Digital Camera's image
transfer software.
6) After the film has been scanned check the footage and frames shot on
DANCINES.EXE (tm) screen, and see if that matches the counters on your movie
film scanner's projector to see that there were no errors with the motor
advancing the movie film through the projector in the movie film scanner.
7) Download any needed utilities or updates from the internet. Third party
programs such as DCRAW (tm), IRFANVIEW (tm) or some other images file converter
with batch mode, VIRTUALDUB (tm), and media file converters that can turn a un-
compressed AVI into MPEG2 for making DVDs, i.e. TMPGEnc (tm). You would also
want DVD burning software that does not "double encode" the MPEG2 files to get
full quality. Install DCRAW (tm) into a folder called C:\DCRAW and give it the
dll files needed for your digital camera's RAW file type.
8) Run the utility DCRAWBAT.COM (tm) included in the DANCINES.ZIP (tm) archive
to make a batch file called X.BAT that will call the third party DCRAW (tm)
program to turn your RAW digital frame exposures into numbered *.TIF files.
You no longer need to convert the TIF files into BMP to load into the Edit list
since DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) and DANCAD87.EXE (tm) can read 48bpp 16 bit TIF files
now. If you want to make a workprint AVI with VirtualDub (tm) you can use
IRFANVIEW (tm) or some other graphics file converter that supports batch
conversion to convert the 48bpp 16 bit *.TIF files into *.BMP 24bpp files. If
you are not using a DSLR such as the Canon XTi (tm) to make your digital
exposures, you may need to use some other utility program to convert your RAW
images into 48bpp 16 bit RGB *.TIF or 8bpp and 24bpp *.BMP images.
9) From step 9 on the Digital Intermediate workflow is the same for frame
images from most sources, i.e. non movie film sources. To get the maximum
quality a single exposure of each movie film frame with a DSLR is not enough.
You should set the DSLR to "auto bracket" making three exposures with one on
exposure, one at plus a stop and one at minus a stop. You should then arrange
the light house or a filter wheel so that you shoot three exposures with red
light, three with green light, and three with blue light. You can shoot more
exposures of each frame for better quality, but 9 exposures is enough for
acceptable quality for average work, but you can make your own mind up about
how good you want the results vs. the time and cost required. The Fuse command
in the Kinema Edit list Insert command can be used to Fuse the 9 BMP 24bpp
exposures into a single 48bpp NIP file. The Fuse command can take a long time
since it uses math to find brightness for each pixel, so you should have
another computer just for running the Fuse command on the BMP files made from
the RAW scan images. Once you have made a back-up of the Fused *.NIP files you
should be able to delete the RAW files (*.CR2), the TIF files, and any BMP
files made from the TIF files to recover hard-drive space on your scanner's
computers. Because converting the RAW files to TIF may slow down the computer
that is running the Digital Camera's USB download utility, you should probably
have another computer just for converting the RAW files into TIF files. That
way your Movie film scanner can run 24/7 and you move the files from one
computer to another for the processing steps (or you would run the appropriate
software on each computer holding the scanned images from different rolls of
movie film.) If you were making a stop motion animated movie using a DSLR to
shoot your frame images, you would still get better results if you shoot three
or more exposures for each movie frame and use the Fuse command to combine the
pixel data to get a higher quality result. In fact if you put a motorized
filter wheel in front of your DSLR (or use colored LED lighting of your models
i.e. Red, Green, and Blue LEDs like for light house mode 3) you could shoot 9
bracketed color separation images of your stop motion models and get better
color and image tones by using the Fuse command to convert the 9 exposures into
a single 48bpp NIP color image file (the actual bpp that are good data in the
48bpp NIP file will depend on the number of exposures that you fuse, fusing 9
exposures gives to about 9 to 10 bits image quality, more exposures gives you
more bits generally.)
10) Although the color correction Grading command in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) can
process 24bpp BMP files, color correction works by increasing contrast in parts
of the image tonal range, so if you start with 24bpp you will end up with gaps
in the histogram and less than 24bpp in the corrected images. If you color
correct 48bit TIF or NIP frame images that have 10 bits (or more) of valid data
then when you do normal color corrections you will not get histogram gaps and
end up with 24bpp or better in the color corrected images. Therefor it is
important that you Fuse several different exposures of each frame to get better
data before you do the color correction. To be able to color correct a shot
you need to copy the numbered BMP frame exposures into the I01 resolution
directory folder for an empty shot in the project structure. You make a
project structure with the Structure command in the Files Utilities Kinema sub-
menu. You then move the cursor in the Kinema Edit list to the shot you copied
the TIF or BMP exposure images into and press the Space-Bar. Pressing the
Space-Bar brings you into a menu that has the Insert command, you then use the
Fuse option in the image Insert command to convert the TIF or BMP exposures
into NIP frame files in the I01 resolution level directory folder for that
shot. The shot number folder you save the shot into does not matter since you
can move the shot numbers around in the Edit list, but you may want to group
shots done in the same scene or something.
11) After you get the Fused NIP frame images made you can do rough color
correction. Generally just picking a Key frame mid-way through the shot is
good enough, or you can do the rough color correction on the zero slate frame.
The frames from each shot should be numbered so that the frame the slate closes
on is frame zero, you find that by looking at your negative with a magnifying
glass while it is in the sync block, and you program the *.SCF file for
DANCINES.EXE (tm) to not shoot frames before the frame that the slate closes at
for each shot. Use the Insert command and pick the option for re-size and
color correction NIP to NIP. You will then be making a copy of the I01 Fused
NIP files into the I02 resolution level folders for each shot. At the same
time that the Grading command does the color correction it can re-size, letter
box, mirror, rotate, 'scope/de-'scope, and otherwise format the frame images at
the aspect ratio and resolution that they will be needed at for output to the
film recorder or for making Blu-ray (tm) or DVDs.
12) After you have the output size images formatted and color corrected in the
I02 directory folders for each shot (you do not need to wait until you have all
the shots scanned) you can make the "proxy" frame images for use with the Pick
and View command while editing. Again use the Insert command for the shots
with its option convert NIP to PIX with re-size. The re-size is controlled by
the video mode the Pixel files will be made at. The PIX aka Pixel files are
special image files that are optimized to load very fast into the video card's
memory so that you can view them at 24/25/30fps. The bottle neck as far as the
speed and resolution that can be used for the PIX files is the hard-drive, if
you can use a solid state hard-drive you may be able to use larger and or
better color depth PIX proxy frames while editing. The recommended resolution
for the proxy frames is 640x350x4bpp dithered 32 monochrome, that sounds low,
but when made from 2048x1152 48bpp images using the "Quad pixel" re-size and
run at 24fps it looks good enough for editing. If you have a RAID 0 array of
solid state hard-drives you may be able to use 640x480x8bpp monochrome,
640x480x16bpp color, or maybe 800x600x8bpp monochrome or 800x600x16bpp color.
DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) supports proxy frames at many resolutions from 320x200 to
1920x1440 and higher if your video boards supports the right VESA 1.2 codes.
If you do not have a array of solid state hard-drives you may be able to
install GB of RAM into your computer and use a RAM disk utility to put the
project structure holding the proxy frames into a RAM disk for smoother play in
the Pick and View commands. Another trick is to play the shot once then play
it again, it may run smoother the second time if the OS has buffered the hard-
drive. The 640x350x4bpp proxy frames are small enough to play without (many)
dropped frames from an EIDE ATA 133 hard-drive with a 8MB buffer and 7200RPM
under Windows 98SE. Under XP (tm) you may get some dropped frames from time to
time when playing from a SATA hard-drive. The dropped frames while using the
Pick and View commands do not have any affect on the quality of the output
frame set that will go to your film recorder or be used for making the Blu-ray
(tm) or DVD, it is just that the real time play back is limited by your
computer's ability to load the un-compressed proxy frames into the video card
at the true 24fps (or 25/30fps) frame rate. You will have to experiment to see
what resolution proxy frames you can get to play on your system. The main set
of proxy frames normally are all put into the I11 resolution directory folders.
All of the proxy frames for a given Ixx resolution need to be the SAME
resolution or the View command will not work across shot cuts. You can make a
second set of higher resolution proxy frames and keep them in I10 or I12, you
could then change the default resolution in the configuration and just view
those single frame in the Pick command to inspect the color corrected frames at
higher resolutions like 1920x1440x32bpp. If you try to run Pixel frames at too
high resolution you will get a "slide show" style playback since the program
will keep sync to the sound playback (or clock for MOS playback) and load a
frame that is close to the right timecode. The Proxy frames should always be
in Divided file name type so that they will work with the Pick and View
commands.
13) Once you get the proxy frames into the I11 resolution folders of the
project structure you use the Pick command to set the head, key, and tail
frames. You can make the proxy frames from the NIP or BMP exposures before you
do any color correction, but their contrast will not be as high as the
corrected frame images, and if they are color the color would be off balance.
14) Go into the Track list for each shot and use the audio Insert command you
get by pressing the Space-Bar in the Track list to convert the WAV files for
each audio track that goes with that shot into RAW audio frames that correspond
to each proxy image frame. You can have many audio tracks for each shot.
After the editing is "picture locked" you can enter the Track list from any
shot and select the "other" Track list that is for tracks that run the full
length of the edited project, and insert those audio tracks that run the full
length over the edit points, e.g. music, narration, and such. Exit the audio
track list back to the Edit list shot command menu.
15) Select the Link command to link the edited shots into a cut set of frames,
the Link command can also do the sound mix if you want to hear the sound mix
and look at the edited cut shots, but mixing can take a long time, so there is
an option to do a MOS link of the editing just to look at.
16) Select View to look at the edited shots. If you mixed the sound also you
can use one of the sound play back modes. The best sound play back mode is
using a second computer to play the mix wave file and lock to picture with
SMPTE LTC time code. When using the SMPTE sync you can stop the View command,
back-up, fast forward, and the sound will automatically sync up and start to
play at speed after a few seconds to achieve sync lock.
17) If everything looks good in the View command at proxy resolution you can
use the Insert command to make a set of DVD resolution 720x480 BMP 24bpp down
resolution copies of your film recorder color corrected resolution frames and
put them into maybe I08 resolution folders for each shot. Be sure to save the
DVD resolution frames as Divided file name type so that the Aggregate command
can use them.
18) Use the Aggregate command to copy a set of edited DVD 720x480 BMP 24bpp
frames into a sub-directory. Since VIRTUALDUB (tm) does not understand my
Divided file name type, you need to use the Padded numbered file name type, and
since the OS may limit the number of frames to about 65535 per folder you may
not be able to make an AVI file with all the frames in your project at one
time, but you should be able to make an AVI of each reel (movies are cut to be
printed into 2000 foot reels that last about 22 minutes so a four reel movie is
about 88 minutes long). You can then later maybe join the un-compressed AVI
files for each reel into a single MPG2 file for the whole project, or something
like that. Anyway, use VIRTUALDUB (tm) to convert the WAV mix for each reel
and the aggregated frames for each reel into an un-compressed AVI file. You
may need to convert the audio from 48000 samples per second to 44100 samples
per second in a third party program like Magix (tm) before you combine the WAV
and BMP files to make an un-compressed AVI file so that the sound will be in
the right format for the DVD player. The Aggregate command just copies the
image files used in the edit from each shot's folder to a single folder as a
single numbered set, so any type of image frame file can in theory be used such
as *.CIN, *.DPX, *.TIF, *.JPG, and so on, that way you can use DANCAD3D.EXE
(tm) to edit a film made of image files compatible with commercial movie film
scanners and movie film recorders. In order to use Pick and View you would
still need to convert your frame images into 48bpp 16 bit *.TIF or 24bpp 8 bit
*.BMP so that you could make *.PIX proxy frames. If you were unable to make
proxy frames you could still use the Edit list and enter the time code or frame
count for the edits from a telecine transfer of your camera negative manually,
that would allow the Aggregate command to be used to make a set of edited frame
files for output, and for the audio sound mixing in the track list to be used
to mix the sound track. There may be third party image converters that could
make TIF or BMP files from whatever image file type you have, so making proxy
frames should be able to be wrangled somehow.
19) On a fast computer running XP (tm) you should be able to display a 720x480
color un-compressed AVI with stereo sound. You can look at your edit and mix
running in MediaPlayer (tm) and see if there are any issues that you need to go
back and redo on some of the shots. If you change the total running time you
will need to redo the audio tracks that run the whole length of the project so
you should be sure the picture edit is good before you call "picture lock".
20) The Edit list Link command can make a "shoot list" file for DANCINEL.EXE
(tm), or you can use Aggregate to make a continuous set of output resolution
frames for sending to the film recorder.
21) Run DANCINEL.EXE (tm) then configure and calibrate your film recorder. Then
use the "shoot list" or select the first frame of an aggregated set of output
resolution color corrected frames. DANCINEL.EXE (tm) will then expose the
print stock or duplicate negative stock with your output resolution color
corrected frames in edited order. If you are making a print you may need to
make a sound negative or electro print the mixed WAV file onto the print stock.
22) You need to use a lab to process the print stock or to process and print
the duplicate negative film. You then will have an edited print with sound or a
sound negative and printing negative to make many prints with in the
traditional way in a Bell and Howell "C" printer.
23) Screen your finished film project in a 35mm projector. As an alternative
to finishing your project by making a 35mm film print, you can use the
Aggregate command to output a set of edited high resolution BMP 24bpp frames
(e.g. 1920x1080p) that can be formatted for Digital Projection using some 3rd
party software, much like making a MPEG2 file described above but higher
resolution. The Insert command would be used to re-size the film output
resolution frames to the size used for the digital projection maybe in the I09
resolution folders, then the Aggregate command should take those re-sized
frames and make a set that matches the edits in the edit list. The audio WAV
of the mix can be re-sampled if needed for the digital projection standard. If
the digital projection is not going to run at the same frame rate as the film
was edited for, you may need to re-sample the mix WAV file to adjust the
running play time so that the audio's frames will stay in sync with the images.
---
OVERVIEW OF DANCINES.COM (tm) COMMANDS AND CONFIGURATION
DANCINES.EXE (tm) is still undergoing development, so the exact nature of its
commands and configuration in the version you have may differ from what is
described here, but this should give a general idea of what some of the prompts
are there for.
In the "main menu" of DANCINES.EXE v1.xx (tm) you have these commands,
There are two commands that read the *.SCF (Scan/Shoot Cue File),
Press [1] key, lets you simulate the execution of a *.SCF file to check for
data entry errors. Remember that all things must be spaced in the *.SCF file
and the frame numbers of the ins and outs must be consecutive.
Press [2] key, this is the main command, it executes the *.SCF file, so be sure
the scanner is setup, powered, the counters on the projector are zeroed, the
digital camera is on, lens focused, X-Y adjustments set for the image to be
framed, the exposure set, CC filters are inserted for neutral color balance,
and everything is ready to go, before you press [Y] when it asks Yes or No to
proceed. Normally for scanning you would always be "printing" the "A" roll, so
the *.SCF file would just have .pa and .pz dot commands for the parts to scan
and the parts to skip, but DANCINES.EXE (tm) supports all rolls from "A" to "Z"
if you need that many.
There are four commands to manually operate the scanner/printer to aid in
setting up the exposure and loading the projector,
Press [L] key, this lets you close the light house lamp relay to turn on the
light house lamp. Since the light house lamp is wired into the relay it is
easier to turn it on with the software than to re-connect it while doing setup,
also it is easy to forget to turn it off or on if you are using a bypass switch
and thereby screw up your scan or print job. When you exit this command the
lamp relay is returned to the off setting so that the program is ready to
execute a *.SCF file starting with the lamp off, the program turns the lamp on
and off as needed for printing the rolls, and when the job is done so that the
lamp does not burn more than needed. Tungsten lamps are normally run at about
80 volts to make them last longer in a scanner or printer. You could wire up a
photo cell to set the hold pin 10 on the parallel port in hold state if the
lamp does not come on when powered, but if you are just scanning film, rather
than printing you could just restart the job if the lamp burns out mid-way
through.
Press [V] key, this lets you set the light house color and brightness if you
are using a light house that is supported in the program to work from the vane
numbers in the *.SCF file. Since the light house is under software control
this is the only way you can change the brightness and or color in order to
make test frames or take a light reading. This is not used with light house
type 0 because it just uses CC filters, and light house type 2 because it has
knobs on it to set the vane numbers to. In light house type 1 and 2 the color
trim values are entered with the trim controls, but the trim does not show in
light house type 1 until you use this to select a vane for the particular valve
because the trim and vane are electronically triggered together before the
light valve moves, in other words if you turn the trim control on the electric
light valves you will not see a change in the light until the vane is set by
using this command with the power to the light house control electronics on.
Press [S] key, this lets you shoot test exposures in the camera without
bypassing the relays that control the camera. If the software has been setup
to shoot more than one exposure per frame, then this command will work through
that sequence, so check the configuration before using this command to be sure
that you will be making the required number of exposures. There is an option
to have the lamp relay for the light house On or Off for the exposure/camera
advance. With the light house off this lets you advance the camera without
making an exposure on film in a movie film camera, e.g. to run the flashed
footage past the gate or something.
Press [P] key, this lets you advance the projector a given number of frames and
is useful for running in past the head leader and out past the tail leader.
Always have enough tail leader so that when the program stops advancing the
projector at the end of the *.SCF file there is still film on the supply core
and that way the torque motor will not spin at high speed for hours at a time
until you can get back to the scanner/printer to load the next roll.
There are three commands to configure the operational options,
Press [D] key, this lets you manually set the values in the timing delay loop.
The PC has a timer that only counts 18.2 ticks per second so is too infrequent
for many tasks, to make up for that DANCINES.EXE (tm) has its own timing loop
that is set to time in 1/100 of a second. The values you enter at this prompt
try to have the timing loop time for 10 seconds, you need a stop watch to check
that the timing is right on. Slowly increase the values until you read 10
seconds for the time between when you press [Return] and the 10 second message
comes up. Accurate timing under Windows (tm) is not good because other
programs use part of the CPU time, so it is better to run DANCINES.EXE (tm)
under DOS 6.22 or FREEDOS (tm) so that it is the only program running. DOS95
and DOS98 can also be used if you make a Boot floppy under Windows 95 OSR2 (tm)
or Windows 98SE (tm) using their DOS command FORMAT A: /S. You then reboot the
computer with the DOS95 or DOS98 floppy disk before you run DANCINES.EXE (tm).
Press [M] key, this lets you set the timing for the projector motor. If the
camera fires before the projector motor has advanced one frame increase this
value, if the projector advances two or more frames before the camera fires one
frame decrease this value. The timing values relate to the 1/4 second to 4
second markings on a particular ACME (tm) animation motor's exposure dial. For
other animation motors on your scanner/printer projector you will need to
adjust the value. With the sound effects active you will hear a high pitched
sound when the projector relay contacts are closed and a lower sound telling
you the program is waiting for the projector's animation motor to stop turning,
so the lower sound should end just after the projector's animation motor stops
turning. 72RPM sync motors turn a little faster than 1RPS, so the projector
advance cycle time is a little shorter than one second. Since the timing on
the motor may be marked for a camera with 180 degree shutter the value you
enter here may be 1/2x or 2x the value on the animation motor you have. If the
projector advances two frames rather than one you probably need to make the
value here half as big. If the camera shoots before the projector has stopped
turning you probably have the value here too short.
Press [G] key, this brings up a general configuration for DANCINES.EXE (tm),
the prompts are mostly self explanatory, but I will try to go over the ones
that were present in v1.00 to give you some idea what they are there for.
Feet and Frames prompt, because the *.SCF file can have the frame numbers
entered in Feet and Frames like standard sync blocks, this tells the program
what type of film you are printing. 16 frames per foot is normally for 35mm
movie film negatives, 40 frames per foot for 16mm and Super16 films, 72 frames
per foot for Super8, and 80 frames per foot for Regular 8mm. Feet and Frames
does not support fractional frames.
Frames per Second prompt, is required so that frame numbers entered as SMPTE
time code will convert the frame numbers into the right time plus frames value.
The normal value would be 24, but 25 and 30 could also be used if you shoot at
25 or 30 frames per second. If you use the Telcom Research T102 (tm) external
SMPTE time base locked to a Video signal, to maybe get 23.976fps or 29.97fps
DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) still treats the frames as if the are 24fps or 30fps and the
time base is running slow, so you would need to adjust the audio length before
and after the edit to get the audio the right length, in other words no frames
are dropped from the output set so it is best to edit at 24fps and 30fps and to
listen to the audio off pitch, then after the edit when the audio plays at the
right speed and is adjusted for length it should be back on pitch if the camera
was running at 23.976fps or 29.97fps. SMPTE does not support fractional
frames.
Samples per Frame prompt, is required if you use audio samples in place of
frame numbers for the ins and outs. 2000 samples per frame is normal if you
shoot 24fps and record at 48000 samples per second. Samples per Frame does not
support fractional samples.
Audio state prompt, the program has built in sound effects that come out of the
small speaker in your computer, if it has one, but not the sound board. These
sound effects can help you de-bug your scanner/printer since you can hear what
is going on. It is also good to put LEDs on your parallel port interface so
you can see the program sending signals to your scanner/printer and then you
can know if it is your scanner/printer not reading the signals or you have the
configuration wrong and the signals themselves are not right. Once you get
everything working you can select the sound effects to be off with this prompt.
If you put LEDs on the signal pins of your Parallel Port you should have a 10K
ohm 1/4 watt resistor in series with the LED so that it does not load the
signal too much. If the LED does not light up you may have it the wrong way
around.
The Scan Group Limit prompt, lets you set a limit on how many exposures are
shot before the program pauses and puts up a message on the computer's console
screen. If you are using a Compact Flash card you would set this value to a
value smaller than the maximum number of images the memory card can hold. For
instance, the Canon XTi (tm) can save about 170 RAW images in a 2GB Compact
Flash card. If you have your camera wired to a computer to save the images
through the USB cable you might set this limit to 9999 or 10000 if your camera
uses a four digit number for the images saved. The main point is that you do
not let the camera overrun its storage or you will be shooting frames that will
not be stored. When you reach the Scan Group Limit you change the memory card
in the camera and or reset its counter number to 0 as needed.
The Shoot Pulse Exposure prompt, lets you control how long the camera "trigger"
is held down. Some cameras may fire several frames if you hold the trigger
down too long, so this needs to be long enough for the shoot relay to close and
not too long to cause problems. Setting it to 25 gives you 25/100 or 0.25
second trigger hold down. If you have delay and logic on the shoot pin of the
parallel port output so that the ring on the electronic cable release closes
before the tip to simulate the way the Canon XTi (tm) cable release works you
have to have a little extra time on this pulse so that the sub-mini phone jack
tip relay will hold on for at least 0.125 second (or what always works).
The Mirror Lock up prompt, lets you have the program send two camera fire
pulses per exposure so that the reflex mirror in a DSLR will move up on the
first pulse and the shutter will fire on the second pulse. To turn on Mirror
Lock up mode in your DSLR you use its menus. Be sure that when you start the
*.SCF file the camera is in pre-lock up state, otherwise DANCINES.EXE (tm) will
be out of phase with the DSLR's one-two trigger sequence. I have not found
this to make much difference and it slows down the scanning. If your scanner
or printer is not very solid you might get sharper results by using the Mirror
lock up mode.
The Disable Hold on Pin 10 signal prompt, lets you turn off the hold feature if
you do not have a photo transistor wired up to pin 10 to detect the red hold
light on your DSLR camera. Pin 10 can also be held in hold state by a micro
switch on the projector's motor's cam to keep the camera from shooting while
the projector is advancing. The program only checks pin 10 just before firing
the camera to make an exposure, so the red busy light on the camera can be on
while the projector is advancing. So the program will only go into hold right
before the next exposure, pin 10 will not stop the motors as it would in my CAM
programs since the animation motors are not stepper motors run by DANCINES.EXE
(tm), they are powered from the AC line mains or other sources. So this is
just to hold back the program from sending a shoot pulse while the DSLR is busy
and might skip an exposure.
The Hold Digital Filter Delay prompt, lets you see how long the program should
look for the red busy light on the DSLR. It checks several times since the red
busy light may blink. A value of 10 sets 10/100 or 0.1 second delay per check
of pin 10 for signal that the red busy light is on, or some other hold signal
is active. If you do not need a busy check before each exposure you can set
this to 0.
The Skip Print prompt, is for non standard 35mm film types, you would not be
using those so just set this to 1 all the time. If skip scanning is done the
image numbers saved need to be fussed with to get the frame set in order. You
might be able to write a Macro in DANCAD3D.EXE (tm) to untangle the frame
numbers for skip printing if you need to get into it for some reason.
The Parallel or Serial Exposure prompt, lets you select if you are using a
Monochrome Digital Camera or a Bayer filter or color type Digital Camera.
Parallel mode means that Red, Green, and Blue are exposed at the same time in a
color Digital Camera. Serial means that a Monochrome camera or Color camera is
used and separation exposure images are made for the Red, Green, and Blue
through colored filters or using colored lamps, that will later be Fused into a
single RGB NIP file with the Fuse option of the Kinema Edit list Insert
command. Parallel exposures is also used for making color separations if you
are going to run the roll of film through the scanner three times with a color
filter in the light house, giving you three sets of scanned frames for Red,
Green, and Blue. Automatic dust removal would not work in Parallel mode with
four passes since the dust on the film would change, increase, fall off, or
move around because the film would wind up and unwind between exposures of the
same frame, you always get "rainbow" dust when scanning in Parallel mode with
three passes for color separations.
When you select Parallel Exposure you get these prompts,
Number of Parallel Exposures per frame prompt, this lets you set the number of
exposures you want per frame, if you just want one exposure per frame enter 1,
if you are using the automatic bracket feature in your DSLR select 3 if it
makes three images, one on exposure, one +1 stop, and one -1 stop. You can
enter larger numbers of exposures per movie film frame to get higher quality,
but that will slow down your scanning. The Fuse option of the Kinema Edit list
Insert command would be used to Fuse the exposures into a single frame file.
Color results made with the parallel mode with white light are not as good as
using the Serial mode with colored LEDs or filtered lights since the Bayer
filter on the Digital Camera sensor does not filter the light as well.
Parallel Exposure mode is good enough for scanning Black and White film, when
you want color that is not bright and clear, and for fast "work-print"
scanning.
Exposure time for Parallel Exposures, each exposure can be set to have a
different delay time. Because the auto bracket feature in the DSLR changes the
exposure time you may want the program to match the exposure times to keep the
scanner moving as fast as it can to get the roll of movie film scanned in the
minimum time. If you had all three exposures set to the longest exposure time
the total scan time would be longer than if the delay is just as long as is
really needed.
When you select Serial Exposure you get these prompts,
Number of IR exposures per frame prompt, this is the number of exposures that
would be Fused to make the IR mask for dust removal. The IR exposure is first
since if you have a monitor plugged into your DSLR's composite output you could
see the dust and maybe flick some of it off with air tweezers or a paint brush.
The second IR exposure could then be used for automatic or semi-automatic dust
removal. I am still working on this feature so let me know by email if you
have an interest in the IR scan. If you do not want the IR scan just enter 0
here. The IR scan does not do much good for Black and White film since silver
blocks the IR light. Color film passes the IR light if you use the right
filter, you can use over exposed flashed color film of the same type as you are
scanning with a Tungsten lamp as the IR filter, since the flashed and processed
film that has been bleached to remove the silver will just pass the right IR
wavelengths, you may need to stack two or more thicknesses of the flashed film
to block all the visible wave lengths.
Number of Red exposures per frame prompt, this is for the number of Red
exposures. If your DSLR is set to auto bracket three exposures then this would
be a multiple of three, i.e. 3, 6, or 9 etc. You can select 0 exposures if you
are shooting Black and White film and will only use the Green exposures.
Number of Green exposures per frame prompt, this is for the number of Green
exposures. If your DSLR is set to auto bracket three exposures then this would
be a multiple of three, i.e. 3, 6, or 9 etc. Green exposures would always be 1
or more for normal use.
Number of Blue exposures per frame prompt, this is for the number of Blue
exposures. If your DSLR is set to auto bracket three exposures then this would
be a multiple of three, i.e. 3, 6, or 9 etc. You can select 0 exposures if you
are shooting Black and White film and will only use the Green exposures.
IR exposure time prompt, this lets you set the exposure time for the IR
exposure. This is mostly for reducing the camera post shoot pulse delay
shorter for the shorter exposures when the camera is bracketing the exposure to
speed up the total scan time for the roll. If you select more than one IR
exposure you can optimize the delay times for the individual exposures.
Red exposure time prompt, this lets you set the exposure time for the Red
exposure. This is mostly for reducing the camera post shoot pulse delay
shorter for the shorter exposures when the camera is bracketing the exposure to
speed up the total scan time for the roll. If you select more than one Red
exposure you can optimize the delay times for the individual exposures.
Green exposure time prompt, this lets you set the exposure time for the Green
exposure. This is mostly for reducing the camera post shoot pulse delay
shorter for the shorter exposures when the camera is bracketing the exposure to
speed up the total scan time for the roll. If you select more than one Green
exposure you can optimize the delay times for the individual exposures.
Blue exposure time prompt, this lets you set the exposure time for the Blue
exposure. This is mostly for reducing the camera post shoot pulse delay
shorter for the shorter exposures when the camera is bracketing the exposure to
speed up the total scan time for the roll. If you select more than one Blue
exposure you can optimize the delay times for the individual exposures.
After the camera trigger prompts are some about the light house,
Light House Type prompt, This prompt lets you select the type of light house,
this is important because some of the light house types are automatically
controlled by DANCINES.EXE (tm) and set the color and brightness of the light
source for the movie film single frame projector using the light vane value
numbers you entered into the *.SCF file for each shot to scan/print. Light
house type 0 is for just a light bulb that can turn on and off, adjustments to
the exposure are made with filters in the light path, the iris of the macro
printing lens, and with the shutter time in the Digital Camera. Light house 1
is for a Bell and Howell additive light house with electro mechanical light
valves, those come off old movie film printers and the old light valves may not
set the right light every time because they stick and need adjustments. Light
House type mode 2 is for Bell and Howell manual vane type additive color light
houses, but with those you need to sit there and change the dials on the light
house each time the program prompts you. Light House type mode 3 is for a
light house with colored LEDs that can change automatically or for a light
house with a filter wheel that is motorized.
That's it for configuration of v1.00, if any more prompts appear you can
probably read the screen and figure out what they are for, maybe, else you can
email me with support questions. If you use DANCINES.EXE (tm) I would like to
know what you are doing with it so I can keep you in mind when I might make any
future changes.
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FURTHER INFORMATION
Additional information may be found at www.DANCAD3D.com (sm) which you must
visit before trying to use or test DANCINES.EXE (tm). If you have specific
questions or suggestions you wish to contribute see Section: 8 at the Web site.