Introduction

I recently came up with a firmware modification for these scanners which causes them to produce video of a significantly higher quality than usual. The modification involves restricting the Quantization Parameter (QP) of the H.264 codec used by the Novatek chips in these scanners to a maximum value of 17. In the H.264 video compression standard, QP values range from 0 (least compressed & lossless) to 51 (most compressed & worst quality). Using the modified firmware, scanning 50ft of film will result in an output of ~700MB and scanning 200ft of film will result in an output of ~3.0GB. I found that lowering the maximum QP further than 17 caused my Somikon HD-XL scanner to run out of memory while scanning several films. My guess is that this was due to the complexity of those films requiring bitrates higher than that possible using the available RAM. I haven’t had any such issues with a maximum QP of 17. I’m providing Wolverine and Wolverine Pro firmware images, however these haven’t been tested yet. The modified firmware produces videos with a framerate of 20fps. You might want to adjust this in your video editor if your film wasn’t shot at 20fps.