MWA Nova vs Lasergraphics Archivist

I really don't know where to post questions like this but I've often had good results on DPReview forums for oddball questions. 
These two movie film scanners both are priced right around the same. We're trying to make a decision which to buy but there is so very little comparison information. Anyone here have any insight?
Forgive me if there would be a better group here to be posting to.
Thanks!

The scanning machines you mention are very expensive. Your business already offers to scan people's legacy 8mm movie film at up to 1536p and 80mbps. That is probably the maximum quality one can obtain from such (often grainy and soft) source material. One could argue that 480p @ 6mbs might be enough.

Unless you expect to digitize great amounts of 16-35mm movie film, and have the pecuniary means, it might be better to hire the services of a firm that has such 4k or 8k grade devices.

The Bay Area TV Archive has a Lastergraphics machine. If nothing else, archivist Alex Cherian should be able to offer a qualified opinion about its performance.

Videographer Thomas Meyer knows about MWA Nova devices.

Moving Image Tools and Tech had extensive experience with MWA Nova machines and may offer useful perspectives .

However, I doubt anyone can answer a "which should I buy?" question without first telling them a lot about your needs, resources, and expectations. The best answer might turn out to be "neither."

My guess is that much of the movie film you work with is over 50 years old.  Lot's of it may not have been seen in many years, if ever.  Recollections of the people or places featured may be fuzzy, faded, or perished.  What the clients probably really need is a titling and voice-over service.  But would they pay for the work that entails?

John Koch wrote:

The scanning machines you mention are very expensive. Your business already offers to scan people's legacy 8mm movie film at up to 1536p and 80mbps. That is probably the maximum quality one can obtain from such (often grainy and soft) source material. One could argue that 480p @ 6mbs might be enough.

Unless you expect to digitize great amounts of 16-35mm movie film, and have the pecuniary means, it might be better to hire the services of a firm that has such 4k or 8k grade devices.

The Bay Area TV Archive has a Lastergraphics machine. If nothing else, archivist Alex Cherian should be able to offer a qualified opinion about its performance.

Videographer Thomas Meyer knows about MWA Nova devices.

Moving Image Tools and Tech had extensive experience with MWA Nova machines and may offer useful perspectives .

However, I doubt anyone can answer a "which should I buy?" question without first telling them a lot about your needs, resources, and expectations. The best answer might turn out to be "neither."

My guess is that much of the movie film you work with is over 50 years old. Lot's of it may not have been seen in many years, if ever. Recollections of the people or places featured may be fuzzy, faded, or perished. What the clients probably really need is a titling and voice-over service. But would they pay for the work that entails?

Thanks for your thoughts John.

The problems with our current scanners are that they require a whole bunch of extra messing around so it comes down largely to a workflow issue. For instance these other scanners create a miriad of file types straight out of the scanner so we're not stuck having to encode files which ends up being hugely time consuming. We also do a lot of sound film and with our current unit, you have to run the film a second time to record the sound and then sync them afterwards.
Both the scanners I talked about, this isn't an issue as they have sound heads built in and will create a number of file types directly out of the scanner with now need for post encoding. Also with our current scanner, the scans only really look great with post processing whereas these scanners put out a great product directly from the scanner with no need to be running Neat Video to make the scan look great. Neat Video is really slow even with a fast computer.
Added to these things, The company that makes the scanner we use now, keeps dropping support for their old units and instead tries to sell their latest unit. This happens every couple of years it seems like...In the end we likely have close to the price of a lasergraphics machine into this company. I'm not going to mention the name of this company because I like them but it's time for us to move on.
So...more than anything this is a workflow issue.
In the end, I think we're getting the Lasergraphics because we've been happiest with their presales support, the features offered and maybe the big one, everyone that knows good scanning knows what these are and it will be a selling point for us.

filmrescue wrote:

I really don't know where to post questions like this but I've often had good results on DPReview forums for oddball questions.
These two movie film scanners both are priced right around the same. We're trying to make a decision which to buy but there is so very little comparison information. Anyone here have any insight?
Forgive me if there would be a better group here to be posting to.
Thanks!

The Archivist is fantastic, I've been told it's a beast by a professional with a LOT of experience in the restoration industry. Their facility will have one in a few weeks, if you'd like send me a private message and I can likely get some shareable samples organised off some old home movies some people have over here. Or otherwise get Lasergraphics or GD to do some samples if you're in a hurry to make a decision. It has a lot of options that the Scanstation Personal lacked, including HDR (you have to pay for the license) and warped film gates (again this adds to the base price). I'm sure you know that already, just making sure others are correctly informed. The base price on the 16/8 model is $40K. Ideally you would want to get the warped gates for your gauges and HDR. HDR makes a big improvement for prints and other dense film, the companies that say it doesn't matter are focused on 16/35 negatives.

I respectfully disagree with John that the price is "very expensive" - you have the startup costs which are training shipping and tax, and then if you put it on a 48 month lease it would be around $1K per month to pay off depending on the options you select with it. If you're running a successful transfer business it should pay itself off in no time.

Don't do the colour correction in the scans please, it's destructive and LG doesn't recommend it. They're not telecines you shouldn't treat them that way if you want to get the most out of them, just do a simple colour correction in Resolve after the scan and charge the correct amount for the employee's time to do it. For most film you won't need to bother anyway, it'll look fine. Turn the internal filtering off as LG recommends and scan away straight to your desired format/s.

Good luck!

filmkeeper wrote:

filmrescue wrote:

I really don't know where to post questions like this but I've often had good results on DPReview forums for oddball questions.
These two movie film scanners both are priced right around the same. We're trying to make a decision which to buy but there is so very little comparison information. Anyone here have any insight?
Forgive me if there would be a better group here to be posting to.
Thanks!

The Archivist is fantastic, I've been told it's a beast by a professional with a LOT of experience in the restoration industry. Their facility will have one in a few weeks, if you'd like send me a private message and I can likely get some shareable samples organised off some old home movies some people have over here. Or otherwise get Lasergraphics or GD to do some samples if you're in a hurry to make a decision. It has a lot of options that the Scanstation Personal lacked, including HDR (you have to pay for the license) and warped film gates (again this adds to the base price). I'm sure you know that already, just making sure others are correctly informed. The base price on the 16/8 model is $40K. Ideally you would want to get the warped gates for your gauges and HDR. HDR makes a big improvement for prints and other dense film, the companies that say it doesn't matter are focused on 16/35 negatives.

I respectfully disagree with John that the price is "very expensive" - you have the startup costs which are training shipping and tax, and then if you put it on a 48 month lease it would be around $1K per month to pay off depending on the options you select with it. If you're running a successful transfer business it should pay itself off in no time.

Don't do the colour correction in the scans please, it's destructive and LG doesn't recommend it. They're not telecines you shouldn't treat them that way if you want to get the most out of them, just do a simple colour correction in Resolve after the scan and charge the correct amount for the employee's time to do it. For most film you won't need to bother anyway, it'll look fine. Turn the internal filtering off as LG recommends and scan away straight to your desired format/s.

Good luck!

Thanks Film Keeper...you put my mind a little more at ease. It's a big purchase for us. Over the past few days and having talked to a lot of people, it will be the Lasergraphics machine we're going with, with HD and the warped film gate. haha...the new Tesla is on hold now for at least a little while 😪
As to cost...we have been struggling with the volume of work we've had in and this is going to help with that for sure. I think with a single unit from Lasergraphics, we will be able to do about 50% more work than we can do right now running two moviestuff machines. Also, we will no long have to tell clients who say they want a top end scan that while we can do a good scan, there are better - and then refer them somewhere else.
yeah....color corrections, while we offer them, we don't push them and even less now when we have a machine that will more faithfully be reproducing what's on the film. We might continue to offer degraining because the Lasergraphics machine's degraining really softens stuff up. Neat Video does a better job when set well.
Thanks Again Film Keeper! Right when I'm done here I'm going to light a little fire under Steve at Lasergraphics to get our quote done so we can place our order. It's an exciting purchase

filmrescue wrote:

Thanks Film Keeper...you put my mind a little more at ease. It's a big purchase for us. Over the past few days and having talked to a lot of people, it will be the Lasergraphics machine we're going with, with HD and the warped film gate. haha...the new Tesla is on hold now for at least a little while 😪
As to cost...we have been struggling with the volume of work we've had in and this is going to help with that for sure. I think with a single unit from Lasergraphics, we will be able to do about 50% more work than we can do right now running two moviestuff machines. Also, we will no long have to tell clients who say they want a top end scan that while we can do a good scan, there are better - and then refer them somewhere else.

No problem, you should be very happy. "Top-end scans" are not just the equipment but how they're used as well. For that reason if you operate it well you can achieve results better than a lot of places that use more expensive machines like the Scanstation. The Archivist really isn't that expensive when you consider the amount of research and design LG has put into their machines, it's at a fair price-point. The HDR feature and warped gates are what sets apart the Archivist from the Nova or HDS+ both of which I understand to be quite decent machines.

filmkeeper wrote:

filmrescue wrote:

Thanks Film Keeper...you put my mind a little more at ease. It's a big purchase for us. Over the past few days and having talked to a lot of people, it will be the Lasergraphics machine we're going with, with HD and the warped film gate. haha...the new Tesla is on hold now for at least a little while 😪
As to cost...we have been struggling with the volume of work we've had in and this is going to help with that for sure. I think with a single unit from Lasergraphics, we will be able to do about 50% more work than we can do right now running two moviestuff machines. Also, we will no long have to tell clients who say they want a top end scan that while we can do a good scan, there are better - and then refer them somewhere else.

No problem, you should be very happy. "Top-end scans" are not just the equipment but how they're used as well. For that reason if you operate it well you can achieve results better than a lot of places that use more expensive machines like the Scanstation. The Archivist really isn't that expensive when you consider the amount of research and design LG has put into their machines, it's at a fair price-point. The HDR feature and warped gates are what sets apart the Archivist from the Nova or HDS+ both of which I understand to be quite decent machines.

Thanks Filmkeeper. Your responses have been a big factor in setting my mind at ease with this purchase. We're paying our deposit today and moving forward.
Lasergraphic assures me that although the Archivist is only 2.5K on 8mm film the quality will be the same as the Scanstation even if we upscaled from 2.5 to 4K.  It's nice to have varification that 2.5K is plenty of resolution on an 8mm frame from a company that makes a unit capable of 4K on an 8mm frame. This is something I've always believed but there are always going to be people out there that swear differently. At 1536 pixels on the short dimension of the 8mm frame, that calculates out to just shy of 12 000 dpi. FADGI's top standard for film scanning, what they call a 4 star scan is 4000 dpi so needing 4K on an 8mm frame is hard to argue as being necessary.
My guess is that the Archivist will slightly outperform an older Scanstation because I don't think an older Scanstation has the new sony sensor in it. We're ordering theArchivistt with the HDR module so there's that too.
Thanks again!

filmrescue wrote:

Thanks Filmkeeper. Your responses have been a big factor in setting my mind at ease with this purchase. We're paying our deposit today and moving forward.
Lasergraphic assures me that although the Archivist is only 2.5K on 8mm film the quality will be the same as the Scanstation even if we upscaled from 2.5 to 4K. It's nice to have varification that 2.5K is plenty of resolution on an 8mm frame from a company that makes a unit capable of 4K on an 8mm frame. This is something I've always believed but there are always going to be people out there that swear differently. At 1536 pixels on the short dimension of the 8mm frame, that calculates out to just shy of 12 000 dpi. FADGI's top standard for film scanning, what they call a 4 star scan is 4000 dpi so needing 4K on an 8mm frame is hard to argue as being necessary.
My guess is that the Archivist will slightly outperform an older Scanstation because I don't think an older Scanstation has the new sony sensor in it. We're ordering theArchivistt with the HDR module so there's that too.
Thanks again!

Very happy to put your mind at ease! You will get better resolution on a 6.5K Scanstation zooming the image if nothing else it will improve the debayering. So the attainable quality won't be quite the same, however for family movies and even the vast majority of archival film the difference would be small to negligible. There's a lot more to a good scan than just resolution, capturing the full dynamic range in the film is far more important than losing a little bit of resolution in my opinion. Also keep in mind the original Scanstation when it launched was a 2K scanner and it cost an awful lot more than the Archivist!

With the quality, I've sent you a private message. It all really comes down to the company that owns the scanning machines and how they operate it. I don't just mean Scanstations, but other expensive professional machines as well.

I'm sure you'll be very happy, and even more importantly, so will your customers.

Neat video does not work better than the presets on a Lasergraphics scanner. Now neat video is an inexpensive software that does a good job. But to say neat video is better than the Lasergraphics that is not true.

Wally Stall wrote:

Neat video does not work better than the presets on a Lasergraphics scanner. Now neat video is an inexpensive software that does a good job. But to say neat video is better than the Lasergraphics that is not true.

Yeah...those comments were from before we had the machine and likely from something I saw on line. The LG machine if performing  like a champ.