embracing authentic film colors, powered by science

Dr. David Pfluger

Film restorer, CEO Scan2Screen Switzerland GmbH

Media preservation, digitization and digital conservation specialist

E-mail: pfluger@scan2screen.com

Website

Julius Muschaweck

Physicist, CEO JMO GmbH, founding member Scan2Screen Switzerland GmbH

Optics and illumination specialist

E-mail: muschaweck@scan2screen.com

Website | LinkedIn

Martin Weiss

Film scanning, IT, founding member Scan2Screen Switzerland GmbH

Audiovisual preservation specialist, researcher, cameraman

E-mail: weiss@scan2screen.com

Website | LinkedIn

Scan2Screen presents a completely new paradigm for film digitization that offers significant advantages for those seeking to digitize their most precious color films. Its multispectral design is the industry’s first science-backed workflow that recreates the appearance of a film’s screening in the cinema according to historical analog projection technologies.

Historical film colors differ significantly from modern chromogenic negatives or prints. The dyes and pigments embedded in their film stocks have unique spectral characteristics that often fall outside the gamut of contemporary workflows and devices. Scan2Screen captures the full spectrum of color information, ensuring authentic color rendition that adapts to evolving technologies and standards.

By capturing the full spectrum of colors, Scan2Screen provides customers with greater flexibility in color processing. Its unique visual rendering software enables the rendition of colors under a range of historical and contemporary cinema projection lights. Additionally, it offers enhanced capabilities for reconstructing faded dyes in chromogenic prints and performs sophisticated negative-to-positive inversion that emulates the opto-chemical process.

Restoration ethics demand three core requirements: transparency, reversibility, and documentation. Unlike most scanners, which operate as black boxes, Scan2Screen’s workflow provides comprehensive documentation of all optical and digital configurations. All six monochrome captures can be stored long-term, allowing full reversibility without the need for rescanning in the future. The scientific principles embedded in the scanner and in the corresponding workflow minimize subjective interventions, aligning with best practices in restoration.

As color information is captured over the entire visible spectrum, Scan2Screen’s proprietary visual rendering software automatically calculates colors based on the spectral characteristics of specific cinema projections. This eliminates the need for costly and time-consuming color grading, streamlining the process significantly and increasing efficiency, all while improving the end result.

While current trends in film digitization prioritize creating flawless renditions for mass audiences – less grain, more sharpness, less scratches, rock-steady stabilization –  preserving historical authenticity remains crucial. There are certainly valid reasons to produce polished products for a broad audience. However as important it is to acknowledge this market-driven demand it should not compromise the pursuit of historical authenticity. Preserving a film’s historical appearance on screen enables film historians and cinephiles to experience its historical aura, complete with the traces of the film’s past. 

Therefore Scan2Screen proposes a scaled approach, where the multispectral scanning and post-processing preserve the unique material characteristics of each film element. Customers can then adjust their preferred presentation of the film, opting for a more polished version while still respecting the film’s historical integrity. This approach offers them a range of renditions including various options for  individual preferences.

Reach out to Scan2Screen to learn how this approach could fit into your digitization strategy.

While all the wide-spread commercial film scanners use diffuse light only Scan2Screen’s multi-spectral scanner offers diffuse and directed illumination, which can be essential for scanning color films.

The so-called chromatic Callier effect changes color as well as local contrast rendition. Scan2Screen aims at scanning colors true to projection in the cinema, which requires directed illumination. Capturing with both types of optical paths enables you to combine the best from both worlds, the crisp images and colors from directed illumination with the reduced scratches and dirt from diffuse illumination, see our paper Trumpy / Flueckiger (2019) in the publications section..

Video: Multi-spectral scan of Gaumont Fragments, mordant toning, rendered with the spectral characteristics of a historical projector, courtesy of Lichtspiel | Kinemathek, Bern. (Down-scaled for web display)

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