The discussion of film scanning doesn’t come up too often. A lab has a scanner of their choosing for various reasons, and we simply send our film to them for the scanning work asking little questions. But there are plenty of questions to ask with the biggest one being “is this the right scanner for this job?” Maybe it it is, maybe it isn’t. We spoke to Manuel Götz after seeing him teach Southeast Asian film archives students on how ARRI’s famous scanner works. With a huge range of options that could handle just about any piece of film from missing sprockets to shrunken frames that had no right getting through any scanner, the ARRI is the workhorse of many labs and archives throughout the world. Manuel shares his knowledge on the great ARRI machine but also his very interesting perspective on the future of scanning including AI.

A native to the city of Vienna, Austria, Manuel studied at the School for Independent Film Friedl Kubelka before graduating from the film preservation-MA at the University of Amsterdam. He has been working at the film restoration departments of ARRI Media and MoMA, was involved in restoration projects with Bill Brand at BB Optics and is the serving chairman of filmkoop wien. Currently an independent film restorer, he has most recently been engaged in digitization projects of the Bavarian Broadcasting and film scanning workshops for several national film archives.