Robert Houllahan

Welcome to the wonderful and less complex world of filmmaking, try pressing the trigger a few times while smacking the side of the camera, if the movement does not knock loose then you might want to pop the door off and start messing withe the film in the movement, perhaps your loop is too short? the cameras are simple, thinking simple is part of the appeal of making moving pictures with film... -Rob-

Well Bob Hum who works at Cinelab was working for Super-8 sound in Cambridge Mass when it was founded, and he runs the Color department at Cinelab, Vigent has made a business specializing in 8mm film and there is no denying it, I think the Millenium machine is just about the best Telecine ever made so if you can buy the ticket then the ride is good. We will be the last lab in the western world to have a Scan/HD capability and that is fine with me, I just bought the best optical printer ever made...call me a traditionalist.... Plus I am cutting my first directorial picture (a short) on a steenbeck for a 16mil B+W print no DI involved, and some Oscar contenders agree that DI is lower quality for more money.... -Rob-

I thought both Spectra and Pro-8 did am I wrong? I would like to setup S8 cartridge stuffing but don't have the staff right now... -Rob-

Times change and labs have to change with the times, plus look at Bear Sterns a supposedly rock of financial stability that is a train-wreck now, you can run any business into the ground, even a lab :blink: One thing has remained constant and that is people want to shoot on film, and continue to do so, furthermore film is the best format overall for many situations. I love film, I have made it so my life is full of film, I certainly do not work at Cinelab for great financial rewards, I did a HD shoot at harvard a few weeks ago that paid a considerable percentage of my annual lab income, but... I am shooting a feature in NY/NJ and have run through almost 400 rolls of 16mm for it and I am timing all of the dailies and possibly will grade the final 2K scan, would I do that all again on the next picture? maybe not my head is almost melting but I have a very complete idea of the whole process. I am working to make our lab into the lab I would want which includes a very keen eye towards a completely green organization, film is all organic chemistry and I believe it can be made not only textbook green but fully sustainable as well which includes biomass remediation of chemistry. Making computers and their systems (including d-cine cams) requires exotic plastics, metals and many persistent carcinogens and those systems are obsolete quickly and consume allot of power. As energy and environmental concerns become more pressing I think film will be seen as more valuable. As long as someone makes film somewhere, be it 35mm, etc we can slit it and perf it and make 16mm or 8mm out of it, and thus film, and film labs, will persist for a long time.. -Rob-

I hardly think any labs have been killed off by transfer houses, in fact as a lab co-owner I wonder how all those small transfer places keep afloat! I think most labs have a split on profitability between process and transfer... and most labs do upgrade their gear and offer as good, or better services than lower end transfer joints. I know that most of the film we process gets transfered here too, sometimes just for dailies that will then go on to a scan, i.e. we are doing a 2-perf feature with SD disk dailies right now and that will go on to a scan elsewhere. There is trillions and trillions of feet of 8mm and 16mm home movies, etc. out there that i think the smaller stand alone transfer company lives on and then there is billions of feet of new film shot every year and much of the new stuff needs work that a little transfer house cannot do, like keycode reading and flex file generation. Plus a lab will have both Alcohol/Prista and ultrasonic cleaning, etc. so there are many advantages to using a lab for a complete package.. The road diverges at the Hi-end - lo-End and most labs can feed both as a "Front End" I know that there is film we process and do best light dailies for that ends up going on to a Spirit or Arriscan, etc and the costs of process and dailies is insignificant in this realm..but we do well on it. Then there is the guy with a super-8 camera and a few rolls of tri-x that we would process and maybe transfer or maybe he shoots it off the wall or sends it to a guy with a sniper, etc... the machines used are allot cheaper than a Cintel (in fact you could buy 4 or 5 snipers for the cost of the tube I just bought) but the Cintel machine is all 10bit, not CCD but flying spot and has a all real time color corrector (we have a Copernicus 8X8 and a DaVinci 888) which processed color at 16bits in real time with secondaries and power windows, etc. I could not imagine getting all the film out we do if I had to mess around with a mouse and a pc color corrector tied to a slow projector... I think labs are doing fine, the few that have gone out recently (like Magno or A1) had real estate issues not lack of business problems..and if anything feeding hi end post shops, etc or doing dailies for indie features is good money for a lab. No wet lab is going to be a get rich quick scheme or millionaire maker but you can do ok working in this realm.. -Rob-

$12K per lens is cheap..... -Rob-

They make good pictures, they are very very slow... -Rob-

The closest would be Cineworks in Miami. www.cineworks.com -Rob-

I think it is important to point out (as a lab owner and filmmaker) that A1 did not go out because of a lack of business, they lost a lease and had a staggering rent increase, they could reopen?? if they found a spot that would work for them... We had a similar situation in the late 90's when Cinelab was in back of fenway park in Boston, we moved out of the city and tripled our space for half the old rent... -Rob-

I am going to be buying a Teranex SDI to HDSDI up converter for Cinelab, shortly, we have a Mac-Pro now with a Decklink HD card. I think it is best to use a specialized box like the Terranex or Rezzer to do the uprez and then capture in 720P or 1080i instead of uprez in FCP or similar. Will it be as good as a Spirit HD transfer? No, but if you are working in a compressed HD format (Like with HVX footage) it may be just right and a fraction of the cost of a real High Definition transfer. -Rob-

I think we need to separate HD (Hard Disk) from HD (High Definition) as HD is often used to describe both. I was talking about Standard Definition (NTSC or PAL) transfered as a 10bit 4:2:2 over SDI as many Telecine houses (such as Spectra or us at Cinelab) are doing using commonly available Mac/PC and Decklink/AJA hardware. A scan to HD (High definition) such as a Spirit with a Super-8 gate will do is a whole other more expensive beast and a true 1080P 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 super-8 scan will be in the same class as a 2K scan you can get from a Spirit, etc. And then you have people with projectors and camera running a aireal projection, I set one of these up at Cinelab but could not get the same kind of quality as we get from a highly modified Rank. -Rob-

There is no progressive SD video format, any telecine (real one like a Rank or Spirit) scans progressive and outputs interlaced for SD ntsc or pal. Any real suite will do this over a SDI 10 bit pipe, no firewire or YUV analog signals. If you are using a mac you can record this all digital 10bit 4:2:2 video signal as DV, Dvcp50, 8bit 10bit uncompressed, etc as these are just settings in the capture preset panel. -Rob-

10 minutes is too much, if you need to learn how to make cheap films nobody will remember and front like you do everything just get a crap camera from best buy and start shooting and save the rest of the 9 minutes and 54 seconds for jerking off... Hula

If you have a reasonably recent incarnation of a telecine it has SDI out of the TK or Color Corrector which is easily piped to a Blackmagic or Aja card for recording uncompressed. Single frame for super-8 is a joke unless it is a real 2k scan, i.e. "single frame" is a guy in his basement with a projector and a DV camera. -rob-

I had a Baselight-4 loaded with allot of demo footage for three months, I thought the 4K northlight scans looked best but all the Origin demo footage was really impressive, the only real 35mil alternative I thought too bad no nice grain... -Rob-

We have run XX22 as reversal before, if run and shot normal (as 200iso) it comes out very dark and muddy, you need to rate it as 50iso and or dump as much light on as possible and run it in the reversal chemistry as a push 2 to get a relatively thick exposure, it will be nasty and grainy but if that is what you are looking for... it is possible and we have run it here at Cinelab you just need to have your lab run it as a push 2... -Rob-

That isn't Capitalism? Damn I guess I have to go burn all those books then.....I was just at Harvard Business School Thursday, I wonder how they will react to having to burn their library down, oh well I call them up and ask on monday... Rob

I had a talking head 2 camera shoot at Harvard business school yesterday, big deal professor there limited time, etc... I rented 2 EX-1's from Boston camera co (boscam.com) for the shoot I am happy with the cameras overall. I shot 60i in SP mode (for run time) with 2 16G cards for each camera. I filled one card each and downloaded the contents to my laptop on site as a backup after switching both cards to read-only the download was fast and I opted to retain the 2 cards and the reader for another day to download again to my G5. Sony's FCP plugin seems very good and stable with fast download speeds the clips go into FCP seamlessly so no problems so far. The camera was nice to use, for it's small form factor, I had both cams on sticks with tram's and lectro's for each speaker with a pair of sennheiser shotguns on booms, before I shut of the camera's internal mic's I noticed that even touching the camera lightly showed up in audio. The image seems very good and the lens on full manual works well except for the zoom control which I could not get a good clean start from and the first 1/6th of the zoom paddle did not do anything so that is a minus on what otherwise seems like a winner from Sony. I was much more impressed with the EX1 than the HVX overall and I do not think i could have fit 2 bigger cameras into this setting so a small camera with a full 1080X1920 1/2" chip set is nice, even though I did not us it at full potential.. Card recording is a little sketchy to me especially if you plan to erase the cards (as I will, they are rentals) no originals but the SxS cards seem robust and the software seems good, I do not know how much cards are for this camera, are they P2 pricing or more reasonable? For the money involved for this shoot I would seriously consider buying cards as "originals" if they were $2-300.00 each... -Rob- -Rob-

The words of the great Rodney King come to mind, "Can't we just all get along?" Red's got a functional camera, seems to get more functional all the time, I suggested to Phil that he might want to start sourcing parts and build his own camera if he feels so passionate about it. Jim seems to have been a bit humbled by the whole process. Maybe a little peaceful discourse about the red and this type of camera in general would be nice here, hmmmm...

Are you sure they are 1" lenses not 3/4" or 1/2" I THINK A 1" lens should cover S16 easily, the Kowa's look great i may just buy a 8mm and a 12mm for a filmo S16 project I am putting together. -Rob-

Maybe this is why so many prominent studio features have been going back to photochemical finish (There will be blood, American gangster, Batman?, etc..) I think as an indie producer it would become more popular to shoot 4perf and make an answer print for the better quality and lower costs then even a cheap DI. -Rob-

I was told by someone very knowledgeable that the black 8-64's had a internal element that was "glued" together with a optical epoxy that was prone to fogging and even failure.... -Rob-

I am pretty sure DvcProHD is 8bit.. -Rob-

Some sort of dithering or oversampling? I assume that the voltages in the "bucket" on any type of sensor would be somewhat small and the precision that the bucket is quantized at I assume makes up a large portion of the "subtlety" and DR of the picture?? So even if a photo-bucket can read 16 stops of dynamic range the problem of actually reading that electrical signal with enough precision becomes a barrier to the DR of the camera? -Rob-

they went out, sorry, we used to send the E6 we get at Cinelab to them but now send it to Dwaines (k14movies.com) I think Pac-Lab may be running Ektachrome and you could send your B+W reversal to (shameless plug) us at www.cinelab.com (we have a drop at www.standby.org in NYC) or to Pac-Lab I think A-1 lost their lease which forced the closure, not lack of business.. It is always sad to see a lab go out.... :( -Rob-