Robert Houllahan

They shot on the Arri 416 primarily with a new Zeiss 12mm superspeed I think they had CSC in NY make a 2.40 GG for the camera. I agree that 2.40 extract from a S16 neg is a strange choice (maybe 2-perf would be better) but I was surprised at how good it looked on a very big screen. I feel that 2.40 S16 clearly outperformed the SI-2K in Slumdog by a fair margin. Plus shooting with a light S16 cam has many many advantages. That said a 2k S16 scan for 1.85 is just about perfect I have been scanning a feature film that I shot on my Aaton and just scanned a clients short (10K ft of S16 250t fuji) on a P+S 2k scanner we have at Cinelab and I'm impressed. I think that at 1.85 and a little post work many people will not know it was 35 and it has a added texture that sorely lacks in much of the clean digital imagery clogging up screens these days. -Rob-

"The Wrestler" and now "The Hurt Locker" are both extensively 7219 originated pictures. Wrestler was a 2.40 scope projected picture that was a 2k scan on a Arriscan. I saw Wrestler in a big new multiplex and thought it looked great on a 70' screen. You might want to think about 2K DPX files a newer Mac-Pro or even a beefed up G5 will be able to work with this material and it will allow for more room to work than a HD transfer. -Rob-

I have shot allot of 7231 and a year in the fridge is nothing it will be as new. -Rob-

I would just caution that if you get the film wet and remove the remjet you would have to wind it into a spiral reel such that the film would not be wound together causing the emulsion to adhere to the base layer to layer. The nice thing about a processor is that once it goes into the soup the film is not tight wound together till it leaves the dry box. Good Luck -Rob-

Here is a pic of the Remjet backing removal sprayers/buffers from our Treise 35mm/16mm ECN machine. You can see that the buffers hit the backing side and a set of jets both help remove the backing and keep it off of the emulsion. This is right after the tank that softens the backing. I would think that a DIY backing removal box could be made by using a small pump and one or two buffers and a set of rollers and a small tank for the Borax. The buffer pictured on our Treise is for 50ft. / Minute and 35/16 so a small box for 16mm only should be made with a little DIY elbow grease. One certainly can process ECN or E6 by hand and I do see it come through the lab for printing or Scan/Transfer. usually it has marks and remnants of perfs and remjet on it but that is sometimes what you want. -Rob- Backing_Removal.tiff

In the excellent documentary "The day after Trinity" a witness to the first atomic detonation describes how her daughter saw the flash which was exceptional because her daughter was blind. -Rob-

We run B+W reversal every day and B+W Negative at least twice a week. We offer B+W reversal processing in 8mm and 16mm and B+W Negative processing in 16mm and 35mm. We also offer SD, HD and 2K transfer. www.cinelab.com -Rob-

There are over the air compressors which work fine with grain watch some hbo on satellite or digital cable (neither are super high bitrate) and clean original HD sports gets blockey all the time. So this is just BS from a also ran network of pencil pushers. I agree with David that someone should make a hit Super-8 show and shove it up the ass of the titewad BBC infrastructure. As far as engineering goes they should get or have built better encoders not limit the already declining standards even more with a crap bottleneck at the end of the chain. BBC suck it. -Rob-

We at Cinelab are doing 25fps Transfer to PAL or 25fps 1080P to hard disk. For S8 it is $0.25/foot to Standard Def in Pal (best light) and a $50.00/hr hard disk fee (in 15min increments based on film run time) or $0.30/foot to High Def in 1080P 25fps with the same $50.00/hr hard disk fee. Scene to scene is set at $200.00 per hour. We have been doing work for some well known clients for national and international distribution. -Rob-

The SO 16mm is double perf as David said it is also polyester base in addition to the .3000 pitch. I have found that you can use standard film in Hycam cameras (up to 12,000 fps) just fine if you want a one shot but if you want to start and stop the camera you need polyester base. -Rob-

You can run the telecine at 24fps to transfer to 25fps but if you are transferring to a SD format it will be interlaced no matter what you do. The film is always progressive and a telecine will scan a progressive picture then place that frame onto the video format's fields. You can easily re time the video in software after transfer. i.e. the 25fps PAL video and be re timed to 24fps in cinema tools if you want to work in 24fps time base for DVD delivery. -Rob-

Sorry that is (almost) completely wrong ;) Telecine in NTSC countries is 1frame = 2 fields then 1 frame = 3 fields i.e. the 2:3 pulldown which happens in the telecine's framestore (not software, hardware) for 29.97 fps NTSC. PAL countries and PAL Telecine is 1 frame = 2 fields at 25fps no 2:3 pulldown because that is for NTSC. You can use FCP's Cinema tools to conform the 25fps material to 23.98 fps once it is captured. -Rob-

Ultra-16 and Super-16 are basically similar when it comes to Lab handling procedures. With U-16 you do need to run it on a demand drive film processor as opposed to a sprocket drive processor. If you then bench handle it as Super-16 you will not scratch the inner perf area. Film cleaners and Telecine rollers need to be slightly modified as well so they do not touch the exposed area inside the perfs. Plug: We at Cinelab have a Demand drive film processor for running 8mm and 16mm ECN as well as a Sprocket drive processor for 16mm/35mm and we can successfully run 16mm film as U-16 in ECN. Also our B&W 16mm Reversal and B&W Negative (16mm and 35mm) processors are demand drive so we can run U-16 in every for but E6. I am currently modifying one of our 16mm gates and will be able to provide U16 transfers soon including to 1080P. -Rob-

The 6.6-66 is a better lens and also much newer. Boston Camera got a 416 with the 6.6-66 (boscam.com) as the camera was rigged at their hands on demo with the 6.6-66 I got to play with it a bit and it is very nice especially the wide end with little distortion and visibly very sharp through the ground glass. I think is is the newest-bestest S-16 zoom available. -Rob-

Well the original Spirit-1 is getting old... Of course new Spirit-HD 2K and 4K are very expensive. And yes there are a few Super-8 gates floating around for the Spirit Technicolor has one in NY etc.. -Rob-

"So far, I've encountered the MovieStuff, Tobin, and Elmo brands and I've scoured this forum to find nobody having a clear post about this..." The Elmo is junk the Tobin and the Moviestuff will be similar and quite good in many respects I would pick whichever one seems best to you out of the two. Both are well made and perform similarly. "I've seen what the MovieStuff guy has to say and I also know that I'd be happier with a Spirit brand, but these seem to run like $30k..." A used Thompson Spirit SDC-2000 Data Cine (Spirit-1) can be had used with a color corrector for around $550,000.00 to about $750,000.00 expect to pay about $70,000.00 for a used Super-8 gate if you can find one. :huh: -Rob-

In my experience with all sort of telecine I don't think you would be able to have the machine do a ramp maybe a speed change from one to the other on the fly but usually you have to stop the machine and setup for a different speed. Getting frames and doing a speed change in after effects would be better. -Rob-

The yellow lines are definitely a pressure mark (chemistry is always splotches or streaks) it could be a squeege (although most labs have gone away from squeeges in ECN in fact out of our Five processors at Cinelab only the B+W reversal machine has a set of Squeeges anymore) but it could also be too long of a loop with the film rubbing just enough in the mag. The black thing is a piece of dirt in the gate. -Rob-

This is because the telecine is applying a 2:3 pulldown to make the 24 fps film go into the 30fps video (technically 23.98fps to 59.97fields video) if you run the telecine at 30fps (29.97fps actually) each frame of the film will be on two fields of the video which will get you a clean frame for each film frame which you can speed change without any ghost frames. 2:3 pulldown puts the first frame on two fields and the next on three fields which gets you those blended frames you can do a reverse telecine in FCP cinema tools which will pull the blended frames out as well. -Rob-

We have two machines running right now both have all the Dave Walker mods plus 10 bit framestores. We have the Copernicus 4X4 on one and a DaVinci 888DUI. I just got a Teranex Mini to try out HD Up-Rez from these machines. I am pretty impressed with just that and we have done a few S8 to HD jobs and everyone was happy. We are just doing 525i to 1080i or 625i PAL to 1080i50 which is not a sophisticated as what Cinelicious is doing. I may get the more sophisticated Teranex processor in the future (the mini is $3K and the Processor is $14K) With a telecine that is in top shape the HD output is very good and for Broadcast or Blueray presentation you might not see a huge difference from a much more expensive Spirit transfer. Keep in mind that the Spirit-1 is a subsampled machine in many ways and has allot of video processing which leaves me a little flat compared to other scans (Millenium/DSX in tube land or Arri, etc. in scanners) We are probably not going to try to do interlaced to 23.98PsF from our legacy telecine any time soon as we will be installing at least two scanners fairly soon (a fast 2K and a 4K+) but I would say that Cinelicious has probably worked out the bugs and has a method that I would go with if I did not own a lab of my own :rolleyes: -Rob-

If you really want it to look good and it is for an important project I would suggest getting it done through a Teranex or other similar system. Just uprezzing in FCP will not yield the best results i.e. jaggies will become apparent. -Rob-

A couple of things one should realize about these machines are that both technologies can make quality pictures and each has it's limitations. The Spirit-1 is fast becoming passe in the world of high end commercial post due to it's limitations. The Spirit-1 actually only samples color (physically at the CCD line array at half resolution making it a 4:2:2 machine) also the Spirit uses allot of electronic processing to make up color and especially to do sharpening. I have never been entirely happy with the way the Spirit looks and I think this is due to the heavy sharpening. I have used several newer Tube based machines like the successor to the URSA Diamond the Cintel DSX that was sitting next to a Spirit and it did not lack for sharpness or color and it is ultimately capable of 4K scans which is much more actual resolution than the Spirit. I felt the DSX (and Millenium or Nova) had nicer color and was a little less buzzy than the Spirit but if you saw a national spot transfered on a DSX followed by another transfered on the Spirit you might not be able to tell them apart. CRT based machines are naturally full bandwidth color (4:4:4) or RGB and require far less processing of that side of the informaton. Sharpness in a newer machine is a combination of how well controlled the flying spot is and digital aperture correction in the signal chain. Newer Spirit machines do full bandwidth sampling (Spirit HD,2k,4K) but are tremendously expensive and still don't match scans from a Arriscan or Northlight, Imagica, etc. So to get back to the SD Cintel machine.. it still retains it's color bandwith and pleasing natural light processing. As long as the tube is good and the scan system is maximizing the sharpness of the 10bit SDI data it makes one of the best quality sources to drive into a Teranex box for up-res. It is amazing how close to a full HD scan you can get the SD feed to look. Rob

Any modern telecine can do 2-perf with a adjustment to the servo. We are able to provide 2-perf dailies to 1080 pro-res hq now as well.. -Rob-

Rob, might you expand a little, please? What is it about the Shadow that might "edge out" other more high-end telecines? Is it the resolution or something else? I got the impression that the Shadow used a single line CCD array. I could easily be way off the mark, here. Do you know if the Shadow can capture all the way to the sprocket holes, or does the gate block off some of the frame image? By casual inspection of the manual (found online), I also got the impression that, if one operates in data mode, one could specify the resolution. The Shadow uses a set of line array ccd's just like the Spirit however the imagers are set to 1440 for luma and half for color (rgb) just like the Spirit (which works at 1920 luma and half for each color) I don't think the Shadow edges out the Spirit or Millenium (esp) it just makes nice pic's from S8 and the resolution matches the format pretty well. I don't know about the S8 gate but the Spirit(s) I have operated in the past do not see into the sprocket area on 16mm with a unmodified gate. You can specify the output resolution on a Shadow but anything more than 1440 pixels is interpolated not actual real scan of the film. -Rob-

It is a fairly large front element which is 80mm in diameter and non threaded. I don't think there was a WA adapter made specifically for this lens from zeiss. I suppose if there were a 80mm slip on WA adapter out there it would work. -Rob-