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S16mm to Hard Drive (in HD)


Jess Dunlap

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Is the simplest way of getting S16mm on a hard drive in HD format going through HDCAM-SR or DVCPRO-HD tape? In getting quotes for this, I keep having to budget for transfer of film to tape, and then tape to hard drive (which apparently take a lot of time, and money). I have no access to an HD deck to do that transfer myself.

 

To transfer 45 minutes of S16mm is going to cost no less than $1,000. It seems like there would be a more efficient and less costly way of doing this. Any thoughts?

 

Thanks!

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The simplest is to use a datacine, which sends output as data onto a hard drive rather than video onto tape. This tends to cost more, however, but the benefit is that you can skip the compression and just get .dpx files if you want, which is really nice.

 

The other way is to make friends with the people at the post house and get them to do it for free during off hours ;)

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We just had five rolls of 7219 transferred to hard drive, 1080p 10-bit uncompressed, at Colorlab, with no tape step.

 

10-bit uncompressed meaning Apple ProRes 4:2:2? Are you happy with the transfer?

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10-bit uncompressed meaning Apple ProRes 4:2:2? Are you happy with the transfer?

 

Blackmagic Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2, they offer RBG 4:4:4 for a little more, and 2K for a little more than that: http://colorlab.com/telecine/colorlab_HD_guide.pdf

 

We got a best-light, and honestly it looks a touch on the dark side to me, nothing that can't be brought up, since it takes desktop color correction very well. It was my first time out with both the lab and the stock--I'll probably rate it 320 next time.

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Is the simplest way of getting S16mm on a hard drive in HD format going through HDCAM-SR or DVCPRO-HD tape? In getting quotes for this, I keep having to budget for transfer of film to tape, and then tape to hard drive (which apparently take a lot of time, and money). I have no access to an HD deck to do that transfer myself.

 

To transfer 45 minutes of S16mm is going to cost no less than $1,000. It seems like there would be a more efficient and less costly way of doing this. Any thoughts?

 

Thanks!

 

 

This is a time of transition for many labs, they are used to television work flows which always go to tape but now more and more clients are requesting direct to hard drive transfers and even some TV productions are experimenting with going tapeless for aspects of their work flows. So it should not surprise you that many labs are still doing a traditional telecine to tape and then ingesting that tape via a Kona, Black Magic or CineWave card.

 

The most important issue in any telecine is the quality of your colorist. It sounds like you are looking for an unsupervised session in which case you REALLY need to know about that colorist and what they do.

 

$1000 to telecine 45 minutes of footage and get it on a hard drive is not an outlandish price but, no doubt you can do better. Doing better usually involves having a nice discussion with your sales rep. at the lab.

 

Also what are you going to do on the other side, when you are done editing? How do you plan to get you QT file on tape for viewing and distribution?

 

Good Luck.

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Pardon the delayed response, I've been at Full Frame, and apparently didn't set up my email notification properly....

 

We spent $1300 or so on the processing/transfer. The total file size is just over 400GB on a FW800 drive we provided. The editor is working in FCP with 1080p ProResHQ proxies (overkill, I think, but apparently he has the horsepower for it), which comes to about 68GB total. We'll reconform to uncompressed before we send it to Apple Color for finishing.

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