Extremely cheap 35mm telecine?

[John Butler]

I have recently decided to take advantage of the surprisingly large amount of merchants selling films (16 and 35mm) at my local flea market, and in the case of finding more obscure, one of a kind titles, I'd like to know, what is the cheapest telecine facility for 35mm you know of? I don't care about color correction or anything, just a simple, raw sd transfer would be sufficient.

[Hal Smith]

I have recently decided to take advantage of the surprisingly large amount of merchants selling films (16 and 35mm) at my local flea market, and in the case of finding more obscure, one of a kind titles, I'd like to know, what is the cheapest telecine facility for 35mm you know of? I don't care about color correction or anything, just a simple, raw sd transfer would be sufficient.

How cheap is cheap? I bought a fully functional 35mm KEM Jr. flatbed telecine off eBay for $2K. It's one drawback is that it doesn't do a true 3:2 pulldown. It has a Sony machine vision color camera with NTSC, S-Video, and component outputs. I plug up the S-Video into a Sony MiniDV and get recordings that look pretty good on a 55" Mitsubishi TV. I've experimented a bit with an HDV camera on it and got promising results for eventual conversion to HD output.

 

As far as I can tell, a KEM telecine is the same machine as a KEM editor with a different picture head. I probably could purchase a 35mm optical head and plug it in where the telecine head goes.

 

Any recent features show up at your flea market? I've been looking for a print of "Enchanted". My 35mm collector buddies tell me that any Disney is hard to find but I've managed a few like "101 Dalmatians" and "Aristocats". A couple of my treasures are "Galaxy Quest" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". I run a Simplex SP portable converted for Dolby SR and have the pieces to add Dolby Digital.

[Saul Rodgar]

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/resources/cat4.php

 

The cheapest SD telecine lab I have ever used, with great results, I must add:

 

http://www.tfgtransfer.com/

 

I dunno if they will take commercial prints that you don't have rights to, though.

[John Butler]

I haven't seen any recent films at my flea market. It seems that my flea market just happens to get a lot of people who have some films among the possessions they desire to sell. I started trying to collect them after a foolish experience where I gave up on finding out the title of a complete film print because I was too lazy to unwind the leader (which the seller insisted i do).