Blackmagic Cintel Film ScannerOver a year ago we acquired the legendary film scanning company Cintel. Of course at the time people wondered why we would purchase a film scanner company if film was a dying technology. There was a reason for buying this company and at the time we were hard at work on Ultra HD products and focused on an Ultra HD future.When you look at Ultra HD, there are 3 ways to generate content. First there is shooting and editing content to create new Ultra HD programming. The second way to generate Ultra HD content is live production and that?s perfect for sports, concerts etc. We have developed whole workflow solutions for these two methods.However there are already millions of hours of Ultra HD content sitting in vaults on 35mm film. For decades the film and television industry has been generating Ultra HD content without even thinking about it. That?s because everything shot on film is essentially 4K so it?s Ultra HD now. It?s just sitting there ready to be re-scanned as amazing new Ultra HD programming!However traditionally film has been a more mechanical technology and the electronics were crappy. Even Cintel had very average quality electronics when I used to work on Cintel telecine?s is post production back in the 1990?s.So we have been hard at work developing a whole new type of film scanner that supports real time scanning of both 35mm and 16mm negative and positive film and it includes the patented Cintel diffuse light source to reduce dust pickup.But the most exciting feature of this new Cintel film scanner is it?s so super thin it can be wall mounted! It also features a wonderfully gentle fully digital servo system that detects when you are lacing the film and then gently tensions the film slowly. It detects when the film is about to run out and slows down.The whole design is designed to be zero maintenance so you don?t need engineers to install it and make it run. It features Thunderbolt 2 so all you need to do is plug it in and run the control software on a Mac. If it?s wall mounted you can use those new long 30 meter Thunderbolt cables and connect it direct to your DaVinci grading system!The new Cintel film scanner will be on show at NAB and we don?t have a firm ship date, as we want to really show it off and get some good feedback on what people think. It?s a radical redesign so I think its best for us to get your advice on anything else it needs before we start shipping it.We plan to retail the new Cintel film scanner for $29,995 and that includes film spools, 35mm film gate, cleaning rollers, scanning software and a copy of DaVinci Resolve software. We will have one scanner on the booth desktop mounted and another wall mounted so you can see what a dramatic design the scanner is.