Abstract / topic summary
In the world of film digitization, "raw" image data is inherently "cooked" the moment it is captured. This concept, championed by Reto Kromer at the No Time To Wait series, provides the context for this session: a practical how-to of "uncooked" sensel-native archiving via a DIY 8mm cinefilm scanner. By treating the scanner as a pure data-acquisition bridge, we argue that sensel-data provides the most honest digital representation of the film's content, within the inherent constraints—and budget—of a given sensor's color filter array spectral sensitivity. This method creates a fixed, immutable datapoint that is free of typical unknown "hallucinations" introduced by traditional debayering at the point of capture. Our open-source implementation sidesteps other hardware constraints by utilizing the full quantization range of the sensor’s native Bayer mosaic. We present a choice of scanning strategies: producing an "Honest" 1/4-resolution Binned TIFF for a ready-to-use result based strictly on measured values, or a Sensel-TIFF to preserve the option for post-scan debayering choice. This latter approach allows future image representations to evolve with algorithm improvements without ever altering the original, authoritative sensel-record.
Speaker summary
Pablo Miliani
Pablo Miliani is an independent developer working on the technical preservation of small-gauge cinema, and the author of Tingopix, an open-source scanner for Regular 8, Super 8, and 16mm. He works as a program manager in the aviation industry and lives with his family in South Florida.
The project began at home. Digitizing his own family's films, he found that the scanners within reach produced results well beneath what the format itself holds — that the limiting factor was not the film, but the machine reading it. His background in electronics engineering, two US patents in multichannel television encryption, and a career in broadcast automation and digital video storage across Latin America gave him both the curiosity and the technical grounding to pursue it.
He was not, it turned out, working alone. Home movies have been treated as cultural heritage for over two decades, by Home Movie Day events worldwide, by national and regional filmotecas with dedicated recovery programmes, and by community archives preserving the moving-image record of neighbourhoods that institutional collections overlooked. What connects them is that the film sits in a house rather than a laboratory — and that the scanner available to it decides how much survives, and at what fidelity.
Tingopix is being published progressively as open hardware, software, and documentation, developed over several years with the DIY film scanning community on the Kinograph forums. He documents the project at tingopix.com.
