Post CC & Grading (short film)

Santiago Benet · July 17, 2010

I would like your opinion and technical advice on this process we are using. I shot a short film with a very very limited budget but with a lot of help from skilled people and rental & service companies.This particular post is about the Post production.We shot a dream scene in Red and the rest of the story in film. For the film part we used 3 kind of different emulsions Vivid 160T , Vivid 500T both filtered 85 for the "reality",and 5219 V3 to create a cleaner look for a specific part (a court room). A local post company is helping us with the color grading and they are mostly a digital post house.They mostly work Red files, so the technician told us to send the material to a lab and print it and do a flat pass and scan to HD to process it in his machines. The question is would i still have the benefit of the latitude and resolution of Film at the time of color correction and grading ? Thanks for your time.

David Mullen ASC · July 17, 2010

Well, first of all, you wouldn't make a print and scan that, you'd scan the negative. Second, does he want a 2K or 4K RGB data scan or an telecine transfer to 1080P HD? Which is the digital master being finished to?

If you are finishing in HD, some of the differences between the stocks will be lost, however, it is easy to use digital color-correction to make the stocks look different from each other by monkeying with the gamma & chroma, etc. But HD won't resolve all the subtle grain differences between the stocks, which are pretty close already. I mean, you'll still see the differences, but not as clearly compared to doing a 4K scan of the negative. But if this is a low-budget short film, you can't have everything.

Chris Burke · July 17, 2010

My advice is to have the lab (if they can) scan all super 16 to the highest resolution they can. 2k dpx files would be ideal. Have them do a flat pass with the scanner and deliver the files to you on hard drive. Many labs, some near me, give very competitive indie rates. Many will do a scan only to hard drive for indies with no grading required. You do the grade. Which in your case will be the post house.

David Mullen ASC · July 17, 2010

My advice is to have the lab (if they can) scan all super 16 to the highest resolution they can. 2k dpx files would be ideal.

If he shot 5219, it sounds like a 35mm shoot.

Santiago Benet · July 17, 2010

Well, first of all, you wouldn't make a print and scan that, you'd scan the negative. Second, does he want a 2K or 4K RGB data scan or an telecine transfer to 1080P HD? Which is the digital master being finished to?

If you are finishing in HD, some of the differences between the stocks will be lost, however, it is easy to use digital color-correction to make the stocks look different from each other by monkeying with the gamma & chroma, etc. But HD won't resolve all the subtle grain differences between the stocks, which are pretty close already. I mean, you'll still see the differences, but not as clearly compared to doing a 4K scan of the negative. But if this is a low-budget short film, you can't have everything.

Sorry for the terms, we would develop the film and then scan the negative in hd 1080 ,I was trying to get a 2k RGB data scan to have more resolution ,but he says its a overkill for a shortfilm. My only concern is that we would like to print a 35mm projection copy in the future. Would we be able to get good results from the 1080 or should i insist on the 2k scan ? thanks again

David Mullen ASC · July 17, 2010

Sorry for the terms, we would develop the film and then scan the negative in hd 1080 ,I was trying to get a 2k RGB data scan to have more resolution ,but he says its a overkill for a shortfilm. My only concern is that we would like to print a 35mm projection copy in the future. Would we be able to get good results from the 1080 or should i insist on the 2k scan ? thanks again

You'll be fine, there's not a big difference between 1080P and 2K, and if this is a low-budget short, you go where you can get the best deal.