Douglas Hunter

There is a place here in LA called Custom Upholstery Products that makes barneys for super 8 cameras. Here is their web site: http://www.customupholsteryproducts.com/

1) For doing wild sync in super 8 head AND tail slates are a good idea. A crystal conversion by the Film Group is about $500 so its probably within budget. 1A) I own a Marantz PDM 660. Its a 2 channel digital field recorded, it records to 48K 16bit .wav files. It has very low system noise and is basically as good as the mic you put in front of it. The drawbacks are that it does not have time code and that if you want to ride the levels while shooting you will need to put a mixer in front of it. If you step up a bit the Marantz 670 is even better but its $700 rather than $400. Sound gear should be a rental item anyway, and then you could go for one of the Sound Designs compact field recorders which are amazing devices. Of these three devices the Sound Designs recorder is the only one that can do 24bit audio which is the HD spec. Its not a big deal at all, just something you should know. 2) Any particular reason you want to go to HD? I believe its doable but I don't know how many labs can go to HD. Currently no labs in LA offer Super 8 telecine to HD. As for the question you can edit on FCP as HDV but you would need to down convert your telecined footage to HDV from HD. When your cut is finished you would then relink to the full res media. One thing to watch out for is that FCP creates many large render files if you choose to work with hi-res footage. Right now I am finishing up a cut using 10bit 4:2:2 media and I have 33 gigs of necessary render files for an 18 minute film!! Another way to do it would be to telecine to a hi-res codec and also do a simo DVCAM. ingest and cut with the DVCAM and then when picture is locked blow away the DVCAM media and re-link to the hi-res files. This keeps editing easy and keeps the size of your render files way down. 3) Never used express. studio or FCP 4.5 - 5 will do the job. 4) You will want to finish to a number of formats. If you telecine to a true HD codec than I would create a HDCAM final master and maybe also a DVCpro HD master, and also digibeta, DVCAM, and also make a bunch of DVDs. You ask about going out to 35 but is that really the look you want? and do you have the budget or that?

Assumptions can cause a lot of problems. That being said, Rafael is right, you should call the lab, tell them what you see on the video and what you expected to see. Ask them what they saw during the transfer, etc. They are really the folks who can tell you why the telecine turned out the way it did. A dialogue now may lead to a re-do or at least to better results in the future. Good luck.

A snip test will tell you want you need to know for sure. But I also want to add that 7246 is a pretty hardy stock. A year a room temp will most likely have no effect. I shot 7246 that was stored at room temp for 3 years and the results were fine. I did snip test it first and the test showed it was still well within range.

Jeff, Its very difficult to tell what we are looking at on a small highly compressed image. That being said, its not a simple case of the camera metering the film correctly, its a matter of what you wanted to expose for and if the film (and the telecine) could handle it. Also did you take notes while shooting? Camera reports are beautiful things when you have questions in post. You should always keep detailed notes when you are shooting. Even if all you record is the subject of the shot, what you were exposing for and what the F stop was that would be very helpful to you in situations such as this. Also what was the method of telecine used? Did you go to a smaller lab with non-professional gear or to a bigger lab with a reasonable telecine set up? It sound like your session was not supervised so did you instruct the operator to go scene to scene or did they just do a rough "best light" run? In telecine you pretty much always get what you pay for. You mentioned color. Keep in mind that 64T does not have very good color to begin with, it does tend to have a desaturated look. In addition you transferred it to miniDV which has very little color information in the signal. So if it was color you wanted the deck was stacked against you. Concerning exposure, keep in mind that reversal has a narrow exposure range, in high contrast shots you are always pushing against the shoulder or the toe depending on what you are exposing for. Looking at your images its hard to tell what was happening. You have areas of normal exposure in almost all of your shots. If the earlier footage was at dusk the telecine operator could have been trying to get you normal exposure for the foreground objects such as water, rail road tracks and grass thinking that you would rather have that than an underexposed foreground and a more normal sky. Did you tell the lab what you wanted for each scene or did they need to do some mind reading? Looking at some of the shots such as the time laps of the sun set over water, the water is the closest to normal exposure so in that case I would expect the sky to be more blown out because it looks like you were exposing for the very dark water. And if you were exposing for the sky I would expect the water to be nearly black. So basically the things you do not like about the footage were likely a combination of shooting and telecine. Also I always encourage people to not be so trusting of their BTL light meters. Super 8 cameras are all OLD and the photo cell could go at any time even on good cameras. Also when you are exposing film in shots that have a broad exposure range, such as the earlier shots in the reel you need to know when you are shooting what the different parts of the frame are reading and ask yourself what you want to expose for. This is essential, and its more easily achieved with a good hand held meter than with the BTL meter.

The short answer is that it can't be done. The long answer is that there are some things you can try that might work for your application. The first thing is using a good film grain plug in such as the pulg ins for After effects. The next thing is to work with color and contrast. Do you want a reversal or negative look? If you want reversal then experiment with bringing down your blacks and increasing contrast. Also reversal is often described as having "inky" color, that is, the colors are highly saturated and dense looking. Then you can also play around with simulating gate weave and dirt and scratches. Personally I do not like the way added dirt and scratches look, it very difficult to make them look organic. also the HDV image is going to be sharper than a super 8 image so you may want to play around with adding some gaussian blur or defocusing your colors. Another thing you can do is to actually shoot some super 8, project it and then re-photograph it using your video camera. The look you get will tend to be soft and the colors will be fairly vivid. It also tends to have a slight flicker. I've done this for a number of projects. Its a great, but very specific look, not for all applications.

The last shot of Tarkovsky's Nostalghia has the kind of haunting beauty and emotional resonance that can stay with one for years. Actually the entire film has that kind of imagery (especially the black and white footage). I remember being in Chicago one weekend and going to an art exhibit there on the "image of memory." I was delighted to see that they had this shot on a loop playing over and over again.

"Simple" is in the eye of the beholder I guess. Leaving the majority of the color work until post production leads to its own series of challenges. 1) For dailies what do you show the network or studio? You simply can not show Execs. the washed out looking image that comes from the Red or the Genesis. If you do, the first conversation the next morning will be about firing the DP. Execs. want to see great looking dailies. They want to know as soon as possible what the show really looks like. 2) Doing more work in post means increasing post budgets but will production budgets drop? I doubt it, so it ends up making a show more expensive. 3) Politics, who gets to define the final look of the show? As it stands I've been on many shows where the DPs were "managed" into having no notes, or they were given their pass and then all their notes were changed after the fact. The good news for DPs working in traditional formats is that they did most of the work on set and so there is only so much that can be done in post. But if the image coming out of the camera is something of a blank slate then it seems likely that the role of the DP will be greatly reduced, and the final look of a show, will be, to a greater extent than ever before left to the EPs and the network. Granted I know better than to think that the DP always knows best (they don't) but as a member of the creative team they should not be sidelined. But that is a risk posed by a post heavy workflow.

What do you mean by a frame rate problem? What are you seeing that suggests this? Granted looking at film on the web by definition can't tell one very much but I'm not seeing anything in your footage that suggests a teleccine frame rate issue, or significant speeding up or slowing down of the camera's motor. Or slipping frames due pull down claw issues.

Zack, Time code is not your problem, in PAL countries you are SUPPOSED to transfer at 25fps. Ireland is on the PAL standard correct? PAL is a film friendly video standard because the time code frame rate is only one frame per second different than the frame rate of your film. So when your film is telecined it is only sped up a tiny bit to make up for the one frame difference. The human eye will not see this difference. Those of us on the NTSC standard have a much harder time with things because when we transfer film to video we need to add 6 new frames per second (that is 6 new frames per every 24 frames in order to achieve the 29.97 frame rate of NTSC video), hence the dreaded 3:2 pull down which gives us two split frames for every 3 whole frames. Anyway your jitter problems are because you were shooting hand held and on top of that you may have a camera problem. Also some gate weave could have occurred in telecine. Finally keep in mind that most super 8 cameras (including the Beaulieus and Canons) don't have very good registration. That's one of the things that gives super 8 its charm.

Good! Well shot R16 looks amazing, you have made the right choice. As for digital and film schools. I was getting out of USC just as the full court press for digital was underway. There were a few pragmatic reasons for going digital, such as lower costs on student projects, ease of use for new film makers, and also the feeling that "the industry" is going digital so the students should be ahead of the curve. Personally I don't agree with most of that thinking but I do think that the aesthetic value and flexibility of R16 and Super 16 are remarkable and are not easily matched on digital. As for the costs to the school of film vs. digital I believe that in the long run the cost of going digital is much higher, since video cameras in a film school environment have a life span of 3 - 5 years tops and need to be maintained as well.

Its not exactly film hours, its hours of telecine bay time. Think of it like this, you can do your telecine 3 different ways. 1) - Unsupervised best light: This means that the telecine operator will take a few minutes to look at your footage and come up with a general setting that will work fairly well for all your footage. They will set-up the telecine and then let the footage roll. So for 1 hours worth of footage this would add maybe 15 - 30 minutes of telecine bay time. 3) Scene to scene unsupervised: In this case you are having the lab go from shot to shot of your footage and asking them to do basic adjustments to your footage to get "normal" exposure and color for each individual shot or scene. This takes longer than #1 but not as long as #3. 3) Supervised: This is where you sit in on the telecine and give specific instructions to the telecine operator as to how you want each shot or scene to look. As a rule of thumb its better to estimate on the longer side for this, I mentioned 2 - 3 hours per hour of footage earlier but its easy for a session to go significantly longer than that if you have a high number of shots and scenes, or if there are problems or if you have a specific aesthetic that you want to achieve. You also mentioned developing (or processing) yes that is a different charge usually done by the foot. Expect to pay between .11 and .14 cents per foot for processing. There is also a charge for prepping the film for telecine which may be a flat or an additional .02 - .04 cents per foot. Preping includes cleaning the film and adding leader. Be sure to ask up front about any additional fees that the lab may charge. For telecine done to tape there are a few labs that charge a "deck fee" or maybe soon we will see hard drive set up fees, or conversion fees etc. Just make sure to ask about any and all additional fees that may come to bear on the work the lab does for you. So lets say you have 2200 feet of 16mm to process, prep, process and telecine. lets say the lab charges a base rate of .13 cents per foot for processing and an additional .04 cents per foot for prep. your cost will be .17 per foot X 2200 = $374 + tax Now lets say you want to do scene to a supervised telecine and you have a lot a small shots in the footage and a good number of different scenes. Lets go long and say its going to take you 4 hours to do that and the lab charge $265 per hour to go to a hard drive as 10 bit 4:2:2. so that's 4 X 265 = $1060 + tax Your total would be $1434 to get 1 hour of footage in Hi-res for editing and finishing. At that point you need to think about the back end of your work flow. After your project is edited and you have created a full res quicktime, then what? Do you want to post it on the web? make DVDs or do you want to do out to tape? Most people can handle the web and DVDs on their own but going out to tape often requires a final trip to the lab for output and dubs.

We don't usually measure the cost of telecine by minute or foot. Telecine is usually billed as an hourly rate. For supervised session its safe to estimate your time at 2 or 3 to 1. So if you have 1 hour of footage telecine will take 2 - 3 hours depending on the number of shots, the length of the shots and how much work they need. As for the cost of doing telecine 16 can be cheaper. Spectra for example charges less for 16 than for super 8 when going to tape.

Actually you do not always capture at 24fps. The frame rate you use to capture should be determined by the time base of the medium you are finishing to and your workflow. The time code of your DV tape is 29.97. So if, for example, your final product will be standard definition video of any kind (DVD, miniDV, Digibeta, etc) Then you should just capture at 29.97, edit in 29.97 and go out to tape at 29.97. With super 8 there are not many reasons to capture or edit in 24. There is no such thing as matching back to film in S8 and not many people finish to 24p HD so 29.97 is it for the majority of Super 8 projects. I suppose there is one other reason to edit in 24, and this would be if you wanted to post your video on the internet and have no split frames, then removing the pulldown is the way to go. However since you shot at 18fps you are really out of luck, since FCP is not equipped to remove the pull-down used to bring 18fps up to 29.97. Unless . . . you telecined your footage at 24fps then you could remove the pulldown and slow your footage down to achieve natural looking motion.

Alex, Granted in a close up that could be the case but I was not responding to or countering your concern. My post and the note about the christmas lights concern the light falling on the subject. Having so little power, they will not contribute to the exposure and therefore should not be considered in the calculation of how many FC are falling on the subject.

I think you mentioned earlier that you were shooting 200T which does tend to look mealy. Only Velvia and the 100D have fairly fine grain among the color stocks. Its been a while but I seem to remember double-x as being very smooth grain. If a smoother grain is a big part of your aesthetic then you should shoot 16mm.

Your plight is cinematography 101. Unfortunately its been a while since I took cinematography 101. I am a little foggy on the details but here is what I remember to be the key elements to knowing if you had enough light to expose the film. 1- The output of the light source 2- the distances from the source to the subject 3- the asa of the film. In essence the question you are asking is: How much light is required to expose the film with iris set at f1.1 rated either 200 or 160 asa. Looking at the Kodak website they say that Tri-x rated at 200asa needs 16 FC at 24 FPS to get normal exposure at f1.4. So the question is how many FC of light were falling on your subject? You said you had blue gells on the lights. Full CTB will cut the light's output in 1/2 and a party blue will cut it even more. anyway if you were using Arri 300W plus lamp with full CTB at a distance of 10 feet, then you would be getting about 70 FC (67.5) if the lamp was spotted and 14FC if the lamp was flooded. (according to Arri) which would give you enough light for normal exposure of your subject at F2.8 or F1.4 respectively. Look up your light's output specs on line and then calculate the light loss due to the gells and distance from the subject. Don't worry about the Christmas lights, they are low wattage and have no throw. The film will see them but they won't help expose your subject.

I looked at the footage and there is a fair amount of compression artifacts in the picture, but I expect to see that on web video. I've seen a lot worse. Are you also responding to the grain of the super 8 film or just the compression? Preping the film means cleaning it and adding long head and tail leader in order to thread the telecine machine. Basically you want you film as clean as possible before it goes to telecine. It only improves the quality to the extent that less dirt means a more pristine image.

I spooled down some Fuji 64D for the A-minima last month. I did it at Yale. It worked just fine, no scratches, no dirt. Just make sure to emphasize to the lab that the A-minima's wind is emulsion out.

That's a longer conversation, it changes where the tonal range would fall, it changes the appearance of grain and at times color. Say, if you underexposed reversal film by a 1/2 stop and then pushed it by the same amount, you may find that it looks normal but has more detail and more grain as well, you may also find the colors shifting a bit. I'm no expert on this topic so I can't describe it very well. So in that case the questions are: what type of telecine did you use? as well as how was the image getting to the monitor and what kind of monitor was it? All three are worth looking at. I forgot to mention that earlier, the device you use to play the image out the the monitor does matter. A digibeta deck out to a monitor will look a lot different than a DVD. Not that I assume you have the money to rent a bunch of digibeta decks for your screening.

1) Pushing & pulling: Usually we don't talk about this topic in terms of "benefits". Usually pushing / pulling is done in conjunction with a specific method of exposing the film. Pushing and pulling are just different tools we have for achieving different looks but you really need to shoot your footage planning to do one or the other. Pushing and Pulling are achieved at the lab by leaving the film in the developer for a longer(pushing) or shorter(pulling) time than normal. 2) In terms of showing the films, it all depends on what you mean by "as good quality as possible" Projected film does look significantly different from telecined footage, but if your goal is for the video to look as much like the original film as possible then I think there are a few things you would want to consider. A- In telecine do a supervised session to either digibeta or 10bit 4:2:2 quicktime files. This will give you the most color information of any standard definition format and the least amount of the "video" look. B - As for you monitors you will want to adjust the monitors using color bars so you can adjust the contrast, brightness, and color of each monitor so they are as close as you can get them to standard norms. C- You mention that the films are showing in an art exhibition. If you are in a gallery space the challenge is often that galleries usually have white walls and if the room has a lot of light then you are going to get a lot of reflections on the monitor that make it harder to see your films. So be very picky about how you place your monitors in the room, keep the room dark and minimize reflections any way you can. If there are any dark colored walls in the gallery position the monitors so that they are facing the darkest part of the room. hope that helps.

The key thing is to give the lab the right amount of information and the right type of information. Giving too much or the wrong type of info will just create ambiguity. What the lab needs to know is your processing and telecine instructions. Are you pushing, pulling, or processing normal? Do you want the film prepped for telecine etc? If you are doing an unsupervised telecine spell out all the basics for them: 1- How much footage you have and what it is (reversal, neg., format, color or B&W) 2- The tape format you are going to. Or these days the file format you want and how you want your files named / tapes labeled. 3- The film speed you want the film transferred at. (18? 24?) 4- The type of time code you want (drop or non-drop?). 5- The aspect ration of your film. 6- The aspect ratio that you should see on the tape. 7- You should also provide shipping instructions including your shipping address and special packaging needs you may have. 8- General instructions regarding your telecine. Is there a general look you want to apply to all the footage. or do you want to go right down the middle? You can also mention something about how they should handle the highlights and blacks. Also if you have done any VFX in camera such as dissolves etc. do you want the lab to smooth them out? That sort of thing. 9- Are there any deal breakers. If they string up your film and there is a horrible camera scratch on a roll, or everything is way under exposed do you still want them to telecine it? 10- Your contact info including your cell phone #. Let them know that they are welcome to call you if there are any questions or problems. In general most of this info should be given to the lab before your film ever reaches them.

Not knee-jerk offense, I just think your perspective is not well informed, honestly beyond your work on Westsider how many color session have you supervised and at what different labs have you done them? I was forthcoming about my level of experience - I deal with labs almost daily- wasn't I? As for the 64T test, I think the labs should have been informed, its only fair. I know very well that these small labs have had many unhappy customers. At times I have been one of them. The mistake you are making is to simply blame the labs. To be sure there are some things that are the lab's fault. Customer service, roller marks on the film, dirty soup, and other problems are 100% the lab's fault, that is a no brainer. On the other hand many of the complaints I hear are often caused by the client's lack of knowledge, lack of experience, or lack of ability to communicate with a lab, or they shot crappy footage and the lab couldn't fix it. Folks end up blaming the lab because they just don't know any better. There are other complaints such as pricing and poor customer service but those are different issues than currently under discussion. I for one have gotten very poor front desk customer service (from a brand new staff person) and very good telecine treatment from the same lab on the same day. 1) I know better than most how many super 8 labs are out there and as I mentioned I have worked repeatedly with several of them. 2) The second part of what you write does not make that much sense. A lab can only put in extra effort if they have a well defined instruction from the client, further in many cases extra effort won't make any difference. If I take well exposed footage to a lab for an unsupervised session and the instructions are to time it down the middle for the greatest flexibility in a final color pass what extra effort do you think they are going to put in exactly? The results for the labs will be slightly different but its not the kind of thing that hours of tweeking will have much of an impact on. Again you are going about things the wrong way. Here is why. If all the labs in our fantasy test do their very best, and a mag publishes those results. Then as a reader, If I see what a lab considers their own "best" work I can request that level / type of work from them in the future. If it costs more than I can afford then I can discuss what can be done on my budget. Its a good place to start the discussion with the lab concerning how they are going to work with me and my project. Its a win-win situation. Further, in the long run it will actually mean the labs will have to work more consistently at a high level (if for some reason they weren't already.) IF the labs can show us their "best" work and then we know what to ask for because we seen the "best" work, that's the world we should be living in. What you are proposing is that the labs should not be able to show what they can do, or they should show us their middle of the road work, or we should see what their equipment can do with little human effort. which makes no sense. As a filmmaker I don't care if its a supervised or unsupervised session I want the most definitive way to tell the lab "this is what I want." I think what you have been advocating is primarily a technical test which is unnecessary. We already know that SDI signal routing is better than composite signal routing. We already know that going to Digibeta is better than going to minidv. We already know that the shadow, Spirit and Diamond, are better than a standard rank. We already know that a wet gate diminishes the appearances of scratches, etc etc etc. As I see it the technical side is basically a series of known quantities, until the point where new technology is introduced. In situations where the technical stuff get close, say the difference between DVCAM and BetaSP a technical test will not tell us anything. The difference is marginal and certainly will not show up in stills published in a mag. The printing process having a greater impact on the appearance of the stills than the difference between the video media in question. The difference between us is that you seem to think the labs are basically not to be trusted. I think the lab is potentially my best friend and will do what I can to make that the case. You have not offended me at all. My point is that relative experience levels matter. I have far more experience dealing with all different types of labs than you do and can say with with total confidence that communication skills & style, experience, knowing exactly what you want, and budget are the most important aspects of getting the aesthetic results one wants from a lab. In the end what its about is the aesthetic results. That is why I'm so vocal in saying your idea for a test is a poor one. As proposed it simply does not address the most important factors or help educate filmmakers as to the various potentials that are available. You sound like Alex M. now. Look I have about the same level of experience working on low budget non-professional as I do high budget professional project. However, working on such a variety of projects and having spent a good amount of time in different labs I have learned over time how to communicate with labs and I know what to expect from them in different situations based on the budget, and media in question. How do you know for sure that size is the issue? What is involved in this seriousness? You tone is so negative, you really act as if labs are out to get small filmmakers. You are willing to bad mouth two labs in one sentence! Are we to be surprised that you have gotten results that you were unhappy with? Regarding telecine, (since that is the topic at hand) I should mention that I have gotten very good work out of both Pro 8 and Yale on small projects. In the end we agree that an article or articles concerning labs and telecine would be a good thing for the mags to do. But I want the labs to show us great work and the readers / filmmakers to learn how to ask for it and get that level of work on their own projects. Where as you think labs are the enemy and need to be tricked, and won't give good work to small filmmakers anyway so what's the point.

deleted

1) Because as I've mentioned previously I don't think you are seeking to achieve the right goal. 2) A lab is not a product like dishwashing soap. Labs are run by people, the results we get are based on individual efforts and relationships. As a Post Super (that's someone who works professionally in post production and works with labs on a daily basis) I think its its wrong to not tell a lab what you and doing and why you are doing it. That is something I would never do. But I'm just a professional what the hell do I know? No its not the point, any lab worth its salt will do a great job for all its clients. The fact is that no lab wants to get the reputation of providing better service to some clients than others. To do so is just asking for trouble and unhappy clients taking their money elsewhere. Why on Earth would anyone go back to a lab if they thought they were not getting that lab's best efforts? I sure as hell wouldn't darken the doorway twice of a lab that I thought didn't do a good job. I speak from personal and professional experience that I have seen both small labs and the top labs in Hollywood give great service to tiny projects, to "joe blow." Now, what one could say and it would be correct is that a lab will try to live up to the expectations of the client. If a client does not know much, they will not ask much or communicate their desires very well to the lab. So at that point the lab / colorist will probably not do very much because they don't know what would be best for that client. This is why the educational aspect of an article would be important, if a article was published with many different stills of different looks, then a reader could refer to those stills as a way of expressing what they want to a lab. We could also say that the QC aspects of a lab can be quantified and that is an important aspect to consider. Who me? Gee, let me think? Huuummmm . . . have I ever seen a colorist in action? Well, does the fact that sitting in on color sessions is part of my job count? Some of the labs I've done color sessions at are: Fotokem, Modern, Spectra, Yale, Pro 8mm, Technicolor, Post Works LA, Laser Pacific, Match Frame, Encore, Cinepost, etc. I've seen color on everything from FCP to the Luster. So yea I guess I have observed a colorist in action, and when I'm not doing it on personal projects I actually get paid to observe colorists in action imagine that. And you?