Hello Karl:
About my post: I observed that Rob is using this thread for promoting his lab, and I hardly find that objective and appropriate on this forum. It helps his business but puts other labs at disadvantage, and if this is the case, he should expect negative postings like mine from customers who are not satisfied with the lab for any reason.
I posted my input on this forum AFTER I complained and called about the "electronic noise" effect that I saw in the transferred footage. It is still unclear to me what it is. Cinelab told me that it was result of the underexposed footage. Well, I felt different about that but every time I complained I got the same verdict. Obviously, this is my first 16mm film experience, but I looked at other people's footage, and that footage looked much cleaner than mine. I needed an expert to look at the footage and tell me what the hell was that "noise". So far I had one expert who did that, and his opinion was: "it's the lab". DP who shot the footage sad the same thing.
I did call Rob couple of days ago, and he agreed to meet with me and look at the negative. But as far as I can tell, Rob and I both feel uneasy about this. He has to spend his time for looking at my negative, and I have to spend my time and a lot of gas to drive from Malden (north of Boston) to Fall River and back just to figure out what happened during the processing and transfer of my film. Basically, a happy process of film making turned into 16mm film forensics analysis.
Hopefully, my meeting with Rob will determine the cause of the "noise" defect. I am also going to ask other labs to look at that "noise". To be fair to everybody, I will post the findings on this forum, and I will publicly apologize before Cinelab in case the "noise" was my fault.
All the best.
-Yuriy.
