The Technology Behind the Reflex Scanner
A discussion with Reed Bovee, Chief Engineer for Reflex Technologies and inventor of the Reflex Scanner
Q: You take pride in identifying yourself as a filmmaker. What does it mean to be a filmmaker in a digital world?
Reed Bovee: I’m not a digital guy. I’m suspicious of any technology based on 1’s and 0’s. I was a filmmaker who shot on film and was always sadly disappointed when I saw the video copy. Where were the textures? Where were the subtleties? Where was the tonality?
If I were to depict the situation as a political cartoon, it would show a rickety bridge across a very deep canyon. On one side would be film guys holding cans of film – and looking fearful. On the other side, digital guys would be waving their arms and yelling “Come on.” The film guys are afraid to cross until they are sure the bridge will last 100 years – because it’s a long way down if they embrace the wrong technology.
Digital won’t last that long, but we’ve all got to get our heads around the fact that the world is going digital; the medium may be different, but the image information can be the same. If that information is going to live in the future world, it needs to get off the film media and on to new media. That’s why, in building this scanner, I tried to ‘overdo’ it in every area — more pixels than I needed, wider color gamut than I needed, a higher resolution camera than I needed, a longer zoom than I needed, a gentler drive mechanism, a more reliable software system, and so forth. As a filmmaker, film gave me everything I needed. I wanted to take as much of that as I could into the digital world.
Q: Let’s talk about the Reflex scanner. How and when did you develop that?
Reed Bovee: I had been scanning film in a telecine environment – with sprockets and pull-down claws – since 1993 and what I found was that archivists were asking me to scan films that were too shrunken or brittle to run through my equipment. And oftentimes, the film in the worst condition was the most valuable.
As a filmmaker, I could empathize with their plight. I also have a vault full of 8mm and 16mm film – some of it in bad condition — that will be useful to me only if it can somehow become digital. So I actually was in the same pickle they were.
When I couldn’t find a scanner to meet my needs, I began talking seriously to archivists, colorists, and cinematographers, and I started a wish list on the back of a napkin. As my list grew, I knew I’d have to apply my mechanical engineering background and build what I needed – because there wasn’t anything in the market that even came close. It took five years, but in the end, we have six patents pending for the new technology inside. The machine was finished when I was confident enough to run my own film through it. I wanted that ‘bridge across the canyon’ to be as sturdy as I could possibly make it.
Q: So, what technology is inside?
Reed Bovee: The scanner is really seven different systems coexisting together. There is an air-handling system, a self-tensioning system, a film drive system, an imaging system, an illumination system, a data output system, all controlled by a software system – and all in a durable enclosure with lockable, air-tight doors through which operational component can be accessed and serviced when needed. We can take any film in any condition and we can scan it and deliver the end results in a way that has fewer artifacts than any other scanner in the market.
Q: How did your experience as a filmmaker influence your design of the scanner?
Reed Bovee: In several ways. The gate replicates a film camera gate, so even if a splice is misaligned, rollers push the film against a rail where it’s held steady. If the film is twisted, the aperture plate is three-and-a-half inches — long enough to hold it flat while it’s being scanned.
The hole in the aperture plate is oversized so the film can be overscanned to the very outer edge of the image, to compensate for the fact that in every 16mm and 8mm movie camera, the aperture relative to the film is in a slightly different position. Also, by overscanning, we can also record edge code information or even soundtrack information because those are all contextual things that need to be recorded to be faithful to the original film.
In terms of resolution, we are ‘over sampling’ – we’re dedicating four pixels to every film grain in order to capture all the information on the original. The Reflex scanner captures 16mm images at 1920 by 1440, which is almost 4.5 times the average resolution of 16mm film. We can capture 35mm film images at up to 6.5K. And, in terms of color, the digital color gamut is actually triangular-shaped; the color space for this machine goes beyond that and has rounder edges, so it actually exceeds digital color space. What we’re doing here is up to 14 bits per channel – that’s 42 bits of color depth – that’s 1.5 trillion colors. The human eye can differentiate about 10 million colors – so in every aspect of this machine, we’ve tried to ‘overkill’ it.
Q: Talk a bit about the film drive system. Why no sprockets?
Reed Bovee: Old film shrinks. Typically, more than one-and-a-half percent shrinkage is considered beyond most scanners. With more shrinkage than that, perforations will be progressively out of alignment with the sprockets and the film will be torn as it passes over them. We can handle film that has shrunk up to 20-percent. For us, the distance between the perfs doesn’t matter, it doesn’t even need to be consistent – there could be different amounts of shrinkage even within one reel. We transport it with continuous motion, using only one ounce of force over special silicon O-rings on a precision shaft. Because the film is only touching the very top crown of the rings, there is very little surface tension – and the rings are self-cleaning; dirt won’t stay on the crown, it’s automatically pushed down between the rings. No system produces cleaner files.
Q: So, if sprockets, pull-down claws, and registration pins aren’t used, how is the film held steady to record the image?
Reed Bovee: In a camera, a pull-down claw advances the film and that claw is always one frame below the aperture. In our system, we use an optical sensor to detect the perforations as they pass overhead and the sensor actually references the same perforation the camera did. We can also trigger off the trailing edge of the perforation, which tends to be more pristine than the leading edge. The sensor system is sensitive enough to distinguish between camera original film – which is black base with a hole in it – and print film — which is clear base with a hole in it. And it’s reliable enough to do that consistently and at full operating speeds. We can scan film that’s ‘all over the place’ in terms of jitter and weave – and return a rock steady file.
Q: What are the components of the imaging system?
Reed Bovee: Inside the scanner are a zoom lens and a very high-resolution camera with a ‘global shutter’, which means that every pixel fires simultaneously. We have independent software control of the camera’s RGB lift, gamma, and gain functions. And the camera is connected to an on-board computer, so as each frame of raw uncompressed data is captured, it’s automatically written to a hard drive.
The lens was originally made for microscopy. It can take a picture of a cell dividing on a piece of glass. So it has incredible resolution and no geometric distortion. And because film is very thin, the depth of field of the lens is about 15/1000 of an inch. There is no parallax or keystoning, no mirrors, filters or prisms — because each one adds possible image degradation. There is nothing but air between the film and the lens we are using to record the image.
And the optical zoom is actually 8 to 1. One client gave us a 16mm film of Will Rogers and Wiley Post, on their last flight to Alaska before they were killed. The film was shot with a wide lens, so it showed two little characters against this wide landscape. We transferred it once at full aperture and once zoomed in – and you can actually edit between the two versions. The quality is so good, it cuts together, as if they had a two-camera shoot.
Q: How about the illumination system?
Reed Bovee: For illumination, we use a Xenon strobe light that’s as bright as the sun for about 10 microseconds, but is cool to the touch. It has absolutely consistent color temperature – 6400 Kelvin – with outstanding flash-to-flash consistency and absolutely flat illumination edge-to-edge on the film – no vignetting. Of course the film is moving continuously, but even at 24 frames per second, the film moves less than one seventh of a row of pixels while the image is taken, so there’s no image smear. We could stop each frame and take a picture, but in terms of image steadiness, lack of smear, and image quality, there is absolutely no difference between doing that – and running it as we are in real time. The customer receives images with a level of sharpness no other scanner can exceed.
Q: And the scanner is operated from a built-in control pad?
Reed Bovee: It is, but the controls are also smarter than any operator. In the software, there are several safeguards, so it is not possible to push a ‘wrong button’ and damage the film. The software has 900 pages of code. Typically, a system like this has 50 to 100 pages. The extra pages are not to make it overly complicated, but rather to make every single aspect of it adjustable and controllable, and to make the overall system overly protective of the film.
If the film breaks, the system will shut right down, smoothly, without operator intervention, and with no damage to the film. If the film stops in the gate, the illumination is room temperature, so nothing burns or melts. If the silicon rollers spin in place, they are too soft to abrade the film. Our promise is to ‘first, do no harm’ to our customers’ valuable films – and this scanner makes sure that, even if the operator makes a mistake, we live up to that promise.
Q: What output file formats can you create?
Reed Bovee: We can provide virtually every file format known – including uncompressed and compressed video files in AVI, MOV, WMV, RM, and others – and full resolution stills in BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000, TIFF, DPX, and others. We have the software to create files in about fifty different formats. In addition to providing the format our client needs for immediate use, we like to provide an uncompressed AVI file on a hard drive – which is a series of bit maps with a header telling how fast to play them back. A scanned hour of 16mm film, for example, produces 86,400 sequentially-numbered bit maps of raw uncompressed data, each representing one frame of that film on a 1:1 basis. Any other format can be made from that – either now, or later.
Q: Does the fact that you’re producing an uncompressed AVI file, mean that you are providing a digital file that’s ‘future proof’?
Reed Bovee: Not quite, but that’s the digital dilemma. Film is future proof because in 100 years, you can look at it with a light and a lens. You can’t hold 1’s and 0’s up to the light. I can put the digital file on a disk, but I can’t be sure how long that disk will last. I can put it on a hard drive, but I can’t be sure you can play back that drive in even twenty years. The AVI file should be no problem, but the media – the disk or the drive – may be the problem. At the end of the day, all digital media may have limitations.
Archivists are looking for long-term stability and nothing provides that like film. And yet, with the condition some of these old films are in, they can’t just put them into a contact printer, they have to go through some digital intermediate process outputting uncompressed data. We can make a pristine copy with all the information in the original film – plus some stabilization. We can put the file into DPX and our customers can print it out to film again and also store that copy. Film is harder to access, but archivists can have their 100-year guarantee.
We can also provide a secondary copy where restorers can remove dirt and scratches and make other enhancements that aren’t possible with the photo-chemical process – and, of course, that file can also be printed out to film.
Q: Is there any film you can’t handle?
Reed Bovee: Not so far. We received one can where the archivist told us: “It’s either you or the dumpster”. The film was shrunk, some of the perforations were missing and it was ‘potato chip brittle’. You couldn’t pull off one convolution without it snapping. We re-plastisized it, cleaned it, and it ran right through our scanner. We had another roll we called ‘14mm’; it was also shrunk and twisted and you could smell the vinegar leaching out of it. Again, it was no problem. We keep inviting archivists to send us ‘the worst of your worst’.
As long as film continues to be manufactured and people continue to shoot it, film is alive. Once both of those stop – and they are coming to an end — we will have an asset that will both appreciate – and deteriorate – over time. Digital technology is at the other end of its lifecycle – it will get better and more capable over time. We respect – and can relate to — the concerns and the questions of the filmmakers who are reluctant to trust their work to a new medium. But we can promise this: We will do no harm. No one will take better care of their film — and no one will return to them a higher quality digital file that more faithfully captures the information – all of the information – that’s on their film. That file will be a new and useful ‘starting point’, however digital technology advances in the future.