AMIA 2024

In the moving image preservation community there's a lot of concern about and discussion of image quality, resolution, and formats. What about the sound? As film scanners have improved over time, they have added features and functionality. A decade ago sound film was scanned in two passes - once on a telecine to capture the picture, then again on a sound reproducer - which then required assembling the two elements together in an editing program. Now most film scanners will scan both sound and picture in one pass. Is this a good thing? Have we compromised performance for this convenience and labor/cost savings? Recently George Blood Audio/Video/Film/Data was in the market for a new film scanner. At last year's AMIA we presented on the factors impacting image capture, and showed the results from different models. This year we present our findings on the sound reproduction, both mag and optical, of three high end film scanners.