SCANITY^TM Archive

SCANITY Archive is a high-speed, optically pin registered film scanner that ensures the smoothest, safest and steadiest film handling. It has a special feature set to address the specific and unique requirements of Archive facilities:

Roller Gate

DFT designed SCANITY's roller gate to avoid friction and abrasion on the film. Only the edge of the film touches the roller as it travels gently through the film gate on the two gate rollers. No skid plate or stationary reference edge is in contact with the film ensuring a clean and safe film path as no dust is produced from abrasion.

Capstan

A rubber-coated capstan for film transport is a proven concept and is tolerant to all kinds of film imperfections. SCANITY's digital servo system precisely controls acceleration and film tension. There is no smoother or safer way than to continuously transport the film.

Pinless, sprocketless film transport

Archive film often has damages due to careless use, aging or wear and tear that may need repair prior to scanning. SCANITY can help keep the repair down to a minimum due in part to its smooth, pinless and sprocketless film transport system. SCANITY's film transport handles the film with great care ensuring that no further damage occurs.

Film shrinkage measurement and display

SCANITY's film shrinkage measurement feature displays the amount of how much the film has shrunk. SCANITY has the ability to scan shrunken film without adjustments or modifying film gates up to a shrinkage of 4%.

Supporting Film Plate

Supporting film plates that provide precise guidance of the film can be plugged onto the bobbins so that bent film is safely and smoothly wound. This prevents the bent film from becoming slack and fall off the bobbins.

Reduced Shuttle Speed

Some archive material is so delicate or fragile that despite the most gentle film transport, reduced film transport speed is desired. Simply flip a switch to lower the speed of the film transport as well as acceleration and slowing down in visible shuttle or spooling mode.

Optical Perforation Detection

SCANITY's optical perforation detection is an alternative to mechanical perforation systems using pins that provide a tight and possibly harmful grip on the perfs. SCANITY uses a high resolution optical system for detecting the perfs and a touchless pin registration that ensures safe and gentle film handling, and a smoother transfer. Steadiness of images are electronically corrected in a sophisticated special processor.

LED illumination

Delicate archive films need to be illuminated with cold and low intensity light in order to avoid thermal stress and additional color fading. The extraordinary low intensity of light required to adequately illuminate the film and produce a high quality image is due to an extremely sensitive TDI Sensor, which comprises of 96 scan lines and scans every film dye 96 times. This new custom sensor features a higher sensitivity of approximately 50 times compared to the sensitivity of a single line sensor. Despite low light levels, scanning still takes place at fast speeds - e.g. 2K at 25 fps on SCANITY.

Audio Scanning - Optical or magnetic audio on print film

An optional audio scanner mounted into the SCANITY film path reads analog optical mono or stereo audio tracks of 16 and 35 mm film and magnetic audio tracks on 16 mm film. This feature eliminates the need for a separate scanning path for audio scanning and downstream audio/video synchronization.
Audio Scanning Datasheet

Film Grain Reduction

Many features for modifying a scanned file are available in the Batch Processing tool in SCANITY. Grain reduction is just one of them, which allows users to generate a second and cleaned up version of the originally image. The original image is kept in memory unless it is manually discarded.

Scanning Speeds - 10x Faster

One of SCANITY's unique features is its extremely fast scanning speeds. For low-resolution files (250x180 pixel), it scans as high as 96 frames per second on 35mm, 4 perf film. For high resolution scans preserving all content detail, SCANITY scans at 15 frames per second on 35 mm and 4 perf film. Whether you need to quickly browse to check content or record high quality files, SCANITY's speed is unparalleled to any other film scanner on the market.

Diffuse light from adaptive LED light source

Diffuse light optically reduces the visibility of fine dirt and scratches on film and reproduces crisp and natural looking images. The light comes from an integration sphere which is illuminated by four different colored clusters of LEDs – blue, green and two different red channels. The red channels with dedicated spectral characteristics take into consideration the differences of positive vs. negative film for ensuring extremely accurate color reproduction.

IR camera

The optional IR camera scans dirt and scratches separately from the RBG image. It provides a dirt matte either as a separate DPX file or as an RGB image with alpha channel in the same DPX file. The dirt matte supports downstream restoration by making the process faster and easier since the necessary image analysis for dirt and scratch detection is no longer necessary. Only the concealment of the disturbed images parts is still necessary, which is a fairly simple and fast task.

Dirt and Scratch Concealment

Concealing detected dirt and scratches can be performed on the fly with dedicated firmware algorithms in SCANITY and without compromising speed. The resulting image is cleaned up while it is scanned - free from fine scratches and dirt.

Variable Scaling

SCANITY incorporates a real-time scaler that resizes the image and compensates for any film shrinkage. The scaler provides 4096 horizontal pixels from an ACA format and the horizontal and vertical flip function fixes incorrectly laced film.

Vertical Over-Scanning

Splices on films can have wide tolerances causing the frame bar to jump in and out of the visible image area at scene changes. SCANITY scans more of the picture height and shows parts of the previous and following frame allowing the image area to be selected in post production without losing any content. SCANITY's advantage compared to an optical zoom is that the scanned file size increases as the image area (height and width) becomes larger, therefore the resolution (lines per inch / pixel pitch) is kept constantly high. This allows users to maintain image sharpness throughout the post production process - even after cropping and repositioning. The image height is 25% larger than the original film frame, equally dispersed on the top and bottom of the frame.

Individual Light & Density Range Control

Colors on positive and negative film may fade due to age and inappropriate storage or use. As long as there is a little remaining color information left in the color layers it can be recovered. SCANITY offers a wide range and headroom of light as well as the tools to control the intensity of each color of the LED illumination. SCANITY controls adjustable density ranges letting users get the very best out of faded films.

Variable Aperture Correction

This feature compensates for unavoidable losses that occur in an optical scanning system. A neutral aperture correction means the images are seen exactly as they are on the film. An expanded algorithm aids the operator to over or under compensate to make the image sharper or softer. This tool adjusts the looks of different film stocks, reduces the appearance of the film grain or applies a certain look.