Tyler Purcell

I've used the CP2's with film cameras, but I'm not much of a fan due to the cost. It really depends on what features you're looking for in a lens? If you want a fast wide angle lens, that's going to cost a lot of money vs a slow longer or standard 24, 35, 50mm lens. I could only afford what I bought, which were the Rokinon Xeen's and let me tell ya, nobody can tell what they are with the final footage on film. People spend so much time focused on glass, they kinda forget that most glass is fine. I had some college kid argue with me about my recently serviced Optar primes "not being good enough" for his student film. It's that kind of attitude which kills me. I'd rather have three lenses that work, for the price of 1 lens that doesn't do anything better, but has a more recognizable brand name on the side.

Sadly Final Cut was never designed to work with film. There were a few plugin's made by Automatic Duck that helped that a bit, but getting a flex file out of Final Cut 7 is impossible. So the only way is to work with a burn in, but honestly that doesn't help because you still can't create the file required for the negative cutter. For a negative cut, you need to use Avid. Any version will work really and for $199 you can get a year subscription. It's a bit of work to get functioning, but it does work way better than FCP7 and all of these "film" issues are solved. It has so many options for film it's kinda crazy. On a side note, negative cuts on 16mm kinda suck for many reasons. The big one is that it's a multi-reel A/B/C standard. They do this to cover up the splices and it works well, but it's really annoying to cut AND to print, using a multi-pass system. You would not only need to do a negative cut, but also make an IP for archival reasons. This means, you'd have to spend the time and money to do a color pass and dissolves on film, which lowers the quality of the final output. Far better to scan all your negative at 2k using a lower-end system. Then simply re-scan the sections you need at 4k for the final cut. Then you can laser back your film onto 35mm with soundtrack and use that as your archive.

It's gonna be hard to find a good working SR of any kind for $1200. Most of those sub $2k sync sound cameras of any brand are in rough shape, either missing things like batteries, chargers, magazines and usually are "untested" which means you'll probably need to send it in somewhere for a re-build. SR's are workhorses, but when they wear out, they create a very wobbly image (registration issues) until serviced. Also the vast majority of SR's are Arri B mount, which is a good thing if you wish to own your own glass, but a bad thing if you wish to rent glass as most rental houses only have PL mount 16mm glass. So be very careful what you get because it can easily turn your film future career into a nightmare.

I have a complete Super 16 package with Optar's available in LA. Just hit me up!

Yea I read the American Cinematographer article, he's got a lot of fun details in there about camera, lensing and lighting which was fun to read. As a pretty die hard Aaton guy myself, it was nice to see someone do a feature with 16mm and 35mm Aaton cameras, much like my own. There is a set for sale right now on this very forum that is the best deal I've seen in a long time. $10k for a set of 5 Arri Super speeds for Super 16. I have the Russian knock off's called Optars and they're a bit soft, but they really work well for super 16. I haven't had a lick of complaints from the people who use my camera and they're around $6k for a new set of 5, but again they're hard to find. Remember, you can always start with a zoom lens. The Canon 11-165 is the defacto standard and there is one of them for sale on here for $2800 euro's if i recall. I have a Zeiss 12-120, were it is much smaller and lighter then the Canon, the Canon is a crisper and nicer piece of glass with a better range. Ohh and watch out for "mount" types. Quite a few 16mm lenses are Arri B mount. You'll be needing PL mount for any modern camera.

The A-minima is a "speciality" camera. Not an A, B or C camera, but something you pull out to get that one shot where no other camera can go. It's not a sync-sound camera, so it's louder then an XTR/Xtera and it takes very specialized film loads which are not made by anyone anymore. So you can't just order film and use it with the A-Minima like all of the normal cameras. It takes 200ft loads but they're wound backwards with the emulsion out and need to be threaded in daylight due to the complexity of the camera loading. So you'd need a dark room to re-spool onto the 200ft daylight spools properly or pay a lab to do it, which just adds to the cost. The XTR Prod and Xtera are the same camera mechanically and design, but the Xtera uses the 35mm style video tap which is much higher quality. These are A unit sync sound cameras, designed for production. They take standard 400ft loads or 100ft daylight spools (not the same as the A-Minima at all) and they're dead quiet, only 20db at 24fps. Remember, with film cameras, the image is created with the lens and film stock, not an "imager" like digital cameras. So a 50 year old 16mm camera would deliver identical quality images to a 416 if the lenses, movement and stock were the same. This is one of the biggest things us film people have to explain to digital people who wish to shoot film. They just think they must use the newest and best to capture great images and it gets very annoying, especially when there are only a hand-full of 16mm cameras made in the 2000's +. So in reality, who cares what camera body Damian Chazelle used on "First Man" (all the behind the scenes stills I've seen show a 416). Can you afford the Super 16 Ultra Primes which are what makes the image? If you can't, then it's probably best to rent a camera and lens kit for a while to get your feet wet. Finally, finding XTR Prod's and Xtera's is currently impossible. Every once in a blue moon, one shows up on the radar and they go for $7k easily these days. I haven't seen an Xtera for sale since 2016 and in 2018 I only saw 2 XTR's for sale, one Plus and one Prod, both went for a lot of money. Ya just gotta keep your eye on ebay because nearly anyone who has one, will post it there first. The easiest super 16 camera to find is an Arri SR3, but even those are getting more and more rare.

Prices are going up pretty fast. Last decent A-Minima I saw went for $6k. Remember, no matter what the batteries will need to be re-celled and that camera does have a main drive belt that will need replacing at some point as well. So "mint" condition is hard unless you pay a premium and get all of that done in advance. Another side note, the daylight spools are becoming harder to get, so make sure if you get a camera, you get as many mags as possible with as many spools as possible.

It think you've been misinformed about a few things. There is a low-cost brand that makes mediocre 8mm and 16mm scanners http://moviestuff.tv/ and their price range is around $5k or so for a new scanner. They are the only company I know of making scanners in the $5k price range. Lasergraphics scanners are some of the best in the world, the director sitting right next to the Arri scanner in terms of quality in my opinion. These scanners are used in commercial post production and they use some of the newest imager technology with some of the best cleanup tools around. You can get into a basic scanstation personal without an optical package for around $50,000 USD and the normal scanstation with an optical package is around $90,000 USD. There is not much of a used market for these machines because they're so new, very few people have bought them to begin with. Even people who build their own scanners, wind up spending close to $5k on the camera imager alone, let alone the movement and the electronics/software to drive it. If you're looking to transfer Super 8 or 16mm film to digital files, the simplest way is to buy a 5 blade projector for whatever format you're going to shoot and a decent video camera. Then simply project against a screen and shoot with the video camera. 5 blade projectors help remove the flicker from the image and allow you to capture ok images without a scanner. Obviously the reason scanners exist is because they're better quality.

That's the Eclair Cameflex, it can shoot 16mm and 35mm. The NPR and ACL are both 16mm only. Remember, there were quite a few 35mm cameras made; Bell and Howell, Mitchell, Eclair, Moviecam, Aaton, Arriflex and more. The camera body is the least of your concern. The cost is in the accessories, lenses, film stock, processing and transfer. 35mm is an extremely expensive format to shoot, it doesn't matter how much free stuff you get, it's extremely time consuming to deal with and time is money. I shoot a lot of 16mm and 35mm on a sometimes weekly basis and 16mm is on a different planet then 35mm in terms of ease of use.

Can you link to the scanner you're referring to? Unless there is some chinese company stealing the name lasergraphics, I'm unaware of ANY scanner lasergraphics makes that's close to $5k USD.

So all codec's (Mpeg 4 being one of them) have pretty much an infinite amount of adjustment settings. Long GOP pattern and frequency. Frame rate and frame size. Bit rate (variable, or maximum). Then you have options for single or multiple pass, audio sample rate, bit depth and bit rate. So if you just hit the "export" button without making any adjustments, you're relying on the software to do set all those parameters. So of course, two different programs are going to set widely alternative parameters from one another.

The old forum was pretty insecure and I'm sure it was a requirement to update for security reasons. I agree this new layout is poor. However, layouts are easy to change, right now it's on "everything is big" but that can be adjusted in either the admin preferences or the user preferences.

Had you just waited a few more weeks, you would have received the camera. Blackmagic didn't start shipping the bulk of the orders till December. I haven't heard when the next batch will be released, but I would assume they have a lot of back orders so it maybe a while. I myself am waiting until they're in stock because I'm in no hurry and I feel there maybe a hardware update up the road.

I've never had that problem with them. I have two pocket cameras, both I had zero issues getting when brand new. As I said before, I think the European market is a struggle for them. The US peeps aren't having issues getting them at all.

I hope what I heard was not this incremental update. I was disappointed with the G2, I hope they unlock some of it's potential in software soon.