Shooting 35mm for HD post

Gary Robinson · May 25, 2005

I'm planning my next short. I will shoot on 35mm and transfer to hd for editing. I know that super35 is more on par with the with of the aspect ratio of the hd formats, but I don't have a super 35 camera. If I shoot 35, will it just be blown up in telecine to fit the hd aspect ratio? Does anyone have any tips or experiences shooting and transfering 35mm to D5 hd?

David Mullen ASC · May 25, 2005

I'm planning my next short. I will shoot on 35mm and transfer to hd for editing. I know that super35 is more on par with the with of the aspect ratio of the hd formats, but I don't have a super 35 camera. If I shoot 35, will it just be blown up in telecine to fit the hd aspect ratio? Does anyone have any tips or experiences shooting and transfering 35mm to D5 hd?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's not really a "blow up" when you're talking about transferring film to video.

Full-frame HD is 16x9 (1.78 : 1).

4-perf Super-35 / Full Aperture is 1.33 : 1.

3-perf Super-35 / Full Aperture is 1.78 : 1.

4-perf 35mm Academy / Sound Aperture is 1.37 : 1.

Within 1.37 Academy, you can crop top & bottom to get matted widescreen 1.85 : 1.

The two common 35mm projection formats both use sound, not full, apertures: matted widescreen 1.85 : 1 ("flat") and anamorphic widescreen 2.39 : 1 ("scope".)

Since 35mm exceeds the resolution of HD anyway, it doesn't really matter too much whether you have to crop to get 1.78 : 1 (16x9).

Cropping 4-perf Super-35 to 1.78 or shooting 3-perf Super-35 gets you a marginally larger negative area than cropping 4-perf 35mm Academy (sound) to 1.78 : 1.

If your camera is set-up for a sound aperture, not optically centered for full aperture (aka Super-35), then just compose for cropping to 1.78 : 1 just like you would for standard 1.85. Shoot a framing chart so the telecine operator knows the exact framelines for cropping. If your camera does not have "1.78 : 1 within Academy" framelines, you can use the standard 1.85 framelines (not Super 1.85). 1.85 and 1.78 are very close to each other so you could compose for 1.85 and transfer 1.78 (16x9 full-frame) and hardly see a difference. You'll see slightly above and below the 1.85 area in 16x9 HD, so don't place the mic boom or something right on the 1.85 framelines.

John Pytlak RIP · May 25, 2005

I'm planning my next short. I will shoot on 35mm and transfer to hd for editing. I know that super35 is more on par with the with of the aspect ratio of the hd formats, but I don't have a super 35 camera. If I shoot 35, will it just be blown up in telecine to fit the hd aspect ratio? Does anyone have any tips or experiences shooting and transfering 35mm to D5 hd?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Standard SMPTE 96M-2004 certainly recognizes a 16:9 (1.78:1) HD television image scanned from "regular" 35mm:

http://www.smpte.org/smpte_store/standards/

The image scanned is on the "Academy" centerline 18.75mm from the reference edge of the film, and has an area of 20.95x11.78 millimeters (0.825x0.464 inches).

For Super-35, the centerline is the film centerline, 17.48mm from the reference edge, and the scanned area is 24.00x13.50 millimeters (0.945x0.511 inches).

Since the Super-35 image area is slightly larger, grain and sharpness will be better for the larger format.

Gary Robinson · May 26, 2005

Thanks for the info guys. By the way John, I was sent some great DVD's from Kodak after NAB which promoted the use of film over hd video capture. Hopefully, these will be seen by lots of dps.