PARIS — Film Factory, here, is now using the Blackmagic Design Cintel film scanner for both its dailies and final film scanning workflows. Installed by MagicHour, the Cintel film scanner has been integrated into the Film Factory’s film processing laboratory.
“The Blackmagic film scanner is an incredible piece of hardware,” begins director of research and development at Film Factory, Rip Hampton O’Neil. He explains that the Cintel, which comes bundled together with DaVinci Resolve Studio, has dramatically reduced the time it takes the facility to process film dailies and deliver the scans back to clients on-set.
“What it does is produce a lot of data very quickly,” says O’Neil. “I have a great system featuring a Mac Pro and Thunderbolt drive that allows us to pump out 1.5 gigabytes of data per second, scanning the film directly into DaVinci Resolve Studio so that we can go straight into color correction and mastering work without wasting precious time on slow file copying after scanning. It’s a very robust piece of hardware with a simple workflow straight out of the box and I really compliment Blackmagic on that.”
According to O’Neil, the film scanner has also impressed in terms of quality. “Initially, we only envisaged using Cintel in our dailies workflow initially,” he continues. “However, we have been so impressed by the overall quality that we are now looking at how Cintel can be used in our mastering service, helping us to complete the final scans and pre scans on features. It’s really impressive, particularly for a scanner that costs one twentieth of the price of other systems on the market.”