Telecine off of print; tungsten w/o 85 filter

[Larry Miles]

Hello, all,

 

Two related questions:

 

1. Are there advantages or disadvantages to telecine/scanning off of a print vs. the negative?

2. If doing a telecine off of a print from a tungsten negative that had daylight shots captured without an 85 filter, is it better to have any attempts at correction done during the printing stage or in digital post?

 

Thank you,

Larry

[David Mullen ASC]

First of all, don't use a print for telecine transfer, it has too much contrast for full color-correction options (similar to correcting a Rec.709 video recording versus log or raw video) -- but if you have no choice, have it color timed first for the same reason, you don't have as much ability to make corrections when there is a lot of contrast baked into the source.

 

Also prints are generally not made using a single frame pin registered printer but on a continuous contact belt printer (a lab person can describe this more accurately than I can from memory) so will have a little bit more softness not to mention will be a generation removed from the o-neg.

 

The big question is whether you are talking about transferring camera rolls or a spliced negative.

[Larry Miles]

Thank you for your reply.

 

I was referring to camera rolls.

[Tyler Purcell]

With a old school telecine, it's better to try and correct during the transfer if you're capturing REC709.

 

With a scanner, you'd fix it in post.

 

If you only have access to a telecine, sometimes operators know how to capture the image in a more flat "log" style, which will give you more room for correction in post. I've never had a problem shooting exteriors and interiors on the same roll of film, without filtration and fixing it in post.

 

As David points out, a contact print will have loss crispness to the image. This is why everyone today scans the negative and doesn't bother making prints. I have a tendency to make a print and project one roll of film from each movie I make, just to understand the color pallet so when I get into post, I have a better understanding of what the negative actually looks like, rather then what just the scan looks like.

[David Mullen ASC]

With a old school telecine, it's better to try and correct during the transfer if you're capturing REC709.

 

With a scanner, you'd fix it in post.

 

You mean a scan of a negative in terms of color-correction being done to the scan after-the-fact rather than live as with a telecine transfer.

 

In this case, the issue is that if you have to use a print for telecine transfer (or a scan, though that is less common for prints) you'd want the image to be color-timed first due to the limitations of color-correcting something with the gamma of a print. But then, what's the point of color-correcting a print just for a telecine transfer if you can transfer the negative itself, whether you make a Rec.709 or log recording.

 

Unless we are talking about a spliced negative master, especially if A-B rolled, in which case you'd usually want to make a color-timed interpositive (IP) for transfer.

[Tyler Purcell]

You mean a scan of a negative in terms of color-correction being done to the scan after-the-fact rather than live as with a telecine transfer.

Right, scanned camera negative and then adjust.

 

You're also right that it's harder to make corrections after a print is made. With that said, shooting daylight stock indoors, in a "warmer" environment, can generally be corrected out no matter what. It's shooting indoor stock outdoors without a filter, that's where things get tricky because you get into a noise issue when you try to bring up the warmer color tones to compensate.

[David Mullen ASC]

You generally find that when trying to color-correct a positive image with a heavy color bias is that you are missing a lot of color information so the end results tends to be a bit desaturated once you pull the color bias out. This is true whether it is an orange-looking image or a blue-looking image, the only difference is that if all you care about is fixing fleshtones, at least with the orange image you have a bit more red information to work with, which is missing in the overly blue image. Fixing an orange image in a print tends to lead to a bland skin tone but fixing a blue image in a print tends to lead to a dead grey-ish skin tone (which you can then warm up... but you end up back with a bland brown-tan color by adding orange over grey.)

 

But in terms of noise problems, it's a problem either direction and since with film, blue tends to be the grainiest color, it's better if the negative has excess blue exposure rather than excess red exposure in terms of making corrections. But again, this assumes working from the original negative, which has a lot of information to work with.

 

With a print, just like with Rec.709 video, what you can see in the image is all you have to work with, there isn't really any "hidden" layers of information.

[Larry Miles]

Thank you both for your input on the subject.