Hi everybody,
Let me first introduce myself
my name is Spencer Vos and I am creative director of Phantalassa Productions in Amsterdam, Holland. I have worked in the film field for many years first as soundman, years later as assistant director and now as creative director of an international production office .
We have shot on super16mm and on 35mm film :commercials, promo's and we worked for feature films (we worked for Adam Sandlers & Rob Sneiders film company.)
I feel that shooting on a negative film had many advantages such as almost no burning-in of the highlights, (because you shoot on negative film highlights are darks on the medium film)
and the film has a very high resolution (4K/8K)
but by scanning and capturing you are losing a lot of resolution compared to the original master film. going from negative to positive, to a copie and so on
the stops is another thing,
pure hd can handle 11 stops so that is comparable to film,
the hdv most probebly has less stops as a dynamic range compared to film.
it has been said that the end result of a 35mm film seen in a reasonable good cinema is less than or as good such as a just bit more than a 1 till 2k resolution.
(based on the measurement of circle of confusion(the size of the spots you see when (very) close to a cinema screen) )
but Star Wars was shot on a hd900 sony in 1080/1920p was it that bad in resoltion ?
no it looked very sharp and fast..
therefor I decided to step in the HDV and bought the Canon H1 HDV pro35mm equipment which I tested together with a PS mini35mm adapter and Arri lenses.
I have to say, as long as you use the external harddisk instead of the compressed HDV videotape,
an 35mm adapter on top of it with groundglass (I dislike the: seems like burning in of sharp object such as led lights in a dashboard or a refelction on a table and such pinpointing towards the vieuwers eye) the results are very very good,
but remember max resolution per frame on the Canon H1 is only 1.67megapixel (per ccd) X 3 interpolatue that is less than 3 time the 1.67 lets say 4.5 megapixel per frame/sec
and a 35mm film has somewher around 32megapixel if you interpolate (masterfilm)
I have bought the old 35mm adapter PS Technik 300 series because of this:
the new series flips the image on tape, you can flip it back to normal in the canon xl1,xl2 and h1
but on tape it is still upside down, editors tried to explain to me that there is a loss of resolution when flipping in software back to normal. hdv is a bit roughy compared to a cinealta so I tested the old 300 series with prism and groundglass. the picture I love to see in the rushes (super16mm) was what I saw on the HD monitor using the combination H1, 35mm adapter and good lenses,
nice not edgy or pinpointing, sharp and ofcourse by using lenses which cost over 10K eur till 100K eur such as the cooke prime , man a darned good image I have to say.
so when the lighting is good,
cooke prime lenses on the 35mm adapter
the whitebalance well done and very far away from the up white level (zebra on 93 pct or so)
the 18pct grey is checked
no zoom or pans/tilts and as steady as you can
you indeed get a very good image from this camera.
When we shot our first project I am happy to put it here on the site as stills,
Spencer
