Robert Houllahan

I know of a few people who do this professionally at a high level with both dslr and 16mm, I think it really depends on how much detail (i.e. interval) you want and how complicated you can make the taking rig. The Bolex/Norris is a classic but a HD camera head with a PC and can be flexible but be aware of long term power issues, where do you intend to rig the taking camera? will that location cahnge? -Rob-

I personally have shot in weather that was -15c in an ice storm and from a helicopter in the middle of January with the door off I think with the wind chill it was much colder (100mph + -10f out damn cold) look at the many productions that have been done on everest or the north or south poles, brittleness is not necessarily a problem.. -Rob-

It seems to me that Seinfeld was a more "created" bubble of a world which is meant to be ever so surreal where CYE is more as if it is a reality style doc than a film, of course both are highly "created" it was funny to see some early curb shows which were more doc (dsr500 ? ) and less polished... -Rob-

Cool, Did lucas use this technology to make Greebo shoot first? could viewers of his later "films" use this to remove jarrbar-binks? ("they removes-um me from da film massah?") if used on gangster films do guys in suits show up to the software developers cubicle farm with ak47's ?? the possibilities are endless... -Rob-

Just about any lab will do this for you for a small fee, esp. if you are going to do process and print ot transfer with them. -Rob-

You just need a camera which can be run with a long shutter duration, I have an eyemo with the revolution animation motor and i can program the motor to hold the shutter open i.e. 1 sec duration shutter2 sec interval or run at 1, 2 ,3 fps should get the streak you want. Depends on the speed of the motion, etc. -Rob-

This thing looks great is it reloadable? -Rob-

Furthermore, most still lab equipment I have seen in incapable of processing mp film because the still machines are not continuous like a MP processor, i.e. the have cards to attach a roll of 24-36 exposures too, and to do a push the machine stops and leaves the film souped for longer. I went to a few still labs recently to see if any of them had a used E6 machine we could adapt and found that the only similarity to our MP operations were the twin checks. Most any lab that runs ECN2 will run E6 in the machine for a cross process, this includes labs that do Super-8 ECN. -Rob-

Here is a great NY Times article about the real costs of film production: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/12/business...a/12strike.html They could shoot everything on DV for cost cutting and it would not make a dent in this monster. -Rob-

Was it a new 235 ? he is just helping to keep Arri in business... I actually liked that film I am sure it had nothing to do with the lead actress.... -Rob-

I have heard of people dumping mags of exposed film in the trash because the take was known bad...I have not heard of nor seen any used unexposed film sold as short ends, and I have to agree that this would be a hit or miss to catch in a clip test at the lab, you might just get blank loaded film in that foot.. A real bummer but I guess you have to trust the production co that sold the film as recans or short ends did not shoot it, these guys might have had 3 blank rolls come back from the lab when they shot and had a time wondering what happened to their takes... -Rob-

I was 1 :blink: I did see that NHK system at CineGear in NYC back in the day, it was some 16mm xfered to analog HD I thought it looked great. Did not know (other than vaguely) about the 1948 7551 system.... -Rob0

All proper telecine suites are capable of transfering film at just about any frame rate from 1fps to 40 fps and 30fps is no problem, actually it would be 29.97 run speed on the film to 29.97 run on the G5 or Deck so 1:1 is possible and easy to do. To make it 24fps you can then do a speed change in FCP. Rob "tireless answerer of questions and occasionally technically ignorant" Houllahan

I have asked around on the TIG and it seems I am wrong, :o and that doing a 3:2 removal does leave you with 24PsF frames like a F900 I believe..but doing the pulldown removal in post using cinema tools is the best way as I and others have run into issues with using the realtime on card inverse telecine as it does not always get the cadence right and leaves interlace artifacts sometimes.... -Rob-

On the first part I don't think DOF has much to do with the reasons, if anything shooting with Spherical lenses instead of anamorphic lenses for 2.40 can yield a potential for shallower DOF due to wider lens openings and less lighting requirements. The use of 3-perf Super35 for a "panavision" 2.40 wide aspect has to do with the use of less light, longer run times on mags, and usually the DI post workflow instead of photochemical/print workflow (You probably have to do a proper 4K DI to match the photochemical in many terms) I think many films opt for this hybrid Film/Digital workflow for any number of reasons these days... On the second, Yes! well more precisely all 16mm photography (std or super) is shot with spherical lenses (there may be a few experimenters out there with Anamorphic lenses for 16mm but it's rare) the basic answer to your question is the difference between Spherical and Anamorphic photgraphy, google Anamorphic and Panavision I am sure there are plenty of good wikki pages on the subject. -Rob-

My B+W film is a short, not that I would not want to produce a B+W feature, and I have a MV I am shooting coming up which will be all B+W with some nasty dirtied up reversal and some 5231 hand cranked in my eyemo.... Clooney just got away with a all B+W feature didn't he? and the opening to the newest Bond feature was "real" B+W so..... -Rob-

I believe that just removing the 3:2 pulldown does not make the result truly progressive but does make it 24fps, you can step through a fcp timeline setup for 24fps pulldown removed video without seeing the telltale 3:2 cadence but it's still interlaced. I think , I could be wrong it's happened once or twice before.... :rolleyes: -Rob-

I agree I have been seeing allot of 16 and 35 shows on a nice HD set when I am in NY shooting and they all look really good, I think the grain in them is a great and important part of the picture. -Rob-

Wow, that's interesting I bet. It does seem like a scarier time to be involved in labs I have to say. I just witnessed my favorite NY lab, Lab Link, close shop. it is not a business for the faint of heart, but then neither is making films.... Interesting, I gather that's film students doing their first assignments. I assume the crash tests are no longer coming in... It is a whole bunch of stuff certainly not limited to student. Awesome. I wish I could shoot a feature in B&W 35mm, I actually am trying to plan my next one in a way where I get a lot of B&W done. I was a bit unhappy that it cost me more to develop Double X and HP5 at Duart than Lab Link, which had a flat rate for everything. I am negative cutting a 16mm B+W film (with sound) right now maybe I'll show it in Dec or so, I started this short back almost 10yrs ago when I was starting out in this film stuff.... it's 7222 and 7231 with one 700fps shot in it and a scrap of hicon for a title. i think it is really important to see b+w continue as a living part of the film medium. I wonder if HD films are going to get laser recorded to 3 strip, lol. If I had the money I'd certainly do it! I think just about all studio pictures will get a archival separation master... I totally agree about real B&W. I'm so sick of seeing the desaturated color negative look. I think it's more often all about "We really aught to shoot it in color JUST IN CASE" and "I don't remember I haven't shot it in so long, I'd rather just stick to what I'm familiar with and play with it in post" digititus and ease of post symptoms and hedging too many bets lack of clarity in intent.... -Rob-

I am sure it's a A1 gig just being in a big football stadium at game time is pretty pisser much less having free reign like nfl films does.. Amen to the shot the filmwork they do is just amazing.. _Rob-

HA! I loaded 2 100' rolls but ended up shooting a sunrise timelapse on 250D for someone yesterday so I have not had a chance to load the eyemo with it yet. My Aaton is in princeton, nj so no S16 which I think will be more interesting... I have a 400' 16mm test reel and i am going to NY/NJ to shoot on Wed and I will bring it and do some low light stuff with my superspeed set to check it out... -Rob-

Hey Chris, I think sometimes NFL films shoots something like 250K ft (or more) of 16mm a weekend and the cameras on the field are supplemented with S-16mm cameras with those huge canon stabilized lenses and a XTR or SR3 with a 800' mag for slow-mo on tripods in the stands.... NFl films in NJ is quite the enterprise and I believe a non-profit division of the NFL, probably one of the better funded non profits out there ;) -Rob-

Keeping a worldwide inventory of a filmstock is a huge financial and logistical feat. Kodak has to be able to serves productions all over the globe, but cannot keep stock longer than a year or two (I think two) without replacing it. This makes specialty stocks an expensive and risky endeavor, because if people aren't shooting it they cannot just hold onto it indefinitely. Perhaps in the coming decades the growth of nano tech and other bio technologies will allow you to grow filmstock in a small facility and choose from any kodak or fuji recipe from the past or experiment with growing your own variant... may sound nuts but look at the stereolithograpy machines and other rapid prototyping stuff out there for the desktop, stranger things could happen.... I could see us as a lab growing our own stock, offering processing with low environmental impact using solar hot water creation and bio-remediation and nano-bio tech for a fully clean and sustainable film process.... -Rob-

I own a piece of cinelab and I am making several films and own cameras, etc... So I am a bit of a closed loop for my films... :lol: We had been running 16mm B+W reversal at $0.16/foot for the longest time and just upped the price to $0.17/foot because of the issues with silver recovery and bleach, we run constantly every day I cannot remember the last time we did not run B+W reversal.... both 16mm and super8. We had been charging $0.14/ft for 16mm B+W negative which is the same as our 16mm ECN and you are right the Color Negative is a much more controlled process and i guess it's as close as you get to a "commodity" in terms of MP processing, we have 2 machines dedicated to ECN, one for 8mm and 16mm and the other for 35mm. We did up the charge for B+W negative to $0.17/ft recently due to volume issues and chemistry going flat this is mostly to defray some expenses for short runs of B+W negative and we will certainly give a good discount to a customer with 1200' or more. This may all change in the near future as I am trying to put 35mm B+W negative and print in place which may help up the volume a bit for archival projects. I think B+W negative is a important area now and in the future as a 35mm B+W 3 strip separation has a 1000yr or more shelf life and I think it is a very good candidate for data archiving in the future, plus I love the look and feel of real B+W...... -Rob-

Hi Conrad, we spoke the other day, perhaps I can clear this up a bit more... All SD video formats are "throwbacks" to the early days of television the two major standards worldwide are NTSC and PAL one is a 60 field format and the other is a 50 field format (more or less) the use of fields instead of full frames came about for several reasons. 1. the electronics of the day could not handle the high frequencies that are required to display a full progressive frame of video at 25fps or 30fps and 2. interlacing is a form of compression allowing half of the video picture to be time delayed i.e. one field is sent and then the next is sent a fraction of a second after it which requires less frequency spectrum than a full frame at a time. So 80 years later we are still suffering with the original television standards, to further compound things NTSC is actually 29.97 fps or 59.94 fields per second... this has wreaked havoc with people in post houses for years and there are countless stories of EDL's with hundreds of hours of work in them due to 25 to 29.97 or 24 to 29.97 or 30 to 29.97 conversions in them... With the fairly recent advent of digital video came cameras like the Panasonic DVX100 which is able to run in a 24fps mode on minidv. What this camera is doing is a telecine conversion process with a 3:2 pulldown just like you would find on a Rank or Spirit the 3CCD pickup is clocked and run at a 24fps progressive cadence and then it is "telecined" to the 29.97 frame rate of the Minidv tape. The Panasonic codec has facilities to extract the 24fps progressive material from the 29.97 interlaced tape in post (on FCP or Avid, etc. you choose the 3:2:2:3 advanced setup) so you can now play the material in 24fps progressive but if you are going to look at it on a SD television a 3:2 pulldown and interlacing are re-introduced. So there is one example of 24fps SD material, sort of, We use a Blackmagic SDI card on a G5 for our disk captures there is a 24fps codec (Uncompressed 10bit or 8bit) which removes the pulldown and makes the incoming uncompressed SDI signal into 24fps interlaced (it removes the 3:2 pulldown but does not de-interlace) when I play back a file recorded like this the Blackmagic card does the 3:2 pulldown for playout to our 20" SDI grading monitor. I have had some issues with this codec in the past which is why I do not offer it as a option it is basically unsupported from decklink. Post facilities have been doing 3:2 pulldown removal and de-interlacing for years the pulldown removal is fairly easy but de-interlacing can be tricky and requires more cpu power. Programs like Digital Fusion, After Effects, Shake, etc. all have these tools built in. The idea of 24fps progressive SD material is really only in post production because a standard SD monitor would not understand or playback this material and no interface card or deck would play it direct without a interlace and 3;2 pulldown introduction. Enter HD..... When HD was first introduced by NHK it was in a 1035i analog form but that did not last long (I believe that the US required a digital HD broadcast standard) and of course computers were getting faster and faster.. so now we have a whole bunch of HD fromats based on either 1080 or 720 lines and in 24, 25, and 30 fps both progressive and interlaced I think HDCAM and D5 were the first two formats to offer 24p recording to tape. With all of the digital standards and post production manipulations available and the growth of a wide range of HD codecs the lines have blurred considerably. I know that you wanted to make a 24p SD DVD I know that this is supported in newer players (not sure about full backwards compatibility with older players) I would say that even if you could get a 24P SD recording on disk a real time de-interlacing "box" would be less than ideal and even the newest telecine like a Cintel DSX or Spirit 4K (both of which work from SD to HD or 2K or 4K data) would be outputting old interlaced SD when run in Ntsc or Pal...Doing a pulldown removal and then a De-Interlacing in Shake or After Effects will get you the best possible result for a 24p dvd it may just take an overnight render... Hope this helps and I think this long winded post is technically accurate... :rolleyes: -Rob-