testing 16mm stocks with 35mm stills

[adrian angehrn]

Hello everyone,

I am preparing a film on 16mm and wanted to test different stocks (in similar conditions to the shoot) with various push/pull processing to have a concrete base to discuss the look with the director.

For budget reasons i thought of shooting vision 3 on 35mm stills. Grain structure and sharpness seem to be the biggest drawback here. So, my questions would be the following : Would I get 16mm grain structure by cropping into the 35 in post ? About the sharpness problem, as i guess most of it is lens related (we will use Zeiss S16 Highspeeds), do you have any suggestion how i could come as close as possible to to the final rendering ? 

Thank you !

[Mark Dunn]

One problem I can see is that grain is much more noticeable in stills- frame enlargements from films appear much grainier than the actual film. When projected there is an averaging effect which reduces the appearance of grain.

So if grain is important to the look of the film it may be easier to simulate it in post. I know nothing about that.

Edited July 5 by Mark Dunn

[Tyler Purcell]

Sadly there really isn't any way to do what you're trying to do using the methods listed above. 

1) Cinestill is old film, it will have a layer of fog that will not be present on the new Kodak Vision 3 16mm film you'll use for your shoot. Thus, making it entirely inaccurate in terms of grain. 
2) Kodak has removed the Remjet anti halation coating and most likely anything you shoot with Kodak film in the future, will be this new stock. Cinestill does not have this new material. It will react entirely different being pushed/pulled as the new AHU layer is actually made of black silver, which needs to be removed during the processing process. Remjet is actually removed prior to processing. Because the black silver is processed out, whatever remains will have a very different look than simply removing a layer physically. 
3) 35mm stills are vistavision size 8 perforations. Stills lenses are designed to cover that frame size, they are not designed to give you any indication of sharpness in a center crop. I have seen this with my digital cinema cameras as well. When using actual super 16 glass, you will have an entirely different look, it will be way sharper. Also, the contrast of the lenses is very important as well, you can't just use still lenses and then expect the Superspeeds to look the same, because they won't. Yes, Zeiss does make stills lenses, but they don't have the same look as the Superspeeds. 

Sadly you need to perform controlled tests on 16mm to really get the look and feel of what you're after. I would also confirm with Kodak which film you'll be getting, the older remjet film or the new AHU coating film. You will need to test with whatever film you're shooting with. The AHU film has not replaced the Remjet film yet, but it's coming fast. 

[Robin Phillips]

the way to do this is with 100ft rolls of 16 and ideally the camera and lenses you want to work with. load the 100ft rolls entirely in the bag to ensure no light bleed. then use the either the same scanner you intend on using or the closest one you can afford to get your scans done. anything outside if this workflow will leave you with a lot of question marks and uncontrolled variables that may lead to a surprise once you start shooting and getting scans back