Goldeneye Uncompressed

[Nu Alessio]

Kirkhopecleared the air surrounding these tracks on Facebook, explaining that these files were not uncompressed and had been available for streaming on his personal website for years before Video Game Tracks uploaded them to YouTube.

Patrick Kulikowski I'm a Rutgers University graduate with aspirations of joining the game industry. I have a strong love for videogames and their music. When not serving as a contributing writer for Game Music Online and Gameranx, you'll see me working on my game music drum cover project "VGdrum" and managing my Breath of Fire Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube fan pages.

YouTube channel Video Game Tracks has unearthed an uncompressed version of the soundtrack for Rare's classic Nintendo 64 shooter Goldeneye 007, allowing fans to listen to the game's famous music in perfect clarity.

Given the N64's technical limitations the soundtrack had to compressed back in 1998 so it would work on the machine's Reality Coprocessor. The result was a soundtrack people loved, but which few had heard in its purest form until now.

The soundtrack was Kirkhope's first for Rare. On his website he writes: "It was immense fun to write that video game's music, I don't know how many times I listened to all the past theme tunes from the movies, probably hundreds."

Kirkhope went on to compose the soundtracks for classic Rare games Banjo-Kazooie, its sequel Banjo-Tooie, Perfect Dark, and Viva Piata. He is currently working on Yooka Laylee, a spiritual successor to Banjo-Kazooie being developed by Playtonic, a group of former Rare developers.

Just wondering if I can pick your brains about the two scanning options available to me down here at the end of the world.

I've got 5,000 feet of S16mm Vision 3 to scan, but all of the Arriscanners and Spirits in Australia were sold off some time ago, so my only options now are two places that have the new Blackmagic Cintel scanner, and another that has the Golden Eye 2.

From what I can see of the specs, it looks like the Cintel will record a slightly less-than-HD image in 12-bit log DNG. Where the Golden Eye 2 will record 2k RGB as 10 or 16-bit DPX.

My main concerns are that (although I can't find it listed) the Blackmagic sounds like it's using a bayer-pattern sensor, and the perfs are included in the 1910 pixel-wide image. So after you crop in, you're getting a less than HD bayer pattern picture (which isn't an awful lot of colour information).

The Golden Eye 2 has a 3CCD sensor and can scan in 2k RGB in 10-bit or 16-bit, which sounds like a much more robust digital negative.

I haven't heard glowing reviews of either though. So I'd be really keen to hear people's opinions on the best way to go?

Cheers,

The bigger issue with the BMD scanner is not that it's a bayer sensor (our ScanStation has one and the results are outstanding). Lack of color information isn't typically an issue with bayer sensors. But poorly implemented bayer sensor designs mean lots of fixed pattern noise, something but the BMD scanner definitely has (unless they've specifically addressed this recently). In the BMD scanner, the sensor is fixed relative to the film gate, so only 35mm is scannable at UHD (the machine's max resolution). 16mm is less than HD as you've surmised.

The GoldenEye is a superior scanner to the BMD in almost all respects, so if you need to do the work in Australia, that's the way I'd go (though, PM me if you want a quote for doing this in the US. we work with lots of international clients, including some down under). It does have issues with splice bumps, however. And because it's a line scanner with a continuous motion transport (like the Spirit), it's susceptible to streaking artifacts if the sensor gets dirty.

16bit is way overkill. you just don't need it, and you're going to be fighting with the files if you go that route. They're massive and very few systems can actually play them correctly. 10bit DPX, ProRes 422HQ (10bit), ProRes 4444 (12bit) are the way to go, depending on your workflow.

We also just got a Scan Station for 35mm and 16mm and the scans on it are far superior to the BMD Cintel scanner, I would definitely consider a ScanStation scan as an alternative if the cost of the Golden Eye is too much for your production.

Hi guys,

Just stumbled across a third option. There's a guy with a MovieStuff Retroscan Universal scanner down here too. Is anyone familiar with it? How does it compare to the Golden Eye II?

It can output to uncompressed HD, but I can't find much information on the sensor, and whether it can actually record a full RGB 4:4:4 image.

Cheers,

Mark

Thanks Robert, yeah, I tracked down the camera that they use for the Moviestuff, so I've just dropped off the telecine reels with the Golden Eye II guys! Thanks for your help everyone, it's much appreciated.

Yeah, the Moviestuff hardware is pretty low end. It might be ok in certain limited situations, but if you were looking at services that use that, I'd be wary. Most likely they're doing low-end home movie transfers directly to formats like DVD. Tons of compromises there, in terms of quality.

Yeah, the guy with the Moviestuff sent me through a couple of .dpx frames, and there was a significant amount of digital chroma noise from the sensor paired in with the grain of the stock. I can certainly see it being fine for 8mm scans or personal projects, but the quality isn't up to snuff for professional projects in my opinion - I had pretty limited room to manoeuvre the images around in Davinci.

My 12-bit .dpx scans are already underway (actually a friend was just at the shop today, and got to see my own footage before me!) but his reports sounded mostly positive, so I may have actually managed to pull the shoot off (which is a bit of a relief - since this was my first time shooting film in eight years!).

This whole process has been a wonderful learning experience. I've scanned plenty of rolls of 135 and 120 in my time, but when I last shot motion picture film (back in uni), our whole process was photochemical, and we were cutting on a Steenbeck - so this will be my first ever (literal) DI. Really interesting stuff.

Moviestuff is a great solution for mom & pop video companies transferring hours of home movies for people and possibly some Universities that have tons of footage to transfer and no funds to do it. Very affordable and a decent image. Probably the best entry-level scanner around. It's not meant to compete with a Lasergraphics machine...completely different market.

I know someone with the latest Moviestuff 8mm 16mm scanner, it is 8-bit (I think) and lacks stabilization by perf machine vision (like LasreGraphics, kinetta and Xena) and any DPX frames would be derived from 8-bit jpeg or bitmap captures. Not a terrible machine for home movies. Like all these machines it is a color Bayer sensor with inherent noise and FPN issues and it has reasonable speed but it is CMOS which has it's own issues.

Like the adage Fast, Cheap, Quick pick any two, scanning is under the same restrictions, if you want true RGB scanning fast means line scan but that comes with issues with bumps on splices and line streaks with a hair or dirt in the gate, and it's expensive for Speed and HDR (Scannity 500K -700K +)

Many people think they want the "ultimate" scan i.e. Super-8mm at 10K or something but unless it is for Imax or 4K DCI it will be hard to tell the difference on a LCD screen if it be 2k (1080P) or 4K (UHD) because the display tech becomes the limitation.

No idea on the scanity. I never really took the thing that seriously. It was always way overpriced for what it is, with too many shortcomings for anything other than freshly shot film (and that's a bit of a niche in the scanning business - at least 75% of the work we do is archival, and scanners that have problems with splices aren't suitable for archival work).

I am not really sure that any CCD or CMOS sensor that is not liquid cooled can really resolve 16-bits, you can theoretically digitize any imager at 16-bits but those extra 2-4 bits are most likely sensor noise. The noise in an inherent issue with the analog wells which receive the photons and how that small voltage is amplified and then digitized.

That said the CCD lines in the Spirit 2K/4K are digitized at 16-bits but like I said I think there are a few bits of noise there, I was under the impression that Scannity used a set of 4K linear CCDs which had 10-15 lines for each R, G and B color and it combined the data from all of those lines into a HDR scan, I am not as down on Scannity as Perry is and it is clearly being bought by many very high end shops and it provides very high speed true RGB scans at the expense of being very expensive.

We have two CCD based Xena machines one has a color Bayer 5K Kodak CCD running at 1-tap output and 14-bits, it's maximum scan frame rate is 2 FPS and the other Xena is a 7K monochrome Kodak CCD at 1-tap output and 14-bits and it's maximum fame rate in 1-flash is about 3sec per frame.

We have transferred over a million feet of archival nitrate and safety film on Scanity in the past 18 months and have not had significant issues with splices, shrinkage, or warpage. Film has been from early 1900s up to 1970. Scanity uses three separate 96 line TDI cameras. We scan 4k 4300x3324 overscan 16 bit tiffs at 10fps.

I made an initial approach to the BlackMagic house the other day about scanning my film in 4k, and they said the BlackMagic would handle 16mm in 2k, a point which seems to have been verified by what I've read online since (I'm learning fast.)

But I want to scan my film in 4k. I'm not going to do all this with this film again anytime soon, or maybe at all, so I want to go to the highest resolution of today that is good enough to archive the film and which also doubles as future/pending home entertainment resolution.

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