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K Borowski

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Everything posted by K Borowski

  1. Phil: That's not true. There's definitely a price-point with 35mm short ends (yes I know we are so spoiled in the US, but hey, we MAKE the stuff so we ought to be a bit spoiled right?) and older cameras versus high-end digital where it can be really close. DSLRs and HDV will still be cheaper, sure. But you can do a good job scrimping if you really want to. You can still get 35mm ends for 10¢/foot if you are really thrifty. That will get you 6x the film for the same price if you are willing to forego those epic 11 minute shots ;-)
  2. Even 16mm is $160 for TEN minutes. Of course, what about rental costs, the TIME to back up the data, etc. Another interesting point: You talk about backing up onto LTO tape twice. Assuming your movie's considered culturally valuable (or commercially valuable to a studio): How many times would you have had to back up SINCE then? Unfortunately, budgeting never takes this into account. The amount of backing up that you DON'T have to do with film eventually pushes a certain amount of economic advantage back in its favor. Current cost for 35mm is over $600 for as little as ten minutes (more like 8-9 reasonably) of shooting time. Then send 900 feet to the lab at $0.25 (is that a currently valid number?) for a $225 bill. Clean and prep for telecine sometimes extra, then the cost of a transfer or two. Easily approaching $200/minute after all is said and done. 16mm is probably nearly half that.
  3. In a properly budgeted film, it IS more expensive than HD, about 10% on a low-budget shoot. Of course, if you expect to pay no wages, get deals make everything for free, the next "Clerks" (usually a delusion) it can be a lot more expensive. Personally I'd rather shoot digital than to expect to get everything for free/exploit people. If I were making a low-budget movie with friends who believed in it too, I'd still feel obligated to try to give them *SOMETHING* Skilled labor shouldn't be free.
  4. Well, I disagree that the MX or Alexa are "there." You run into problems with color space (not that it doesn't get chopped off with film scanning anyway) and blown highlights with the best digital cameras. It seems they've worked very very hard to avoid this in the test footage. In the real world, it isn't nearly as easy to avoid clipping. It seems, from what I've seen in the test, they exposed the SPARKS to get detail back out. Even if the software were so great it could guess detail, or pull severely overexposed details out of crummy scans, clipped images, in that case there would be noise if it were severely blown out and brought back. Will have to take a look at the footage when I have a better connection, but that should give a far better idea of the software's ability, especially if it is in HD without too much compression.
  5. Umm, I'm sorry, but you'd be working today if you'd thrown film under the bus too? There are many people whose livelihoods are based on working with film. They're [EDIT: Cameron, Lucas] so successful from making movies, with film. I liked Avatar, but I wouldn't have anything to do with this business if all movies devolved into that model. Would you really want to give up a normal life and free time so you could "film" someone with motion capture dots on them all friggin day against a green screen? Sorry but that sounds like all work and no play, and I could do that in an office or shoveling sh** or in a coal mine or making tacos.
  6. NOo, as the late John Pytlak explained to me several years back,, it's identical to E100VS (stands for Vivid Saturated) Friendly reminder that ECN-2 can also be cross-processed in E-6, if you add a scrubber to the front of the machine for remjet removal. IDK if this has ever been done. I seem to recall though, something from the mid '90s, although they might have gotten specially made long lengths of C-41 film instead. I want to say it was something on the ASC website from around '98, or maybe the camera guild. Will see if I can find it. . . C-41 and ECN-2 processes are very different, different times, different temperatures, and different color developing agents. IDK how E-6 reacts in one compared to the other, but I want to say C-41 is more active, and really effects color balances totally differently, as well as contrast. You can probably get a motion picture lab that runs 35mm (even better the same lab that you'd be using for your 7285) to run a still roll of the VS at the beginning of the day or the end of a run and then you'll know exactly what it will look like. Personally, I'd go for STANDARD ECN-2 process times (3 minutes at 106 Fahr., not that anyone cares ;-) ) at least as a start point, certainly makes sense from an ECONOMIC perspective. In 35 I just saw the other day, you're looking at $1300 for a 1,000' core, just rawstock. So you're already spending, I'd assume also for 16 more than DOUBLE as what ECN would cost. Adding pushes and pulls (a lot of labs only do whole stop increments) will just further add to your cost. If they're willing to do the tests for just a nominal fee, I suppose you could do several tests with exposure bracketing (or even one roll chopped up in five ~1-foot/30cm pieces) and pick the one you like the best.
  7. No hard feelings. Sorry I guess I did read you wrong. It's really tough to tell without emoticons sometimes, different dialects, English as a second language for many speakers.
  8. Phil, oddly enough, I find your pessimism curiously uplifting. Maybe under the same principle as comedy being routed in the suffering of others rather than your own :-D I will feel very bad when Kodak is gone. :( Take this with a grain of salt, because I've been indoctrinated, am almost obligated to have this opinion, but I agree the shuttle was incredibly ineffective. Look at our space station. It was partially scrapped, may have to be abandoned, and is in an orbital inclination that is almost completely useless for one of its intended purposes: launching space missions. This was done to make it more accessible to the higher latitude of the Russians, ironically of incredible importance now that the US basically has to bum rides from them and do shots to get there on '60s technology (Shuttle reliability, agreeably being worse). Incidentally, the shuttle WAS predicted to have I think it was 1/100 failure rate, and that was almost exactly, IIRC the number of failures that they had. May have improved slightly with the paranoia that arose after that second shuttle disaster with Columbia. But said disaster was, almost on the tick true to those predicted failure figures. My understanding is the SSME was an incredibly costly engine to fuel. What's even worse, programs for shuttle-derived vehicles being scrapped may mean that, in the long term, a lot of those finicky systems were all for nought. Anyway, I admit to being terribly depressed myself hearing about Kodak's latest troubles. Let's not count them out yet though! They may be hurting, but they're far from through.
  9. Alright, fair enough. Looking at the differences between the emulator and V3, they are a pretty good match, dare I say it enough to fool me in a blind side-by-side (maybe not in actual motion, but then again shooting film isn't just about a grain structure!) Of course, a lot of this can be accomplished in a simple grading session, adding contrast. I'd like to see a larger image, or it applied to a more challenging situation. Of course film is going to see far better into the highlights and digital far better in the shadows. The emulation can't add back shadow detail, or restore blown highlights.
  10. It's frustrating seeing advice offered almost four mos. ago after a 16 hour day of picketing utterly and completely ignored, by the same people who accused me of "copy-pasting" off Wikipedia. The writing isn't on the wall in this case, but it is right on the 1970s Kodak color patches. Seeing semantics and philosophies applied on an arbitrary name to an otherwise very precisely defined photographic color is mind-boggling to me. How can so much debating go on so long and be just totally WRONG and off the mark? I'd have been grateful to have been given the gift of having just one of my early color instructors in school telling me "Photographic Blue is a mixture of cyan &MAGENTA (violet)." Would have saved me many frustration sessions of learning that the hard way. PHOTOGRAPHIC BLUE = VIOLET There's no simpler way to state it. Pull up some Kodak Q-Cards on a color-calibrated monitor and you will see that they are NOT what we would consider blue, they are violet. But, as with other things on the internet, it appears not to be about knowledge and application of that knowledge to our field, but about who can p*ss the farthest. As for my anger at two pages, four months of ignorance, proceeding my first response, I choose to express it here, rather than to underlings and coworkers on the set and in the lab. I've had a lot of pleasant phone calls and internet conversation with people who are absolute a-holes to work with. Or maybe I should bottle anger at one person up and take it home to my family? I feel I am giving anger exactly where it is due here. You choose instead to tell me to "take care" but it is clear you mean the exact opposite, further implying you'd never want to work with me! And that my anger is going to cost me work, and then kill me. Only if there are another two pages in late December is it going to kill me. . . Maybe it would look better, be more diplomatic, if I didn't call out information that is simply erroneous supposition. Should I let it go another four months and contaminate the fall semester's film students?
  11. :munches popcorn: Let's see, so far we have: Likening film to a horse The word "Versus" in the title A rolls eyes smiley right after showing "interest" from both sides as to their opinions If you still want to be a sucker after all this, you're easier to bait than I am! This thread is a sign from God that I need to quit staring at a monitor, end my break, and get back to work, doing my best to prolong the hastening arrival of this utter stupidity in my workplace. It's inevitable, but God does it cheapen completely the skill and craft of producing beautiful imagery, painting with light, shadows, filtration, lighting, diffusion, and movement. All anyone wants to "paint" with anymore is a rickety mouse on a bootlegged copy of Photoshop.
  12. http://www.ebay.ca:80/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=310325768130 It will cost you $8.50 CDN to find out whether or not this guy is my partner in crime as to my whole, unsubstantiated on Wikipedia, claims to something that happened before the invention of the World Wide Web. Kodak's changing the name on their color chart from "VIOLET" to "BLUE" must have originated outward, into space at the speed of light, so at this point, it's only been implemented in a small segment of our galaxy :-p Now I have spent at least 45 minutes (45 minutes too long) on this silly thread. Watch, someone will *still* come back and say I am wrong, just like I can have a saturated low contrast film and I should quit copy-pasting off of wikipedia, (not rolling ECN and ECP at work every day in between offering free advice to people that DON'T READ IT). I suppose that may be the most frustrating thing someone can do, completely ignore something I freely contribute an immense amount of time explaining. Anyway, one more tidbit of mental masturbation: You are never seeing ANY true blues, greens, violets, OR reds, you are seeing Kodak or FujiFilm or AgfaGaveart or Lucky or Ferrania or Technicolor proprietary cyan, yellow, and magenta dyes. (Contrary to popular belief, Fuji does NOT have a red-dyed cyan layer, it's a cyan interlayer that neutralized consumer fluorescent color shifts). Probably the ONLY systems that are anywhere near close are dye transfer printing or IB technicolor prints. Doing it chemically with some arbitrary complementary colors (magenta and cyan taking the bulk of the density in a filter pack and yellow, being so thin, probably having the most spectral impurity) or arbitrarily using additive filters with their own impurities, by their very natures, produce a great deal of inaccuracy (or imprecission?) that none of us, except maybe a select few female readers, could ever see unless pointed out to us, BTW, how many of us can REALLY say that it makes any difference whatsoever whether colors exactly match between a subject photographed and a subject projected, when the eye automatically adjusts for changes and color temperatures, and can easily be tricked into seeing "white" from a wide variety of temperatures of a black body equivalent of different heated Kelvin temperatures?
  13. Is this another sequel to "Dumb and Dumber?" What they call "cyan plus magenta" is arbitrary. You can call it "violet" or you can call it "blue" or you can call it "purplish blue," or you can call it "light urple." The friggin' color patches used to say "violet" instead of "blue" and film responds to wavelengths all the way into the ULTRAVIOLET region, so it's obvious that it is going to go past what the eye sees on the way to ultraviolet and register that too. Do you think Kodak went back and changed all of its films to SKIP OVER violet but still respond to ultraviolet, or do you think they arbitrarily changed the names on their color cards? Since none of the names are scientific and accurate, why would we have two pages of silly debates on "whose violet is the right violet?" It's like using a pair of Goddamn calipers to measure distances on a bumpy golf pitch that someone just turfed in an all terrain vehicle. Then, just for fun, let's translate it back and forth across German and English, debate whether the human eye can see "violet" (not relevant here) and introduce who knows how many other variations in different languages, people, and culture's different terms for different ranges or perceptions of color. Let's argue whether violet can influence the human eye (again, not the subject here at all whatsoever) 's perception of blue. Since photographic blue IS violet, who cares? So many people are misreading and going so far off topic that I'd say the signal-to-noise ratio on this thread is, conservatively 10:1 at this point. Can someone just post a pre-1974 Kodak color card that says "violet, green, red" instead of blue green read so this horse can die?
  14. Brian: While I'm well aware you can cut single frames on a splice block, I am saying that having to go back and physically remove, reinsert single frames, find those frames, etc. means that more times than not, the work wouldn't have been bothered with. Not that it can't be done, that the tediousness would wear an editor thin faster with a flatbed than NLE. BTW, I am using "flatbed" as the generic term for editing workprints. Is there a better term that encompasses different systems, methods? One can always take a MONITOR and throw it, instead of the splicer. Not that this was because of editing, but I have a permanent dull spot on this screen from a "release" :D Never threw a splicer though. . . Have dropped them and put them in spots where machinery has thrown them. I think one time I almost got hit in the head by a splicer I'd put on top of a plate that had been set on timer.
  15. If anything , NLE frees up MORE time because you can play around with more variations instead of physically cutting splicing. There isn't as much flexibility to cut a few frames here and there when there's physical labor involved in doing it. The pressures OUTSIDE of the editing suite really can't fairly be blamed on NLE. Nor can coverage. We're talking about a flatbed versus a non-linear editor. The important part is getting a print to the theatre. I don't' care if VHS tape, 35mm blowup workprints, or harddrives were used to generate an instruction list forthe neg.cutter. Neither does the audience.
  16. I'm not asking for a l,ist, just two films that exemplify this difference. I honestly can't see how an editor working on a flatbed with a specific set of instructions for the look o foa filmis going to produce a different result than NLE. Ultimately, the decisions are reduced to a sweries of frame nubmers that go to a neg cutter in either case. I think the money sould got into ptical printing rather than NLE editing. Even optical printing is going by the wayside. I don't think advising someone to bang their head against the wall and shell out their own money for a workprint that is scrap afterwards is a good way to preserve what is left. But, anyway, I cannot see a difference that I could in any way attribute to a flatbed versus software in any early '80s versus late '80s television shows, movies. "Bourne" comes 20 years after NLE became available, so I don't think it's fair to somehow say that look is because of NLE; there was TWO DECADE of it prior thatdid NOT have the sickening cutting. I know what you mean about that movie. It showed the "advantages of DI" with the jump cuts all over the place. Someone went crazy with it. God forbid a shot have a minimum length of, what 12 fames with contact printing? I don't really enjoy editing of any type. It is a chore, work. I think glamorizing editors is done by people who haven't spent enough time at the bench cutting and splicing. Not that starign at a computer screen is in anyway desirable. I'd love to cut 35mm on a flatbed. . . if someone else paid for it.
  17. I remember an article from circa 2000 where Kodak was pitching film dailies, not workprints, for shooting evaluation. Theoretically, you can still miss some focus issues working with NLE that you wouldn't if you had a workprint, because you basically have a 1:1 copy at HD+ resolution where you can see every piece of detail and then some that is going to make it onto the TV or theatre screen. With HD this advantage has lessened. Steve: I challenge you to provide a movie you know was NLE-edited versus a movie that was flatbed edited from teh '80s when the transition occurred. I find it very very hard to believe you can see the difference. The real influence is editing style NOT the equipment.
  18. Were it not for non-narrative "experimental films" and their makers, the medium wouldn't exist. The desire to capture motion is responsible for the beginnings of cinematography, not the desire to capture art.
  19. At the same time, I wouldn't slit my wrists or take 20 sleeping pills because I coudn't afford to do cut workprints, or do analog sound. I'd settle for what the pros settle for now: Just getting any piece of the process done photo-optically, getting to shoot film, or roll 1/4" tape at 7-1/2IPS It's a major battle to get a print made that doesn't go through the DI suite now. The equipment is crumbling. A workprint is ultimately an expensive piece of plastic you just throw away. I'd take care to heed my surroundings, in an optical or digital editing suite, and regard or disregard them accordingly. I try not to be too much a victim of either chemical fumes or uncalibrated monitors, 1970s analog counters that limit the precision of my optical printing, or planned obsolescence so that the damned software or computer doesn't work with your $60,000 film scanner.
  20. Not to be a naysayer, but if Kodak goes under 65mm will die, as will all IMAX 15/70 theatres. I hope, to put it in Star Trek terms that under best circumstances, 65mm film will "hopefully, exist for a good while." Bonus points for identifying the quote. But the war is going very badly for the Federation at this point. Starfleet command believes that defeat is inevitable. 50% of theatres will be digitally U.S. domestic by year end. There's not going to be any sort of photochemical revival at this point because more than half the screens can't even play it! 35mm is a secondary concern already, let alone optimizing the theatrical experience with it in mind.
  21. Richard, just as it wouldn't surprise me finding a dearth of information on FujiFilm certified labs in Rochester, it doesn't surprise me that there's a similar lack of information for motion picture labs in the heart of FujiFilm's empire on the Kodak website. As far as what Simon has provided, I don't read either of the two Japanese alphabets anymore, let alone remember the language, but there are definitely PICTURES of 16mm film on the Imagica website, and if they have a film recorder they at least know where to get film processed. Worst case, I don't see why 16mm film couldn't run on 35mm rollers, unless you're dealing with a sprocket-drive machine (not talking about Retro, just in theory this should work if you bribe the guy with sake before he turns off the machine at the end of the night).
  22. This is from "an old barfly" but I knew they were shooting in the town I grew up in, and I noticed they didn't have any protruding 1,000 foot magazines. I guess I don't feel so bad I didn't try to get on camera crew for this prod. Film loader's the most important job on the set. DIT? Not that that's why I like shooting film, but God, after 14 hour days, the 1st AC's bitching at me certainly is lessened when I take that to heart.
  23. John beat me to it, far worse places to be in securing 16mm processing in the world. . .
  24. Come on Dom, Kubrick's ART DIRECTOR invented the iPad, er Droid. :-p Phil: There was a black pad with blinking lights and a pen on TOS. You never saw the screen, but the blinking light implied it was electronic. IDK about the pads, but all the displays were powered by 16mm film projectors on many '60s '70s shows. Makes sense. The S8 projector powered the Princess Leia "hologram" in A New Hope.
  25. I have certain watch requirements: Will not spontaneously emit light, preferably windable, must make a mechanical clicking noise in the dark or somehow tell time without the need for illumination. Pocket watch or an older wristwatch seem to be the only devices that fit my needs. Smartphones not so much. Those damned things are dangerous, lighting up for no reason!
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