Neg Cutting

[Guest londoner]

Does anyone have any experience with pricing neg cutters? i am finalizing a budget for a 35mm, feature, which will be roughly 100minutes (9000 feet long) and am beginning to shop around for neg cutters. i have absolutely no idea how much this service costs.

 

assuming the film has no tricky fades or dissolves, and isnt an action flick with thousands of cuts--how much should i look to budget for a neg cutter?

 

a rough, ball park figure would really help!

[Dirk DeJonghe]

Count about 6 Euros per cut, from supplied video and EDL with FLX files to cut negative.

 

Negative cutting is one of the cheapest operations in the lab but also one of the most critical ones with potentially disatrous results.

[Sidney King]

It will depend on whether your negative will be AB or single-strand; you'll find negative cutters charge more for single-strand, but lab costs are less. So, talk with your lab and whoever's doing your titles/opticals to decide if single-strand or AB will be best for your project (which will in turn depend on what your plans are for your film in post: traditional color timing, just doing a transfer, etc...).

 

Most negative cutters come up with a bid based on the number of cuts, so that information is more crucial than length. I got bids from about a half a dozen (this is in the US), they were quite similar. You won't find a huge variation in the bids you'll get.

 

anyway, to get to your answer, expect to spend between 5-8K, again depending on the number of cuts and whether your negative is single-strand or not.

[Dominic Case]

Call a neg cutter. They will base the estimate on the number of cuts - which you won't know, but if you tell them the style of film and length they will have a pretty good idea - if fact they will probably turn out to be spot on.

 

If (as you say) you don't have lots of fades & dissolves, you can cut the negative single strand. More straightforward all round.

 

Dirk's figure sounds reasonable: you wil probably average around 100 cuts per reel, 10 reels, that's up to E6,000. That's on the high side of the US estimate, but we are only talking ballpark figures. It could be a little more, depending on the quality of the EDL supplied. (Sorting out dirty EDLs can take more time than cutting the negative, and that becomes billable time).