Optically Printing 16mm

sinisa.kukic · February 14, 2006

hi. i'm a cinematographer on a 16mm film. i've shot the film on fuji enterna 500. the night scene we used available light and i pushed the stock two stops. to loosely match match the daylight scenes i pushed those one stop. some of the shots in a few scenes we filmed in 6 and 8 fps to be later reprinted to 24 fps. something like what christoper doyle has done in a lot his films.

As the cinematographer i chose to do the optical printing as well, since this is a school project with a very limited budget. I've done a lot optical printing in the past when making my experimental films, mostly on the JK103. I'm pretty comfortable with technical aspect of it. And finally to my question. I know when i reprint this to 24 fps i will have a one generation loss. do any of you have a recommendation on which stock i should print to. should i go with a intermediate stock or another camera stock? which one? should i print from the work print or from the negative?

thanks for your help.

sinisa

Dominic Case · February 14, 2006

should i go with a intermediate stock or another camera stock? which one? should i print from the work print or from the negative?

Unless you use reversal stocks, film always works in a negative/positive mode - that is, a copy of a negative is a positive, a copy of a positive is a negative.

So if you print from the camera negative you will get a positive image (wether you use intermediate stock or camera neg stock). If you print from the work print you will get a negative, which will, in turn, be ready to print onto print film.

But contrast, or gamma, is the other factor you need to understand. The ideal way to go is to print from camera negative onto intermediate stock - which has a gamma of 1.0, so will leave the image contrast unaltered. That will give you an IP, which you will need to print again (also onto intermediate stock) to make a dupe negative. That gives you a dupe negative with the same contrast as the original neg.

A second-best alternative is to print from the work print onto camera negative stock. The high gamma (more than 3.0) of the print is partly reduced by the gamma of the camera neg (0.5), but you will still get an excessively contrasty result. You can flash the negative to improve that. Use the slowest camera neg you can get hold of (speed is never an issue, grain is)- or if the school has it, use 7272.

But either way you are losing two generations, not one. Not much you can do about that!