D.I. options

diego vazquez · July 19, 2007

hello, so i have a question to whoever has gone through the different D.I pipelines...

we're shooting a very independent film (on super16mm) and myself and my friend the DOP both work at a post production company where we have direct access to the equipment on dead hours and weekends of course. this meaning that we have the option of when we finish shooting the film and have it developed, we can go any route we like.... the question is which one is more conveinient for someone like me who's going to edit from home in fcp..

route "A" i was thinking could be the following:

instead of doing bad onelights to beta sp's or minidv's, i thought i could do best lights to [HD CAM SR at 4:4:4 at 24fps] of ALL my rushes, this meaning i transfer from the film lifting the blacks and bringing down the hilights on a (lighting setup per lighting setup basis) just to grab enough from the film's latitude and put it into the 10 bit tape. after this is done, i can capture ALL my rushes from the HD tape at 24fps, but this time only at 8 bit and 4:2:2 literally just to downres them to compressed quicktimes at a quarter of the resolution and keeping the timecode..

in this way i can go ahead and edit in final cut pro at 24fps in my laptop from home the entire feature, keeping all the timecode for future edl.

when finished with my cut, i can conform from my HD CAM SR tapes at 4:4:4 10 bit and have a online master and lay it back to a new HDCAM SR tape at 4:4:4 10 bit without loosing ANY quality from the original best light tapes. so i end up with ONE tape only as long as the film is, with only the shots that actually made it to the cut.

then we can go ahead and grade them of this tape that has enough dynamic range to grade of, and then lay off a final graded master.

now route "B" could go using the scanner, which would mean there's no point on doing the bestlights in HD in the first place, and i would have to go with one lights using [non 24fps tapes] which already would complicate things a bit.

then when finished with my cut, give an edl to scan only the shots that made it into the cut, then conform using the dpx's (by the way at slightly better resolution of 2k) dealing with the hole lookup tables issue, which requires more care calibrating, doing test answer prints, trial and error, etc... and then at the end end up with a 2 hour film in graded dpx file sequence that will take a LOT of storage. and files are not as robust as a tape

so to me route "A" is more straight forward and more comfortable to work with, but the questions are:

-will it be easy to print to 35mm from my HDCAM SR tape??

-or will it be easier to print from a DPX/CIN sequence??

-if i go with route "B" will the quality improvement be worth the extra hassle?? (i'm not slack but has someone actually gone the other way cus the quality is amazingly better?)

i really cant make my mind, efficency wise i would rather go for the HDCAM SR but...

i personally prefer pin registered scanning than realtime telecine..

but then again robert rodriguez and many more will never shoot in film again...

David Mullen ASC · July 19, 2007

I think in the case of shooting in Super-16, rather than 35mm, you won't see as much quality difference or loss between HDCAM-SR and 2K, and if HDCAM-SR is better-suited for your post workflow, it probably makes sense. As to which the post house finds easier to film-out to 35mm, it shouldn't really matter but you should talk to your individual post house. They may not be set-up to handle HDCAM-SR, though unlikely.

You do have to factor in the costs of transferring all your camera rolls to HDCAM-SR on a Spirit versus transferring to SD for offline editing and only scanning selects (or even retransferring selects to HDCAM-SR.) All depends on the price you get for the transfer work.

diego vazquez · July 19, 2007

You do have to factor in the costs of transferring all your camera rolls to HDCAM-SR on a Spirit versus transferring to SD for offline editing and only scanning selects (or even retransferring selects to HDCAM-SR.) All depends on the price you get for the transfer work.

thank you so much david, i'm definately going for the HD SR route. as in tranferring ALL my rushes to HD it hink its worth it cus in that way i only touch the neg once and thats it, i think that is worth not having to be nervous about further risks with the OCN.

and when they print to 35mm from HD CAM SR i dont need to worry about any LUT's right? its their job to match the print to how the tape looked right??