David Mullen ASC

In the days of optical printing, movies, even if they were contact-printed through all generations, often had optical effects that went through an IP/IN step, and that shot was then cut into the OCN, which went through an IP/IN step. Because Douglas Trumbull did not have a 65mm-to-35mm reduction printer, he finished his visual effects like on "Close Encounters", "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", and "Blade Runner", to a 65mm dupe negative - meaning his 65mm negative photography had to be duped, though he tried various tricks to avoid the IP/IN steps in an optical printer, like photographing matte paintings onto IP stock. Anyway, he finished with a 65mm dupe which had to be farmed out to be optically-reduced through an IP to a 35mm dupe negative, which was then cut into the movie's OCN, which then went through an IP/IN step for release prints. It's no wonder that even though many people miss the days of photographing physical miniatures for VFX, no one misses optical printing.

All film -- unless it is reversal, i.e. "reversed" in density during processing -- is "negative" in that it creates density where it gets exposure. So you get a negative image if making a copy of a source that is positive and a positive image when the source is negative. The intermediate dupe stock ends up with a similar low gamma to camera negative stock so that a print made from OCN or a dupe negative looks similar in contrast. It may be that since duplication increases contrast, the IP has a bit lower gamma and once copied to an IN, the gamma increases to match OCN, or maybe it's just designed not to add any contrast to the OCN through both generations. It's not a perfect copy of course. Robert would know more than me...

It’s noise from a telecine transfer or scan off of a film negative, where the darkest (densist) areas are the brightest areas in the scene, like the sky. So those areas are underexposing the sensor, causing signal noise. Not all telecines or scanners create noise in bright areas though.

"Domino" mixed cross-processed 35mm reversal with color negative, as did "Man on Fire". There are few examples of 35mm color reversal being processed as reversal (even "Euphoria" cross-processed it, though that was also because they found that normally-processed Ektachrome looked too staright-forward) -- partly because of the few E6 labs that handle long movie film rolls, but also, until D.I.s came along, the problem of needing it to end up as a negative in order to make prints. Ellen Kuras and Robert Richardson have shot scenes on 35mm reversal processed as reversal. "Blow" (2001), photographed by Kuras, had some sequences shot on 35mm Ektachrome and processed as reversal but then the footage had to be optically printed to a dupe negative (contact printing it to a dupe negative puts the emulsion on the wrong side). I believe Richardson shot some 35mm Kodachrome for "Kill Bill" (2003) which went through a D.I. process.

We discussed it here in 2004.

IMDB is wrong then. But I thought most people here had heard of the use of 35mm Ektachrome VNF stock on "Buffalo 66".

It's not the fragility that matters much -- the bulb is more fragile than the plastic socket -- it's the heat limitation. Most plastic sockets now have a warning label to not use more than a 60w tungsten bulb in them though if you turn off the light between takes, you can go higher. And of course, an LED bulb equivalent to a 60w tungsten bulb is much lower in wattage.

We had this discussion before. Though John Holland claims to have shot 7251, the mid-60s stock before '54, it was not listed in my 1966 copy of the American Cinematographer Manual, and it lists stocks by Kodak, Ansco, GAF, Dupont. etc. Kodak 7254 seems to have been their first 16mm color negative, in 1968, unless they released 7251 in Europe only, hence why it was not in the manual.

As Joerg mentions, Germany made the first 35mm movie on color negative film, “Women Are Better Diplomats”, released in 1941. Kodak introduced 35mm color negative for movies in 1950, 5247 (16 ASA daylight.) Within five years, 3-strip Technicolor photography was obsolete. There was some limited use of 35mm Kodachrome Commercial reversal in the 1940s under the name Technicolor Monopack. The problem with shooting 35mm color features on reversal film was the need to make prints.

The only 35mm reversal movie I can think of from the past 30 years is this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_'66

In Hollywood it was more of a switch in 35mm color from 3-strip Technicolor to color negative from 1950-1955.

You must be talking about 16mm then. Europe switched from color reversal to negative earlier than the U.S. mainly because their 16mm labs were cleaner! Negative dirt is white so more distracting than the black dirt on reversal. I think Europe was switching over in the late 1960s, particularly because of the release of 100 ASA Kodak 7254 but it was more in the late 1970s when U.S. switched over. And it was a very gradual switch.

Setting the camera to the 4000K range will make tungsten look warm and daylight lamps look blue, but in terms of making blue look cyan instead (blue + green), you need to use cool light sources with that green cast (like Cool White fluorescents, mercury vapor lamps, etc.) or use green or cyan gels or use RGB LEDs where cyan can be dialed in, like with Astera tubes. Or color-correct the image and shift the blue channel to cyan, though then things like blue skies will also shift to cyan unless you start using Power Windows to separate blue objects from each other. At some point, a movie like "The Joker" would have done any of these things depending on the scene.

150 degrees might have just been the longest open the designers could manage. Film cameras have to have a closed period to allow time to pull-down the film to the next frame before exposing it -- if you've ever seen footage with a mistimed shutter, a percentage of the exposure is streaked because the film was in motion before the shutter was completely closed. The film has to be static in the gate at the moment of exposure.

By coincidence, I visited Garrison, NY where the Yonkers scenes were shot in Todd-AO for "Hello, Dolly!" in 1968 and most of my full-frame Nikon stills (mostly around 30mm on the zoom) matched the frames at a 40mm equivalent to 5-perf 65mm. Then I asked Roy Wagner, ASC about the shoot and he said they had a very wide-angle 30mm, a normal wide-angle 40mm, and a 66mm and 75mm. Plus a zoom. So I'm guessing that the 40mm was the go-to lens for moderately wide-angle shots (the equivalent of shooting on a 20mm lens in Super-35.)

“Mank” did some of this but they had a Red monochrome camera with a really high ISO.

You’d want the look of warm direct sun and cool soft skylight — and the sun gets warmer and warmer as it goes down, and also dimmer relative to the cold skylight. There are many ways to get that effect so there’s no right or wrong way. You can use a tungsten lamp for the sun and a daylight lamp for the soft skylight and set the color temp of the camera halfway between but you can also tweak that further with gels. Certainly you could leave the tungsten sun ungelled and keep raising the camera’s color temperature setting to warm it up but then you’d have to keep gelling your skylight lighting bluer to compensate. Which mix of gels and settings you use just depends on the situation like the view out the window.

Equivalent to shooting on a 50mm in Super-35 so not wide-angle enough in Super-16 for that look you are talking about.

Most cinematographers aim to get it right in camera and dailies, otherwise we’d have to put up with the director, producer, and studio execs complaining about the look being wrong or it not cutting together visually. We can’t wait for final color-correction months later to “get it right” because we’d have probably been fired long before that.

There are blue colors in the trailer.

First of all keep in mind that your initial resolution is 4320 x 3240 -- the resizing to take out the squeeze doesn't add resolution. So in theory, if your image has a 2X squeeze and you want to create a 2:1 image, then your max resolution comes from a square area of the sensor, so the max resolution from your recording is 3240 x 3240. Now how you get to an unsqueezed 2:1 frame from that sensor area is up to you, it depends on your delivery format: 4K DCP with 2:1 inside 1.85 (black borders top & bottom)? Inside 2.39 (black borders on each side)? 16x9 UHD video (3840 x 2160) with a 2:1 letterbox? Either way, your resolution limit is 3240 x 3240. So I guess you would start by cropping and unsqueezing to 6480 x 3240. But then whether you master for a theatrical 4K DCP first, then 3.8K UHD from that, depends on your delivery requirements. Cinema 4K DCP Aspect Ratio / Resolution Flat (1.85) / 3996 x 2160 Scope (2.39) / 4096 x 1716 Full Container (1.90) / 4096 x 2160 I assume "full container" is used for digital IMAX releases but I'm not sure you'd be guaranteed of that so I'd probably work within the 1.85 or 2.39 containers.

Eastmancolor print stock first appeared in 1950, Vision 2383 print stock in 1999, so surely no one really believes that after 49 years, Kodak forgot how to get blues to reproduce accurately without a cyan bias.

Blu-rays of older movies come from all sorts of sources and are post-processed in different ways -- it's mainly about budget. Look at something like "Out of Africa" for example, mainly transferred from a color-timed IP on a telecine to HD and SD, but then in the late 2000s, Universal decided they should remaster it in 4K as a form of archiving it, so they scanned the original negative on an Arriscanner at 6K then downsampled it to 4K and color-corrected that. But I'm sure the colorist looked at previous home video transfers OK'd by Sidney Pollack (and hopefully David Watkin) and maybe even screened a print but that's not standard operating procedure. Some movies have more budget allotted to digital remastering than others. Look at the "Star Trek" movies -- for some reason "Star Trek 2" had two digital remasters from scans of the original negative done in the 2000s whereas all the others just had an HD telecine from an IP until very recently. One common mistake I see on transfers of old movies where clearly they haven't watched a print or even watched the movie with the sound on, is transferring day-for-night scenes as if they were day scenes.