Robert Houllahan

A mini disc would be the best way to collect sounds. They are cheap, and user friendly for PC use with NLE. Why worry about sync?

I would suggest a digital flash recorder of some type, M-Audio has a nice cheap compact solid state recorder and there are other options too like the marantz, etc. I think Minidisc is kinda dying out and may be hard to find media, etc. If you have a flash recorder you can dump all the sound onto a laptop.

-Rob-

Isn't it like a good 300,000 dollars?

I think that would be more like a complete package with a recorder and lenses, I would imagine the body would probably list around $100k and then be discounted before you buy "accessories" like a viewfinder? I don't know what are considered extras from the basic camera head but that's probably in the ballpark.

-Rob-

Hi- I'm considering going to Alphacine for Super 16 feature (color processing and telecine).

 

Anyone had experience with them?

Everything I have heard about AlphaCine/Forde labs has been good. Furthermore we have seen a bit of their Super8 Color negative and it has been consistently as clean and well processed as ours so they must be doing something right. ;)

-Rob-

I agree with everything that Dominic says; also remember that for the last 60 years or so we have effectively used bleach bypass for sound tracks on colour film. The sound track area was re-developed to bring back the silver after bleaching. I have never come across any tarnishing of sound tracks.

 

Brian

Well I guess this myth is busted :rolleyes: But it is something very many people seem to believe, I did and I work at a lab, but then again there is always more to learn...

-Rob-

I don't know how I can make this any clearer. I don't need info on pricing, only ratios.

There will be two telecines.

1) I will have a one light done on Standard Def. I will edit the film with that footage (all of the footage). That means I will have an EDL for the 100 min film plus some other footage to be safe.

 

2) I simply want to telecine the footage correlating to my rough edit (and then a little more to be safe). The total footage transferred for the second telecine should only be about two hours.

The ratio for the HD telecine will mostly depend on how many flats of film you have and how randomly distributed the shots are. Also a highly organized edl list and an idea of where the shots are on each flat plus a list for each flat will aid tremendously in moving through the film. I do not think anybody could give you an exact ratio until the organization of the original negative is understood. I have found that the most film you can get through in a hour is 44 minutes with roll changes and basic timing this would be 1600' of 16mm or 4000' of 35mm. Figure that you have 1600' in 2 800' flats and you have 6 shots on these flats that have a total run time of 15minutes I would think that between scanning through, finding the shot, timing it and laying it down you could probably go through the full 1600' in 45 minutes maybe less maybe more.I can guarantee that the selects scan will be less than a scene to scene on all the footage.

-Rob-

I don't fully understand all the details in this post ("ungraded", etc), but it does not seem to answer the central questions which are 1.) What ratio should be average for the time it takes to transfer selects? & 2.) Am I missing something about the factors time it takes to do selects? I was told 50 hours. I don't think I should need 50 hours to transfer the less than 2 hours of footage I would need from my SD edit (I think they understood that my SD edit was going to use Keycode, etc).

A scan made on a pin registered scanner is (or should be) a full dynamic range representation of the original negative at the chosen resolution (2k, 4k, 8k, etc.), and these are made in RGB color space not YUV like hd the scans are usually individual .DPX files for each frame and the color fidelity and dynamic range of the file is much higher than a HD transfer.

The issue is that the scans are not color timed and if you just looked at them direct you might think they looked washed out and somewhat flat. The typical workflow would be to put these scans into a color finishing system like a Lustre or baselight, etc. and do all of your color timing and film assembly in a calibrated system with a calibrated projector to match what the finished film will look like on a 35mm print at 70' wide. This is a typical feature film DI workflow a transfer to a HD video format is just that a video format not data.

-Rob-

Telecine Time Ratio for ?Selects??

 

I am trying to budget for post production telecine, probably 16mm to HD, but I am getting some rather confusing information from film labs. I am doing a low budget feature.

 

My original idea was to transfer to SD, do a very rough edit on my regular Final Cut Pro Mac, then use the EDL to go back and do a scene-by-scene transfer of only the footage I want to work with in HD.

 

I have done scene-to-scene transfers before, but never with ?selects?. Being very efficient, I was always able to make it a 3 to 1 ratio, so I was calling to find out what the ratio would be for working with selects.

 

I was told that doing ?selects? will be more costly then a scene-to-scene of all 15 hours of footage at once (100 min film). I am shooting at a 9:1 ratio which means that if I am as efficient as before, would be looking at 45 hours of lab time if transferring all the footage.

 

Even if the selects take me twice as long as my regular scene to scene (6 to 1 lab time), that only equates to 10 hours lab time, so how in the world are they saying it is going to be cheaper to transfer all the footage scene-to-scene? If this were the case, I don?t understand why anyone would even do selects (other than a small benefit of less tape used)

 

I understand that there are different factors that affect this process, but what have you found to be the average lab time ratio for select (supervised) transfers?

 

If there are any legitimate factors they may be putting into this equation (or is this absurd?), please let me know how I can eliminate this from the process.

We recently did this on several projects so here is my take on this:

Transfer all of your film to Dvcam (beta, Dvcpro, etc.) one tape clean and one tape with keycode, timecode, Foot+Frame numbers, lab roll, etc. burnt in and make your edit in FCP, Avid, etc. The rates for a SD keycode transfer should be around $0.14 -$0.16 per foot. The finish edit will have the lab roll (flat) with foot and frame and keycode numbers so you organize the lab rolls and figure the shots you need based on Keycode and foot + Frame numbers and go through the rolls in a "finish" telecine session with the TK house running their keycode reader and transfer just your selects with maybe 5 frame "handles" for each shot. I would figure around $800 per hour for the supervised HD session YMMV.

We did this for Chris Burke (who posts here) we did his SD keycode transfer and National in Boston (www.nationalboston.com) did a HD transfer to disk from his selects. This process could be considred a didital negative cut and is standard industry practice and certainly should be less expensive than doing a scene to scene on all your raw footage.

Check out Pixelharvest.com in LA too they do 2K pin registered scans (selects) we did a 35mm job with them a few months back (they do 16mm too) but these are ungraded so that may push it out of your price range...

-Rob-

I agree about the kinoptic... but 1000-1500 I think that's on the market but I wouldn't pay that much for that lens ....

 

Also I will love to try the Angenieux 5.9 I know it vignetes a lttle bit but some people use it and they love it

BEst

I think the 1K plus price would be for a very nice lens maybe even in PL mount I paid $300 for mine but that is because the person who had it before me did not realize there was a set of shims under the mount which caused a focus issue on his camera. If you want a top lens be prepared to get a mount put on it and have it collimated.

I do not find mine to be a particularly heavy lens so with some care I would think a C-Mount would be fine.

I do not know about the Angie but I think it has better sharpness but lacks full coverage both lenses are a tradeoff between price/performance.

-Rob-

Hmmm. Not sure about the tarnishing, Rob.

 

After all, it's the same silver that you have in b/w film, and that lasts long enough! In fact it is a very stable archival medium.

 

There is no evidence to suggest that a bleach bypassed negative will have any shorter life than one with the full process - so long as it has been fully fixed, washed and dried, and is stored in the proper environemnt with regard to temperature and humidity.

 

However, labs don't usually have the resources to do extensive Arrhenius testing to determine the long-term prospects of blaachbypassed film (or normal film for that matter) - and I know that the manufacturers (who do this testing on normally processed film) can't really provide any data on film that has not been processed to their specifications.

 

Now cross-processing (reversal through a neg bath) is a different matter, and that has a seriously short life unless a stabiliser is added to the ECN2 process.

Well shivver me timbers!!, I stand corrected ;) I was under the impression that Bypass has a shorter shelf life and I think I got that impression from Brad here at the lab, amongst others, maybe this is a Emulsion urban myth? Could the interaction between the silver and the color couplers/dyes have something to do with this? thus the alleged difference when compared to B+W?? I think we may have a Bypass job in storage in our "vault" maybe even something from the 80's might be interesting to see if that's so and take a look.

X-Process Ektachrome certainly does have a shortness but it's a seriously cool look and we run allot of it in Super8 for transfer. Is there a particular stabilizing agent that is reccomended Dominic?

-Rob-

I'm looking for a wide angle for s16 and I don't want to spend more than 600? what you will recommend ?

BEst

 

ps: I have a c mount and a PL.... you tell me ?

BEst

I think the Kinoptik 5.7mm is the least expensive option for a lens that fully covers Super16. I have one for my Aaton and it is softer on the fringes than in the middle but the next step up is a Century for 3-4 times the price. I think 5.7mm Kinoptik lenses are going for $1000 to $1500.

-Rob-

Does anyone know how to go about taking one 400ft roll and making it into four 100ft rolls? I mean obviously you have to have some daylight spools but as far as shipping them to a lab or something, i'm not sure about that. I don't have spare cans or anything. Any ideas? Can you get spare 100ft cans or boxes? Is this even possible?

you will need a set of rewinds and a dark room for them, you then spool the 400' onto a second core (using a tight wind setup for this would be essential for Super16) so that the film is on that core tail out. You then get 4 100' daylight spools and you wind the film onto them one at a time. You do not want to try to fill the 100' spool and even if you manage to be consistent the last 100' spool will be more like 70-80' because when daylight spools are loaded at the factory they actually load 112' per spool and that's why buying 4 100' spools is more than a single 400'. Ask your lab for 100' spools and boxes they should have plenty i know we have hundreds and hundreds of them.

-rob-

It is also crucial that clapper/loaders understands the importance of how a lab system works. I was myself guilty of sending off film with torn perfs and generally in a bad state when I started out, simply because I didn't understand that a lab's process is one continous roll. And if that breaks, all of it gets ruined.

 

I'm not saying that's what happened here, I just had to point that out.

We had a piece of tri-x crash our reversal machine a month or so back, a student sent a daylight spool of unprocessed film which had been tape spliced in the middle of the spool with scotch tape and unfortunately Bill missed it and the whole machine crashed. We were not happy but during the school year the B+W reversal machine runs 8-10 hours a day 5 days a week and there were only 2 accidents like this this school season.

As far as I know in the 4.5 years I have been at Cine we have not ruined any ECN (8mm, 16mm, 35mm) but I think we are lucky that we have Bob Hume running our color department as he is a particularly experienced and meticulous guy. We also run a smaller 70ft/min demand drive machine and not a big 200ft + sprocket drive machine (for 35mm) which I think is more tolerant of torn sprocket holes in 35mm. We also have a dedicated 8mm ecn machine.

As anyone who works/has worked/etc. at a lab knows it's a lot of work to run film and I am sure most if not all labs try to hold them selfs to a zero defect standard for processing. With Color Neg where the value of the original can be astronomical, such as work we do for a Jet Aircraft engine manufacturer where 900' of 16mm ecn (cut down from 24 400' rolls) is worth $33m !!! :blink: the work that goes into shooting it does register and nobody wants to be known for ruining anything.

-Rob-

Dear all,

Ive looked through the archives but cannot find much information on this specific topic.

If its there could anybody post a link for me, I would be very grateful.

 

What I basically want to know is whether a full or partial skip bleach process on the negative will have any long-term effects?

Someone I know who works for Kodak warned that the negative will become unstable and slowly turn black within months..

Its sounds strange, because I read that Minority Report had bleached bypass on its neg...

 

Thanks for your help!

 

cheers,

 

Rob Wilton

This is true a bypass keeps the silver in the film instead of washing it out and the silver will eventually tarnish producing the blackening. This does not happen right away but it is a time sensitive process. You can run a bypass and then rewash the film later (re process it) with the bleach tanks to wash the silver out and mostly reverse the bypass process.

Why is it surprising that minority report had a bypass? that was the look they wanted and the finished film probably got a 3 strip B+W separation master at the end of post for archival storage.

-Rob-

hmmm never thought of splitting the roll. that makes alot of sense.

I would love to do some tests,but knowing my luck and considering this is an indie with practicaly no budget. That wont happen.

I think post would be the best option,instead of somthing as costly as a bleachbypass. I think I'll just get a dense negative,then mess around with it later.

 

anyone still know about costs?

You would have to split the roll either before you shoot or have someone decide where to split the roll at the lab. When you setup a machine for bleach bypass you are literally cutting the machine leader (which pulls the film through the processor) so it does not go through the bleach tanks. So there is no way to run a bypass on part of a roll and then "throw a switch" to not bypass the rest of the roll.

Setup for a bypass usually runs $125 to $300 and some extra charge per foot sometimes. This also depends on how much footage you have to run as setting up for a large run is more cost effective for the lab than a short piece of film.

We charge $125 to setup and an extra $0.02/foot for shorter runs and down to just the setup on longer runs as an example. Your mileage will vary from lab to lab.

-Rob-

also - i thought read once that these stocks would be made available for the Aaton A Minima, but i do not see them listed on Kodak's site. anyone know about this?

I would suggest speaking with your lab if you want A-Minima custom loads I know we have a whole shelf of empty A-Minima daylight spools and it would not be much of a challenge to spool 400' core loads onto a a-minima spool. I would suspect that many other labs have empty spools as well.

-Rob-

There are many shots that are underexposed. Would that cause problems with the transfer?

Sure but you have to know whats happening here, underexposed film will make the colorist work at "digging" the image out of the emulsion or in a one light it will just be left dark. Basically you increase the sensitivity of the scanner and then up the gains on the channels to compensate for the lack of density in the film. This exposes the noise inherent in the telecine/color corrector system this noise can look like grain but it will not look like block compression artifacts because the whole Telecine/Color Corrector chain is uncompressed from Pickups to SDI out any compression happens in the VTR.

-Rob-

How about the artifacting on the miniDV tape? Is that to be expected when transferring 35mm footage to miniDV?

No...there should be no heavy blocking or any other gross artifacts on the tape. I think you either got a bad tape or there is some compatibility issue with your Deck/Camera and the recorder at the Telecine house. Try another Cam/Deck to capture but if you cannot get a clean picture send it back for a re-transfer.

-Rob-

I wonder if I can plug it into my VHS deck...

 

and if the wife will just let me put the Spirit next to the crib...

Just get a set of AJA composite video to SDI and SDI to Composite video adapters and you can do VHS tape to tape Color Correction. You will have to buy another VHS deck and that may be the deal breaker on this one.

-Rob-

Hey all,

I'm gonna be shooting a music video coming up on super 16. I've been wanting to try a skip bleach combined with a pull process. I'd like the final image to to have a kind of blueish, sinister, contrasty, crunchy highlights, but not to be too overly grainy. Has anyone tried this? I'm thinking of the pull process so that I could expose the neg slightly more normally and not have it be overly dense. basically, I'd like to have a very funky, organic, unexpected quality to the image, which is what I had gotten before with skip bleaching 35mm '79.

 

Has anyone ever tried this? any advice? again, as it's for a music video, I won't be needing to go to print or anything...

this is kind of a point of inspiration - I love the messed-up look of the Anthony Mandler video for The Killers:

 

 

anybody know how they got that look? I just love the fogged or flashed look to the performance scenes...

 

thanks!!!

 

Kitao

kitaosakurai.com

Pulling the stock a stop will end up lowering the contrast and with the bypass it may slightly reduce the natural tendency to blow away the highlites. If you are looking for a more contrasty look you might want to control the exposure with ND instead of a pull.

I would shoot a 100' and try it out.

-Rob-

Ok, I am shooting a low budget short on 16 in june. what I am looking to find out is the best workflow after shooting. I wanted to send my footage in to a lab for mini dv dailies.

 

I have a $2500 post production budget with a final output as digital HD or DVD and I need to figure out my best route.

should I edit with the mini DV dailies and then go back and have the edited footage worked through with a colorist and then put on HD or digibeta??

 

I want to get the biggest bank for my buck and I think a local colorist may be cutting us a deal.

 

would it be more practical to just have it done best light and just go with it?

 

This is my 1st experience in working with editing and workflow of my own project shot on film.

 

If anyone can give me a better perspective on it I would be more than thankful.

-Matt

Depending on how much footage you have and what kind of deal you are getting...

I would make a Simultaneous Keycode transfer with a Best light grade to 2 DvCam tapes (one Clean, One Keycode Burn-In) I would generally avoid MiniDv for keycode transfer but you could go that way.

With the set of 2 tapes you can edit your footage with keycode, Foot+Frame numbers, etc and then re-batch from the clean tape to make a clean copy.

Plus

Take the Keycode transfers and just work on the Selects with your Colorist for the online grade and finish to HD or Digibeta.

my $0.02

-Rob-

check out a Peleng 8mm. I have heard mixed things about it, but have never used it myself. It is, although, the only 8mm screw mount lens you will find. I know, I have looked far and wide. Pentax has a 17mm screw mount. It is ?4 at the widest, but has insanely close focus, which makes for super cool shots. So the point is that you can put together a hodge podge of lenses to make a prime set. You could do all Pentax Super Takumar with the 8mm being the exception.

 

Did Pentax ever make a screw mount lens wider than 17mm? Anybody? I don't think so, but it who knows.

chris

The Peleng 8mm will cover 35mm (as a true circular fisheye, it is decent glass and is pretty cheap for such a wide lens. I have one I use on a Nikkon mount Eyemo 35mm rig.

-Rob-

You're paying an awful lot of money for that small performance increase. And an 8-core Mac has exactly as many processors as many Baselight 4 clusters!

 

Phil

This is true and if they cannot get real time 2k performance out of this super powerhouse desktop machine there really is something wrong in the code of this software.

-Rob-

Hi Rob,

 

I stand by my original post, which if quoted in full (you unfortunately quoted only a section and left my name at the bottom implying this was my entire post) mentioned the need for decent monitoring and control surface (and in my opinion a tangent is better than a jl-cooper- why do you prefer the latter?). I didn't think i implyed that this would make all editors colourist and as anything else the tool is only worth as much as the colourist's skill. i also pointed out that real time was one of final touch's major flaws. i think you will be surprised at how good this system is when it runs realtime and compared to other systems, bugs aside, it is in my opinion no more clunky than some of the 'majors' (which also from my limited experience are frequently flawed programmes- i once waited half a day for a baselight to restart!). as for using it as a finishing system why not exactly? technically it performs as high as any of the systems you mentioned in terms of colour space why is a $250000 non destructive color system more accurate than a $1200 non destructive colour system? if it can perform in real time and all the bugs are sorted out i see no reason why it shouldn't be compared to the other systems you mention- and some functions are available on color that are not on others (and vice versa). i understand your hesitation though as i was burned when i first sampled fcp and it wasn't until version four that i switched from avid. now fcp is my editor of choice for both short and longform no matter what the project. multicam was the only function i missed from avid and now fcp does that i will argue till i'm blue in the face that fcp is a superior editing choice. as color is effectively final touch v3 it should be on its way to being a 'giant' killer. i am not saying that every editor is colourist, but i am saying there will be a time soon where some of the best colourists will be regularly choosing color possibly over other systems and there will also be a lot of post houses very depressed about there expensive investments (as there are already over those who splashed out $25000 on final touch 2k license). afterall if apple had bought baselight and bundled that in would this still be a discussion?

 

keith

I have no preference for the JL Cooper. It has a cheesey fake stone look which is almost laughable, the Tangent panels are much better but more expensive. I was suggesting that someone who has a Hi-End FCP system could add a simple panel and a OK grading monitor such as the $5k JVC LCD and for less than $10k have a system which has some capability to do color finish work for the "one man band" style edit, this may lead to better looking work.

The problem with the Tangent and certainly the JLCooper panels is that they are generic, I have spoken with people at both Assimilate and Iridas and both companies really would like custom panels like the bigger players. The reaction may be So What? who needs custom panels? however the reality is that if you cannot get to the tools quickly it makes this work much harder UI rules in grading.

Furthermore yes if Apple had bought FilmLight and made a free Baselight we might not be having a conversation here, but they did not. I have had experience with 2 of the 3 major systems that are a good alternative to a DaVinci 2K+ or Pogle Platinum, these are Baselight, Lustre and Nucoda of the three I have not seen Nucoda yet. These 3 systems do work in real time (Yes when they work they are complex) and when they run out of Juice they gracefully render and cache to maintain playback.

Both SpeedGrade and Scratch also do realtime work in a simpler kind of configuration (GPU single seat CPU) and i have had a Scratch system here and it works in real time for most things and also has good rendering when it runs out of steam. Both Scratch and Speedgrade and all of the other "Big Iron" high dollar software grading systems do work and allot of it in real time and with real time output to your grading monitor. It is very unclear if Color will produce any real time output to the grading monitor, you may be able to apply real time work but is it just to a little preview window on the control monitor? I do not know.

Believe me as a smaller facility looking at software grading systems Apple's Color seems very attractive at a distance, I am sure we will get a FC Studio 2 package this year and I will find out more. It also took Apple a decade to bring FCP to a spot where it is competitive as a editor so who knows where and on what timetable Color may get the same treatment.

-Rob-

Check this out for another opinion about Color.

http://prolost.blogspot.com/2007/04/color-my-impression.html

-Rob-

Hi,

 

Final Touch was one of the best colour correction programmes available at any price- and when i say this i include lustre etc. there were just a couple of issues. unfortunately these 'issues' were rather large problems in a proffesional production. the biggest was real time functunality- the product was supposed to be completely real time, but even without multiple grades and with the best recommended hardware i never saw it get past an uneven 18fps. the second was colour accuracy

keith

I grade film on a regular basis at Cine on a Real time CC ( a Copernicus) and I have run a DaVinci 2K and a Pogle Platinum to grade work I have shot, and worked with a Baselight 4 for an extended time period, I think my experience is a little weird industry wise. I personally cannot stress how important a tactile surface and real time feedback is to this work, I think any Colorist will tell you the same thing it is very reactive work and having to wait for the machine is a real downer. Furthermore I think that any skilled colorist will just ignore a system that is workflow disfunctional and client based work will not flow on a system without performance. I also have heard that Final Touch is certainly a clunky interface compared to Baselight, Lustre, Nucoda, etc.

That said i think the addition of a JL-Cooper panel and a decent monitor to a 8core mac can make a fine secondary CC system and aid editors in finishing their work with a better touch but you have to spend the funds to properly equip the editor, it will still not be a finishing system though.

Secondarily I have camera gear and shoot on a regular basis and I think I compartmentalize my mind a bit for where I am and what I am doing. I am, and have been, shooting a feature in a mix Super16 and 35mm around 300 rolls of film, blah, blah. My point is that while I could shoot/grade the film either at my facility or at another in NYC I feel it's not really a good idea for the DP of a show to grade it even if said person has the experience and technical knowledge to do both. The picture in NY I am shooting is being graded at Moving Images post in NYC and we have a great colorist, Eric, who does allot of MV and Spot work and he is really psyched to work on a feature. I think the interaction between the Colorist, Director and DP is a valuable collaboration and increases the value of the work being done and at the best what you get out of this is so much more than a one man band approach.

-Rob-