need help

[F Bulgarelli]

Hello everyone,

 

so, we were shooting this weekend, extremely tough shoot.

we were near death valley, about 50 miles from baker. 110 degrees, at least.

first half of the day went well, early afternoon the camera started getting really noisy, we checked some of the exposed film; either the pulll down claw or the registration pin was "pinching" the perf. it went on the rest of the day, could not figure out wthat was wrong, tried reloading the mags, the 1st started doing the loading, tried everything within our means.

went to the lab today, they were able to develop the film, there is not significant damage to the perfs but you can see the "pinching" there.

I think we are going to have serious steadiness problems because as the perf is being "pinched", the film is being pushed down and exposing the image in a different place sometimes even slightly bleeding into the next frame.

The camera went back to the rental house and they could not recreate the problem we were having.

I'm wondering if the film stock was defective or maybe it was a problem during the loading but these guys worked for me before and never had any issues.

The film was kept cool and it wasn't exposed to serious heat until we were shooting, everyone i asked say that heat should not have been an issue.

i guess the only option now is post. has anyone hear of fixing steadiness problems in post? it might be very costly.

i'm thinking we should transfer the full 1.66 negative area to give room for shifting the image up or down as is need it. that's pure speculation, i don't really know if anything can be done about it.

 

Thanks in advance for any suggestios,

 

Francisco

[Guest]

Well of course you can fix any registration problems with a DI. Once the frames are scanned you can "lock" them into the exact same position each time. But I'm sure this costs a lot of money. If it's real bad you have to blow up the neg a bit. Want a quick and cheap option? Use a Henry system. I've fixed a few bouncy shots this way. The Henry locks onto the centre portion of the frame, then you blow up the shot slightly, the computer then places every frame around the locked portion. It's fast and cheap. The downside is you will lose a bit of resolution. Even cheaper...bring all the shots into some thing like After Effects and reposition each frame on your own, then print back out to tape.

 

As for the camera issue, is it possible the camera reacted badly to the heat? I mean a lot of things can go wrong with gear when it gets too hot, especially motors. What if the heat caused the motor to run off speed?

 

Any expansion of the parts of the movement due to heat would lead to serious problems. I have no idea if that's possible, I'm not a camera tech, just throwing out ideas.

 

The fact that the rental house could not re-create the problem you where having makes me lean toward operator error or the heat.

 

R,

 

(And continuing a thought from a previous thread, when you rent gear you have no idea how it was treated on the previous shoots or how well it's maintained by the shop. It may have been beat to hell by previous users. Guys who own their own gear take excellent care of it, and it gets little use between shoots. Rental houses jam their stuff out the door as fast and as often as they can. But that's another story :)

[Alessandro Machi]

I'm wondering if as the camera warmed up the film staying cool maybe created a bad combination.

 

It seems that if the morning footage was Ok but the afternoon footage had problems that the camera becomes the one variable that may have changed because of the heat. What are the odds that you just happened to shoot all the properly perfed footage first and then all the improperly perfed footage afterwards, very low in my opinion.

 

More likely improperly perfed film would have been intemittenly mixed throughout the day with the properly perfed film, so the problems you described could not have occured consecutively but rather intermittenly.

 

While it makes sense to transfer as much of the film area as possible to give you more room to match your individual frames, you run the danger of losing resolution on shots that are wide to begin with. In other words you may have to change how much you zoom out on the film frame while transfering depending on whether the shot is a wide shot or a close up.

 

Close-up shots perhaps hold up better if you zoom them out during transfer, especially if you had decent depth of field, whereas wide angle shots might actually benefit from being slightly zoomed in during transfer, even if your going to then zoom in a bit more to try and smooth out the footage.

[David Mullen ASC]

If there was stress at the perfs, it could suggest that the film was not feeding properly out of the mag, causing the pulldown claw to have to tug more forcefully at the perf to advance the film, some sort of drag somewhere.

[F Bulgarelli]

tha's a good point, david. that was our first conclusion, the take up in some of the mags felt a bit tense.

we did have some loads where it felt ok and still created the same problem.

i guess we could always do a DI after we do the final edit and go off the digibeta master, will that be possible?

after all is a 3 minute music video.

is there any post houses you guys recommend to do this kind of work?

 

thanks

[Alessandro Machi]

tha's a good point, david. that was our first conclusion, the take up in some of the mags felt a bit tense.

we did have some loads where it felt ok and still created the same problem.

i guess we could always do a DI after we do the final edit and go off the digibeta master, will that be possible?

after all is a 3 minute music video.

is there any post houses you guys recommend to do this kind of work?

 

thanks

 

If you discover that there is a rhythm to the misregistration you may be able to to do a

strobe of a certain duration and that could minimize the misregistration effect. Try the 4, 6, or 9 frames per second strobe interval speeds and see if that minimizes the misregistration. The overall speed is still 24 frames per second but certain frames are held over resulting in an effective refresh rate of somewhere between 4-9 frames per second.

[F Bulgarelli]

If you discover that there is a rhythm to the misregistration you may be able to to do a

strobe of a certain duration and that could minimize the misregistration effect. Try the 4, 6, or 9 frames per second strobe interval speeds and see if that minimizes the misregistration. The overall speed is still 24 frames per second but certain frames are held over resulting in an effective refresh rate of somewhere between 4-9 frames per second.

 

jus wanted to give you guys an update.

we transfered the footage last night. excactly what we expected, really jumpy and at times it goes in and out of focus, it's almost like the breathing certain old lenses have.

the good news is that it looks pretty cool and we are gona use it in the video.

we have plenty of steady footage to make it all work together.

 

i'll put the video online when it's ready so you can check it out.

 

my thanks to everyone that helped me out.

 

francisco

[Michael Nash]

we transfered the footage last night. excactly what we expected, really jumpy and at times it goes in and out of focus, it's almost like the breathing certain old lenses have.

 

Sounds like the film buckled just slightly in the gate when it was being pinched. I didn't realize the pressure plates on the SR mags were that forgiving, but it doesn't take much...

[Chris Keth]

What camera was this with? Was the first checking the pitch adjustment with every reload? 110 degree heat would probably be one of the times when a fairly extreme pitch adjustment would be necessary, perhaps even to the extent of what happened to you. It would also explain why the rental house couldn't replicate the problem.