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Robert Houllahan

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Everything posted by Robert Houllahan

  1. That is an odd one. Only when a empty filter holder is inserted? and not on any of the other film? Usually a filter issue is a vertical line not a horizontal streak.
  2. I might work on figuring that out as I have three Spirits and one is a parts machine. I will probably try to sell the two running scanners but I doubt the market is hot for them so conversions might be a better route as they have really nice film transports.
  3. Without a licensed and configured SUSE 10 or SUSE 11 Linux workstation running either DFT Bones or DFT Phantom-2 software the machine is a giant dongle. They are good machines which make great scans but they are complex and power hungry and allot to maintain. I have three. I am going to look into seeing about a Xena conversion on the parts machine I have. The other two run ok. Xena would have to be able to activate the spooling transport and then the Spirit capstan motor would be replaced with a newer motor. The lamp and gate setup would have to be converted to a full aperture instead of a slit and the Xenon hot lamp would be chucked and somehow a integration sphere and LEDs would have to be fitted to illuminate the film. Allota work but maybe a 9.4K Spirit conversion kit would be a thing.
  4. Everything but the Bones or PhantomII workstation to run it. Probably from the Air Force?
  5. The armorer was new and incompetent. Evidently they had taken the set guns out to the range which is insane and they had no discipline or method for verifying ammo loaded be it blanks or dummy rounds. She is the daughter of a well known film armorer but new to actual working on sets as one it seems. The production seems to have cut all corners at every turn.
  6. Nice! I will respond to your latest email asap and I have some videos of the B&W processor at Cinelab I will send too.
  7. I do not really shoot weddings, I have shot a dozen maybe. I have a few friends who either really concentrate on them or got their start in weddings and were in high demand before moving on to commercials etc. They used film and digital together, one an A7 series and S8mm and another Cannons and 16mm and the A7 shooter is particularly skillful at grading and putting a high level of polish on his work. I think allot of these wedding customers are wackus bonkers and don't really know what they want until they are told and reassured that what it is will be great.
  8. I would suggest just shooting with a Bolex it is not that loud and in general I have found that people actually love the sound of it. YMMV
  9. Just a followup note. You can get to good but not accurate and with non repeatable control over image dimensional and color by shooting off a screen. The better the screen (lcd etc.) and the better it is calibrated the better the result. making a 24.00fps file and having a camera with a crystal 24.00 fps motor will be best. 35mm will be much more expensive than 16mm either DIY or professionally. A Arrilaser or Imagica recorder will be able to properly and repeatedly record the full density of the film with actual RGB recording per image pixel. A LCD (etc) has co-sighted colors with a very limited grey to grey contrast ratio so there are allot of very fine issues with really recording digital to film that are allot of work to address. The last 20% or so of fine work imaging digital to film is a very steep curve to climb and gets complicated and expensive to do, stuff for features and accurate archival preservation. YMMV.
  10. As someone who has two Arrilaer recorders and has built three generations of 16mm recorders I have a few thoughts. 1. It is relatively easy to film off a computer monitor, I would recommend a sync sound camera not a K3 or Bolex as the frame rate will be off for the whole recording. 2. Setup the monitor and take a spot reading of a grey card to find your exposure. 3. Try to use the most rectilinear lens available, this will keep the image the least distorted. 4. Carefully setup the camera and screen to be parallel to each other. My 3rd generation 16mm film recorder uses a Mitchell pin registered camera and a Eizo Radiforce panel and runs at about 4fps with the camera shutter time and interval between DPX frames being controllable. I also have the panel profiled. You should not try to shoot video that is pushed into the shadows and if that material is then use the log tools in Resolve to elevate the shadows about 100-120ire on the scopes to retain hat detail.
  11. I think it depends on the level of service but in general a full service contract for a machine is about 10% of the purchase price annually. I am happy with the duo of LaserGraphics machines we have at Cinelab now that the "personal" has 2-flash HDR. The Archivist's newer Sony sensor 5.4K camera is very low noise and makes excellent scans.
  12. Digital sensors are linear devices (even when encoded into log) so a ISO change on a digital sensor is an overall dB gain increase. Film negative has a characteristic curve and a photo-chemical push will accentuate that logarithmic curve with more sensitivity in the middle than the top or bottom of the curve. In my experience 5219 pushed +1 is in the same sort of working range as an Alexa in the 1200 maybe to1600 ISO range, with the Alexa having some more shadow detail and 5219 more hilite overexposure tolerance and the mid being similar. YMMV
  13. I would scan HS film at the framerate you expect to deliver at, i.e. 24fps 25fps as then it will have the intended slow motion. You could get a ProRes and DPX scan if you expect to do any speed changes in post.
  14. That client was the US Military Industrial Complex and that was fractions of pennies on the hundred dollar bills they happily burned through. Certainly not any more but it was only within this decade that Hycam cameras were mostly replaced for this kind of work by digital substitutes. The US Air Force had a few very substantial labs of their own. I bet Kodak would do a special run for the overall cost of a master roll now and I was exaggerating a bit about the 25M feet intro cost.
  15. A hair or other small object in the line scan gate on the Spirit does make a streak through the whole frame so it can very well be that is what this is, I have seen similar looking streaks on my Spirit(s) especially because how it dances so far across the frame and out of frame left. I would just send the film back for a rescan.
  16. Was this scanned on a Spirit? It could be a hair in the line scan gate. A movie clip would be more helpful.
  17. I would think that if you offered to buy 25 million feet of film from Kodak they would figure out how to use multiple layers of Vision 3 emulsion without the color dyes and couplers for a theoretical new monochrome stock. Probably at a $1.00/ft or more price.
  18. I have a VV job doing tests right now. I am working on being able to run 9.4K x 7K VV scans for it. We also ran a VV short a few years ago that was really nice.
  19. I have two Visual Inst. Hycam-II cameras (built in 2002) and we used to do allot of work for Pratt&Whitney on FAA mandated tests for jet engines and other high speed camera work for military engines, including for the F-35. The largest test I worked on for them was a engine for the A380 and there was 27 Hycam-II 16mm cameras shooting SO-19 (7219 on Estar) at FR between 6000PPS and 11,000 PPS along about a dozen digital high speed cameras. The test was lit with 500 1K Lowel Omni quartz lights. The newer Hycam-II cameras have new motor control electronics which allow for the camera to get to full speed within 50-75ft of a 400ft roll. P&W would "rent" the lab for a day and we would process the negative and then do a transfer to video, but then cut the negative down to the sections they wanted to really see and make a timed 16mm print. I remember holding about 850ft of negative and thinking it cost about $35 Million to produce it. Picture clarity and detail was really excellent and far exceeded the digital cameras even very recently. The digital cameras would also have issues failing due to the very high vibration environment of a full running 80,000lb thrust engine blowing up. It was only in the last five years that they switched entirely to digital for this work.
  20. The Cintel machine is but 16mm is definitely capable of allot more detail than just 2K when scanned on a machine that is capable of higher res scans.
  21. I am sure he had something to do with it. This was also converted to computer control by Rennie Johnson, I sort of wish it was in it's original config but the PC control works fine too.
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