Aapo Lettinen

colour reversal is easier than colour negative to do at home but the developers are quite expensive. may be practical for Super8 but I'd hesitate to do it for 16mm because of the price of both the film stock and the developer. reversal is almost impossible to get in 35mm in usable lenghts for any mp use (I think the absolute minimum usable lenght for 4perf is about 100ft for MOS second unit indie work) so that is also out of question. the developer (I have used the Tetenal 3-bath kit) also ages quickly and the stuff is oxidation sensitive and the process is very temperature sensitive. and it includes formaldehyde which is not safe to breathe, I have a very good gas mask but why bother when lab developed colour neg is both cheaper and easier to work with :rolleyes:

If they are paying separately for coloring all the material multiple times then it's kinda OK i guess but sounds like quite unefficient workflow to me. Rarely actually heard anyone doing it here in any production, it's the producers who would say no for that because it's kind of, well, expensive and unnecessary :wacko: the Faust movie did that I believe but others are usually pretty much edit-with-the-basic-lut-and-if-you're-not-ok-with-that-you-can-adjust-by-yourself-with-the-edit-software's-tools :lol: tests and everything which is published is of course worked with a pro colorist always but not the intermediate versions for productions's internal use unless necessary for testing and determining the look etc.

You have to define in more detail what do you mean with the footage "looking good". I have seen lots of video and film material that "looks good" when a simple LUT is added. but it always looks better if it's adjusted much further, shot by shot. For example, Alexa material "looks good" when a LUT is added because it now (generally) has somewhat decent contrast and colors. But it can look better if some minor corrections are made. It varies when these corrections are made though, some persons want to make them on set, others want to make them in post prod but not for dailies, others want to make them for everything they see including dailies, others want to always use the same custom look on set through editing and post prod to the screen... the usual difference with film and digital is that film has more limited shadow response but huge highlight headroom which leads to the on-set corrections to be made closer to the mid tones of the range rather than in highlights (exposing digital, especially "indie-style") (approaches vary though) . so it may give you an impression that the film is "easier to color correct" because you don't have to use the mid tone/gamma boost as often and you have limited shadow detail in the original so you probably won't be allowed to boost the shadows at all, plus the shadow corrections are already done on set with lighting and not relied on the post prod gamma corrections. It's thus more of a shooting style difference than actual difference between formats. I could shoot film material for you that is hell of a work to color correct and digital material which is very easy to work with, or vice versa

dust is more of a problem in the drying stage, the final wash takes it off of the emulsion quite easily if there was some in the tank. if you are doing re-exposure for reversal it might matter a little. the Drying Spots are usually bigger problem than dust but can be managed with washing aid and using distilled water for the final wash

I believe you are talking mostly about Commercials and not Feature Films? commercials are quite different productions in many ways, you may have clients on set all day every day staring at the monitor and thus have to get the best quality closest to the final look monitoring on set all the time, and of course fully color corrected dailies for then to view so that they are convinced that you are super and the material is just as they expected. the client may not understand what is bad raw material and what is intentional underexposure for example. with features/making dailies for pro people you can expect them to know that the final show will look much better than the quickly made dailies so you don't necessarily have to do full CC for all the stuff on set. Depends on the Director of course. the DP is usually always experienced enough to know what works for the look and what not even if there is no dedicated monitoring LUT available at all times. Here in Finland it is quite normal to make straight or almost straight LUT dailies and offlines btw for budget reasons in feature productions, depending on the show and DP of course. it can be actually safer to the DP to know the dailies are just through standard LUT and nothing else so it is easier to see how much CC is needed for the material and if there is for example filter color casts etc. so some DP:s even want you to deliver only the basic LUT versions without any corrections

if you buy a model which has the plastic loop formers, those can also scratch film and most users take them off for that reason. you should mark the correct loop sizes to the inner panel so that it is easy to get them right, as said the upper loop scratches very easily if too big because the pressure plate edge near it is quite rough an unpolished. if you decide to take open the camera inner panel for maintenance, make sure to mark first the correct position of the transport sprocket wheel relative to the rollers. they may seem symmetrical but they are NOT and if wrongly assembled they may jam the mechanism every now and then. (if it jams mid shoot you have to open the jamming upper/lower roller and close it again. I strongly recommend installing it right the first time so you don't have to open the rollers all the time because of jams)

I think the main difference is that there is lots more Power-Window-All -persons in all-digital DPs, they are used to making lots of creative decisions afterwards because the shooting format does not limit it as much as with film. A film person can work more efficiently on digital I think, especially in the post production stage, because of having made most of the creative decisions on set and therefore does not need extensive, almost vfx-like post work to get the footage to look good and constant. Mostly lighting and exposure decisions... keeping constant working ISO and tweaking lights and camera filters if possible rather than changing ISO and aperture shot by shot all the time. aka treating the video camera as a single ISO film stock with known latitude and using the scopes as a exposure meter if needed

the main problem with motion picture film is that the film amounts are easily 100-1000 times larger than with still film and you have to maintain very tight tolerances from batch to batch because one single bad batch shows up very easily from the final product. with home processing you can try everything exotic, for example using special developers, stills film in a MP camera, etc. I am starting to experiment in July with for example ferricyanide leeching and using sound print film and stills film as a camera negative, I am testing them first with stills and can then use the same film in Konvas to practice with longer lenghts :lol:

just a comment on the cheap-o Chinese accessories kits: the matte boxes and follow focuses are usually complete garbage which does not last even in hobby use. It is possible to use Chinese or Indian camera accessories with SOMEWHAT good results but one really needs to buy all the parts separately and assemble the kit by themselves. The rod parts and the rods themselves are for example not ideal and have to be tuned. I myself use couple of rod adapters custom attached to a cheeseplate and a Manfrotto long quick release plate again custom attached to r15mm rods. needs milling and drilling and couple of hours of work but works way better than any Chinese stuff out of the box, I can use it with for example dslr:s, bolex, Kinor2m and FS7. The rods are from different manufacturers, as well as the handgrips, cheeseplate, various rod parts, shoulder pad, etc. I recommend buying a used Chrosziel etc. professional mattebox and not bother with the all-plastic Chinese stuff. most of the rods parts can be Chinese if needed but the cheap matteboxes just are not worth it. the Tilta stuff is more usable but is also much more expensive so you could probably get a used quality item cheaper

additionally, film comes mushy very quickly if underexposed so it needs to be exposed more carefully than digital and more based on mid/low range response than highlights. with digital you may need to be careful to not blow out the highlights but most other aspects can be corrected later. corrections are also easier to do because there is generally less "grain" (noise) in digital image so the corrections don't show up as easily as with film where for example contrast boost can be immediately seen in grain texture

that "ease" of using film comes from the standardising of the film stock/developing/scanning path. I bet all those shows used same 1 or 2 film stocks (probably Kodak 5219, 5213 or 5207) for the entire show, always same lab with same processing, and same scanners with the same settings. So there is very little difference compared to the Alexa LogC workflow colour correction wise. If one does like me, using 10 - 15 different film stocks with different labs and different telecine/scanning with different settings, of course one has A LOT of work color correcting the stuff later shot by shot. (we did a short film scenes btw with using only 5207 stock with same lenses, careful lighting and exposing, flat telecine with minimum adjustments and it was very easy to colour correct. the difference comes from how much work you do on set to balance the shots VS how much work you want to do later in post production)

here is a comparison between two telecines transfer of exactly the same 16mm frame. a good example how much difference there can be in transfers from the same film frame

with correct loop size and maintenance they are quite reliable. the "can opener" winding lever is not that great for hands if you're shooting lots of material but for the price they are good cameras and relatively easy to repair though scratch film easily if the loop size is not absolutely correct by 1 frame

is it going to be "art house" type stuff with lots of grain/lower contrast preferred? as Kenny said you should clip test every roll. 7 years is a very long time to store a roll in room temperature, even in fridge and with slowest stocks you would see changes in emulsion. If on shoot I usually store faster stocks max. couple of days in room temperature if cold storage is not possible. then you usually don't see much difference. but seven years, the output could be anything, especially in 16mm and that fast stocks. "room temperature" may also be occasionally much higher than 20°C -25°C average. I'm a bit sceptic about the 500T but the 250D could maybe be usable when used carefully

pro labs are very fast indeed, 3 days including shipping can be easily arranged even from another country although fast shipping is a bit more expensive. if you need dailies on video the labs can usually arrange FTP download so that you can get the dailies back before the films

there was color timing and timed dailies in film era too. and the telecine operator affects considerably to the end result and look of the video dailies so there is still other artists involved. with film you are dealing with at least the lab technician and color timer/telecine operator so technically there's MORE people involved in the creative process. it helps learning pre planning and developing communication skills so it's not a bad thing at all though

the main problem is that to make it economical you need to process in large volume as Tyler said. That was maybe one of the reasons why that 'semi-pro' lab closed: one needs to develop other people's films as well to make developing oneself's own colour negs economical, and that leads to making a business out of it which leads to full time running films so it takes all the time and is not a hobby anymore, nor allows shooting much oneself's own films anymore because of the time constraints. The prices were very reasonable and the quality was good, but running a film lab as a full time job with very reasonable prices is, hm, a bit uneconomical and may bite back after a while. on the other hand, if you raise the prices the customers turn to pro labs so there is little you can do, other than running in even larger volume. May not be practical if someone really wants to SHOOT on film and NOT to only run a film lab :ph34r:

They are not so tricky but you have to be very careful with them and know them thoroughly (like all the Soviet filmmaking equipment. this is true whether talking about Konvas, Krasnogorsk, Kinor etc. cameras, processing tanks, accessories, lenses... they work OK but they are NOT as foolproof as the Western counterparts and you have to know their weaknesses and adjust them every now and then. It's like the Soviet motorcycle, Dnepr, we had a while ago, it worked great but every 30 or 40 miles you had to adjust the spark gap and maybe fine tune the valve clearance. Russian gear works JUST like that B) ) You can split the 16mm to 50ft load before shooting. that way you don't ruin anything important by splitting the film ;)

home processing may be practical with black and white negative if you have to get the results asap (camera tests etc) or you want to experiment and learn the craft on deeper level. Black and white processing in a professional lab is here in Europe close to double the price per meter compared to colour negative and the developing chemicals are very inexpensive. Only when very constant and high quality results are needed the home processing for b/w becomes unpractical and uneconomic. For colour negative, it may not be practical at all because the chemicals are much more expensive unless bought in very large amounts and the process is much more complex and sensitive and needs more quality control than b/w processes. Lomo tanks are relatively easy to load (as long as you don't drop any parts in the darkroom. they are very fragile plastic and will shatter to thousands little pieces if you drop them) but you have to create a system to check that the film is correctly seated on the spiral. I usually check that the outer film layer is absolutely round and then run my fingers over the film edges on the side to find out if there is any double layers which would be ruined in processing (hearing/feeling the individual layers). I also gently shake the spiral to seat the film more evenly and to hear if there is anything wrong with it. All this has to be, of course, made in absolute darkness, you can't use a safety light to check if there is something wrong with it and if you drop anything you'll absolutely screwed. One needs to learn basics about chemical safety/handling before starting to play with developing chemicals and make sure the ventilation is good etc. A good safety principle with chemicals is that if you are not absolutely sure what you're doing, don't do anything... mixing wrong chemicals together may accidentally create carcinogenic substances, poison gases etc. Some developers may already contain carcinogenics in the formula btw, for example formaldehyde as a hardener, so it's better to have a gas mask on hand if you need to handle that kind of stuff at home :ph34r: One thing to consider is that even when the b/w home processing is inexpensive, the b/w negative has to be purchased new VS using recans/short ends/clearance color negative film and processing that in lab. Depending on stock you don't necessarily save anything compared to color negative even if using more expensive lab. Home processing S8 has the big disadvantage that the dust and scratches show much more clearly than with larger formats. that's why I don't use S8 at all for home processing, only 35mm and occasionally 16mm

Peltier elements are already used in some modern digital cinema cameras to assist cooling the sensor. If I remember correctly at least blackmagic and arri are using it. Btw nowadays when we live again the anamorphic/large sensor part of the periodical 3D image format cycle, people most likely take bigger single sensor camera over the 3chip one when the optics is concerned. With bigger sensor you also need more ffd and possibly special lenses but you get more "wow factor" with todays audiences compared to a 3ccd great color response camera. Most of the asudience wants the films specs to look good on paper too, not only on screen

they shot the doc for three years, I had plenty of time to transcode :lol:

actually it is 80TB times THREE (two copies on hdd:s and one on LTO. insurance reasons y know B) ) and also the 30TB edit files have to be archived (one copy is enough for the offlines) so it is about 350TB total :lol:

yep, in the last nature documentary we did it was closer to 80TB or material and it wasn't even all shot in RAW, maybe about half of it when comparing footage length wise. there was lots of 50fps and 100fps material in 4k sony raw so it adds a bit to the lengths. we transcoded to fullhd proresLT for editing. transcoding and thus adding more complexity is actually easier than trying to work with that much of material in original format and is also cheaper because you don't need as huge amount of raid storage and insanely powerful computer for editing, well worth the extra work involved. you still need to correct manually the xml errors when doing online even if editing in RAW so it not that much more work to do the extra step. normal sata drives and LTO are cheap for material storage but very fast raid storage, not so much so it's best to edit as lightly as possible. we still needed about 30TB of raid storage for editing but that's much easier than 80TB especially when it does not need to be that fast because using only proreslt versions for editing :lol:

interestingly enough, almost all RAW footage I work with is shot for documentary projects, NOT fiction (drama, fantasy) movies. that makes lots of sense actually because in drama you need lots of takes and faster workflow but you usually have possibility to have much bigger lighting+grip budget and crew so you don't necessarily need that extra 5% the RAW can offer you. exception are the underwater and aerial shots, those are almost exclusively RAW always in all projects and in aerial stuff usually also hdr if available. in documentaries (and small budget indie stuff btw!!) you meet extreme lighting conditions more regularly and have much smaller lighting package so it makes much sense to shoot raw even if you need more hdd space. depends on the budget of course, we are making stuff almost exclusively for cinema release so if making a small budget tv stuff one does not necessarily need that much control over the image. raw is also more expensive to online and color correct but the difference is not that huge

it's like with film, the silver halide chrystals can only 'see' in black and white and you need color filters to differentiate the colors from each other