If I Want To Scan Film... How Much Hard Drive Space?

[Manfred Lopez]

If I were to scan 16,000 feet of Super 16mm film into cineon format at 2K, what would the per-minute storage requirements be? Does anyone know a useful link that has this kind of info? Thanks in advance.

 

[Manfred Lopez]

Okay, I found this:

"To compute the amount of disk space a Cineon image will consume, use the following formula:

(X Resolution) x (Y Resolution)/250,000 = File Size (in megabytes)

For example, an image that is 1828 by 1556 will require about 11.377 megabytes on disk."


So, that's for each frame right? So 16,000 feet = 640,000 frames... Which at the above frame size would be... 7,281,280 mb.

Would I need a 8 terabytes in drives? Could someone confirm my math? Or am I confusing Mb with mb?

 

[Dan Hudgins]

four bytes per pixel.

four bytes per pixel.

Uncompressed DPX should be about 4 bytes per pixel plus the header, its 30bit data (10bits per RGB) in 32bits or four bytes. Unless the file uses packed bits?

2048x1556x4=12746752 or about 12.8MB per frame.

16,000 feet of Super 16mm film is 16000*40frames per foot = 640,000 frames.

640,000 * 12.8 = 8192000MB or 8192GB or 8.2TB Plus quite a bit of overhead for the OS if you do not ZIP or RAR the frames into archive files to save space, you might need 10TB to 12TB or more to take into account the folders and OS overhead.

I use 16bit 48bpp TIF files in my system for negative scans since 10bits can posterize under heavy grading past the 9th bit, if you start with 14 to 16bits you can do heavy grading to clean up the color negative images and still have more than 9 good bits.

You also need to figure the scan time, since 640000 frames is a lot to scan, if the scaner takes 15seconds per frame you have 4 frames per minute, so

640000/4=160000minutes/60=2666hours/24=111days to scan with the scanner running 24/7, how are you going to pay for that, or do you have your own scanner?

Our DIY scanner outputs RAW sensor data, so the files are about two bytes per pixel, but it scans near 4K 3:2 ratio, its setup to run automaticly from my DANCINES.EXE (tm) which can read s script file to skip over shots (or frames) you do not need to scan to save disk space.

 

[Manfred Lopez]

Thanks Dan

Thanks for clearing up the math for me. I didn't realize the time issue... I thought by now it would be faster. As far as cost is concerned, it seems it's not too bad considering that the going rate per Cineon frame is 3 cents. So 640,000 frames would be $19,200. Not too bad if you consider that the scanning of the film could count as the blow up. There are even places that will scan (not telecine) an entire feature film for only $5,000.

Anyway, it sounds amazing you developed your own scanner. Is this for your own use or do you offer scanning services? And if so, how much do you charge?

 

[Noah Kadner]

Just a question but why so much into Cineon? 16,000 feet is about 8 hours right? Is this a restoration project or something? If it's just dailies from a movie I'd do a telecine transfer to HDCAM SR and go from there. No real benefit to a frame by frame scan. A 16mm>HDCAM SR>35mm output can look great for example if this is for theatrical. But again, why so much footage?

Noah

 

[Manfred Lopez]

It's for a documentary series in six parts. Hence the 8 hours or so.