Cintel 2 standalone operation?

Hi,

I'm in a Library where we use our Cintel 2 w/Audio Reader for scanning archival film.

We also have a requirement for film viewing and I'm hoping the Cintel 2 can double as a standalone film viewer, connected with HDMI to a monitor so we can set it up in a room for a researcher to do what they need to do, which is just identify footage. It's much kinder to film than our Steenbecks.

As the A/B wind, frame rate etc... settings are in software, I'm hoping there's some tricks to control these settings at the scanner. It seems to default to a B-feed, A-take up configuration.

TBH, for research purposes of identifying content, the frame rate is not that important.

Any advice?

Regards,
Damien

[James Little]

Hi Damien,

can you help me understand your requirements a bit better. Why can't you just use Resolve at the Scanner to set it up and watch the HDMI in said other room. Resolve stores project settings, so as you open them up it applies them to the scanner (i.e. you can deviate away from the machine defaults for B/A wind etc.. this way).

Are you looking to automate the entire process? NOTE: The load button is not available to the public API on purpose, such that users have to be in front of the machine when loading to ensure nothing is going wrong.

The SDK might be of some interest to you, you can customize behaviour easily that way.

Regards,

James

[Gavin Lucas]

Hi Damien,

Re: A/B wind local setting, don't forget you can manually load the film (see user manual 3.0.0 page 14 - "Manual Tensioning"), negating need to go back and forth to the workstation to toggle A/B.

Also remember saved Project defaults in Resolve can be used for frame rates, timeline resolution etc., if desired. i.e. One for 16mm 24fps, and another for 35mm 24fps...etc..

Hi Damien,

can you help me understand your requirements a bit better.

Hi James,

Ideally we'd like to fully run the Cintel for viewing film (no capture) without a computer. A scenario would be a client coming to audition say 200 reels of film of ours that we don't really know what's on it, then selecting what is required for digitisation, which we would then digitise. This auditioning could take days.

The computer that hosts Resolve and the scanner, has the extra oomph (memory, GPU, fast CPU etc...) and is used for many other purposes. Videotape ingest, video editing, audio editing and mastering... so it would be nice to not have it tied up as a resource whilst the client is auditioning.

That said, it's not a big deal for us as yet but I was just wandering if I has missed something.

Damien

[DavidS]

You can load the machine fine using the manual method suggested above by Gavin, and it should auto detect 16mm/35mm, but it will always default to negative film type unless told otherwise by a PC client.

You could write a simple test application using the SDK that would run on an old MacBook (as long as it has thunderbolt) and that could just send film types and transport commands to get you into the right format. You could probably even use our CaptureImage example application to do that. That would save on using an expensive high spec machine for the job as it wouldn't need to connect to the video stream.

A really old MacBook with thunderbolt may even run resolve well enough to control the scanner, but wouldn't be able to capture.

[James Little]

I think Dave mostly covered it. Seems like a job for the SDK to me. The SDK with our next release is much optimised and cleaned up and has more source code.

I would probably create something that changes the film type on a button press and the film gauge on another (although in theory gauge can be ignored as unlikely 2/3 perf content).

Stay tuned for our next release and dig into our example applications.