Workflow

Tom Hepburn · June 20, 2008

Hello Folks,

I have some questions about getting to high definition TV from 16 mm film. Here is my workflow:

Film on Eclair ALC Super16 mm camera (16x9).

Transfer to hard drive, but not sure of all of the options yet.

Take into AfterEffects or possibly Premiere Pro CS3 to edit

Export from one of the above (trying to retain as much quality as possible)

Encode for Blue Ray.

Burn to Blue Ray Disk.

I know that everyone doesn't have a blue ray burner/player at the moment.

Most of what I'll be shooting we be more valuable to me (and my kids) in the years to come, not necessarily right now. What is high end at the moment will be considered standard before we all know it. So it's important that when I have my film transferred to Hard Drive it's the best quality as I can afford. I?m thinking 2K scans for the 16mm film.

I want to be able to play this footage in the highest quality on HDTV in the near future. I can keep my raw 16 mm on a hard drive and as the technology advances, I'll be able to re-render and output again. It won?t be a long movie, most likely 20 minutes or so. My computer is a PC that is around 2 years old and has 2 gigs of RAM. I?m not sure of the processor at the moment, but I?m concerned it?s not going to have the stones to handle the 2K scans. I could use lower res compressed versions of my scans and substitute by proxy at rendering time in AfterEffects.

So my two questions would be; is there anything I should be aware of in my workflow in terms of potential snags?

What recommendations are there in terms of retaining the highest quality? I think the most variables lye in rendering, encoding at this point.

Thanks in advance for any help tossed my way.

Tom

Paul Bruening · June 20, 2008

There's a lot of approaches to your approach. I go at it like old school film workflow. I prefer Premiere for low res proxy as if I were cutting a 16mm work print on an 8 plate editing table. I still call this a "work print" even though there's obviously no print involved. The benefit of this is that Premiere is easier to use than AE. You can cut the soundtrack and polish it in Premiere once you've got the picture cuts trimmed. Then you use the much clumsier AE to conform the high res files to the work print EDL (which you import from Premiere). Once you've conformed, you can do FX, composite, import CGI, and color time the output. I know, it's pitiful that I let old school, film workflows effect my digital workflows, but this system has some strong benefits. However, I'm sure someone like Phil or Tyler can throw you an approach that is more efficient and easier. That's their gig.