Tyler Purcell

I've tried to sell clips to stock footage companies for years, I've been rejected 8 times out of 10. They have some odd QC engine that finds issues within the clips and auto rejects them based on those issues. With film clips, it's a nightmare because any flicker or even fast pans which create a motion blur, can cause it to be rejected. This is why when you look at the stock footage sites, nearly all of the footage is heavily stabilized and almost overly squeaky clean. It's hard to get 16mm and super 8 to look THAT clean.

The perforations are all over the place. There is no consistency.

Good! I would take a 50 ISO stock that has a different (but acceptable) look to Kodak, as long as the stock was cut and perforated properly. We're about to test the NC400, which I've seen acceptable results for in the past. Hopefully later this year, they'll manufacture some NC200 in 16mm and we can wrap up our OWRO testing and final thoughts. It's been a journey thus far and I'm hoping they get their act together.

I just got some NC400 to test for an outrageously high price directly from OWRO and it's shipping from Black Hanger Studios in Hampshire UK.. The last batch I got to test which would have been last year, actually shipped from the US, but it was a 3 month delay from placing the order to shipping. Right now I ordered the NC400 on Monday and it shipped Tuesday. I would the UN54 stock would ship from the same place?

Especially since Kodak has been blowing out non conforming (over 6 month old) sealed stock for half price. Where you'd never be able to get enough for a feature film, the vast majority of low budget shows can actually get 35mm for less than 16mm. Hopefully someday they'll have some 16mm for a similar deal, but generally we've found that they don't make enough. They keep 16mm production on a tight leash and only ramp up based on demand. Since the majority of major production is on 35mm, they can have a lot of left over stock. I'm very happy Kodak is selling the non conforming instead of melting it down for the silver like they have in the past. So yes, it's clear that OWRO doesn't want to sell 35mm stock, which is why the price is crazy. I just got some NC400 16mm, which for the first time showed up on the site and the pricing was the same as Kodak. I only got some to test, but nobody else is going to risk buying the stock vs buying new from Kodak.

Very odd, I had one that fit perfectly. I wonder if it was somehow damaged.

Find the "normal" 16mm shots, amongst the super 16 shots in this video. It's a 4k scan, 4k finish, 10 bit pro res upload to Vimeo. Watch in 4k on your big screen TV. Give me the time codes of the normal 16mm shots.

Why would they not cut the film properly? Why would the coating density fluctuate? Why would the perforation be bad? Why would the colors be inconsistent roll to roll. I don't know the motives, but I do know that desperate companies, do desperate things to stay afloat. I also know the results you got, don't match any of the results anyone else has gotten. So yes, I'm skeptical until the product is in my hand, being scanned on my scanner. Also, you'd think they'd make a HUGE announcement "our formula is fixed, come buy some" if they had made ANY emulsion changes, since everyone knows the current emulsion has major issues.

I was more referring to prototype stock, rather than simply the black suits doing something behind closed doors. Tho it does seem dubious that we received our stock around the same time you made your test film. Yes, I hope this is the case.

It's a long story, I don't want to dwell on it right now. I did notice they have NC400 available for the first time in 16mm, so we will go shoot some of that and see how it goes. If they release the rumored NC200, we will shoot that. We aren't being paid to test prototype stock. How do you know what Mark got was the same stock released to the public? I report the results. if you want sugar coating, don't ever look at me. I'll call manufacturers out for their shitty products and poor behavior related to products. Not saying either are the case here, but I spent the money to test the stocks and the results are very easy to see for all. I know OWRO is not happy with my tests.

Yes I know and the shots are lovely, well shot, good work! When you hand over film to another entity, the chain of custody is broken. So you have no idea what the physical film looks like. All you know is what ORWO execs allowed you to see. We do all the work ourselves, outside of the physical processing. So the film leaves our hands for a single step, which means the chain of custody is not broken. Robert from Cinelab (also commenting on this forum) has his own processing, so he has seen the processing through scanning, with identical results to ours. My opinion, based on all the evidence, is that ORWO did a bit of work to the files before you saw them. I know you have no skin in the game, just be aware, what you shot is not what the film looks like for anyone else on the planet.

Just gonna point out, having shot with the stock quite a bit, the samples you're seeing provided by the manufacture are NOT what the stock looks like. All of the 35mm tests my friends did, had similar results to my tests on 16mm. Colors were completely out of whack, especially with hit with over exposure like a sun, they'd just slam hard to green. I'm still very weary of what they tested with, vs what the consumer received. Several people have made posts on this forum about NC400 and NC500, just search the group and you'll see the tests us consumers did, where we controlled the entire workflow from camera through scanning and coloring. Also, all of the stock I received, which was admittedly the first batch ever released, had inconsistent fluctuations that you wouldn't notice unless your shot was being held for a long time and we didn't notice it much on dark scenes. Anywhere there is direct sunlight, it was very noticeable. My videos, which were posted earlier, go over this phenomena. It's either poor coating OR all the film that came to the US, all the batches, 35mm and 16mm, sent at different times, has the same X Ray damage. The likelihood of that is slim, but for sure something to mention/discuss.

The perforation machine clearly isn't very good and the gate weave is in all the products.

Oh so they did the ol' "hands off" thing. That's kinda disingenuous. I get them wanting you to test it, but keeping it in the walled garden so to speak, doesn't really give anyone an idea of what the stock looks like. You don't know how they've manipulated it.

Yes, it will have way more consistency due to the excess control. You have 3 primary color adjustments on a normal photochemical printing system, that's it. You can't do any fine tune adjustments AND to even see the changes, you really have to make an answer print. You can get close with the two tools (color master and filters on a projector) but you don't know until you print it. So what if one shot in a given reel is meh? Do you move on or do you start all over again and make another answer print? Even Nolan, moves on. Nolan and Hoyte do complete DI's and then try to get the film to mimic their work from the DI suite. At Fotokem, they have a dual projection system which can show both the digital version AND the film version (usually 35mm, which is what they use to cut costs on timing and dailies for IMAX workflow) on top of one another. So they can do side by side comparisons between the digital color and the film color. This is how the film color comes out so good. It's in my view, the only "modern" way to make it happen. I will say for the record, if photochemical color were to have some sort of comeback, I have been white papering an idea of an OLED powered optical printer which uses the OLED light source to do pin-point accurate color changes on film. Tho, there are lots of hurtles like OLED density and of course some light wavelength issues, I think with proper software implementation, one COULD create a crossover template which could apply directly to the OLED panel and grade certain sections of a given shot differently, which would vastly alter the way photochemical printing is done. Is it worth it? Meh... I don't think at this point anyone cares sadly. The development cost would be exorbitant for a dying tech. It's a shame, but as I said earlier, doing this the photochemical way, is just not really worth it, even if you nail the colors. With 5 perf and 15 perf, I don't think you really notice the loss, if you strike the prints from the original camera negative. With narrower gauge formats like 35mm and 16mm, yea... they are a lot softer when you print. I have some very nice one light contact prints made from 16mm and 35mm negatives which are awesome to watch, but they are all very soft compared to the source scanned properly in 4k. If Nolan didn't use DI on Oppenheimer, (which evidently he didn't) then I don't see him transitioning over to it unless Fotokem says enough is enough and basically pulls the plug. Even Nolan's "can do no wrong, endless budgets" can't compete with Fotokem putting their foot down. IMAX relies on them for any optical/photochemical work as well, they only do scanning and recording in-house. So if Fotokem says no, which they will soon enough, then it's all over. As a side note, we have hit the end of recording via CRT recorders. So unless someone comes up with a solution that's similar resolution and quality, we may see the end of high quality DI's as well. It could be why Nolan isn't doing full DI's, he doesn't want to waste the poor CRT recorder tubes. Once those are gone, those machines are worthless and the entire industry will have a hard reset on who can do what. OLED may offer the solution in the future, but currently pixel density is not quite high enough. So LCD and DLP are the two major techs being used, along with Arri's Arri Laser, which is ONLY for Internegative 35mm stock and can't be used with anything else unfortunately. For negative it's LCD and for print stock it's DLP. I for one am preying we have a breakthrough on the OLED display tech, where we can get 8k displays with extremely high pixel density. ASUS just announced one at NAB, so let's see how it trickles down from there. I'd love to build a machine.

True! But if it can't be scanned properly on OTHER scanners, then that's also an issue. I'm pretty sure CineLab London would have used an Arriscan, which is an entirely different beast than most scanners on the market. What it can achieve color wise, is a miracle honestly. We actually were part of a test which scanned on a Scanity and it had nearly identical results to my tests. So I know the Scanity has the same issues our scanner has.

Interesting. Yea in our initial tests, I was so completely frightened by the results, I basically gave up testing. Literally the worst looking stock I've ever put on the film scanner in my entire career, which is saying a lot as I've tested everything you can imagine. But if it works in the situation you're describing, maybe it's worth another go, I have so much left!

Yea, a DI to film output has FAR better blacks, night and day. You can actually record out REAL black, which you can't actually do on a photochemical finish. We've done several record outs, right from my the very computer I'm typing this on to you and I've been blown away how much black detail I can achieve. So why can't you get blacks black? Because it's risky. You could easily lose them. So most people don't try to get them that deep. Different projection lamp brightnesses and throws, can irreparably hurt the black level. Just watch any movie from the 70's to the late 90's and you'll see they light the blacks very carefully to make sure you can see detail. Even a classic like Taxi Driver, which on BluRay has deep rich blacks with detail, is missing a lot of detail on film in areas they didn't light. Amazing what they actually caught on film, the digital presentation is stellar.

No, color saturation would always be better doing a DI, especially if a good CRT recorder or Arrilaser was used. The DLP systems for recording out like the Cinevator, they can be a bit "meh" on color compared to a CRT recorder or Arrilaser. The big difference with a photochemical finish is the softness and the fact you won't see as much of the film grain. So it winds up being a really soft and beautiful image, more painterly. The silver moving, grain and almost 3D color aspects of film projection, don't change if it was done entirely photochemically or digitally. As I said above, the DI treatment to Tenet was outstanding. Nolan does it, to keep the knowledge in existence. Also, to limit what he can do with the color, so people don't go all crazy with it. I also think if you're dealing with large format, you probably want to strike the prints from the negative because it would be probably better quality over all than digital intermediate because the expense of doing a 6k or 8k record out, isn't worth it. Even Nolan can't afford that. So most movies are done in 4k and yea, a 5 perf 70mm or 15P 70mm print, for sure holds more res than that if photochemically finished. Interstellar the 35mm scenes were blown up to 15P and the prints were struck from the 15P negative, but the 35mm shots were several generations duplicated, so they looked like crap. Had he done a DI, it would have been a lot better. Dunkirk suffered this same problem with the 5 perf shots. I didn't see it as much in Oppenheimer, but Tenet was perfect due to the film being entirely done DI, there was no difference between the 5P blown up shots to 15P, they looked the same. The 15P shots would be reduction printed to 5P and the prints would be struck off the 5P negative. They didn't make many prints, so it's not like this destroyed the negative. I'm certain the 8k master they made from the camera negative, was done WAY before they even made the prints.

Cinelab musta graded it during the scan then. The nice thing about having your own scanner, is that you can see exactly what the film looks like, not what a colorist rendition is. We thread up Kodak or Fuji and it takes a few seconds to make it look perfect. The NC500 didn't work that way at all. But then again, we never tested indoors, so I appreciate the feedback and I'll have to do a test in 3200k lighting to see how it does. We tried this in the test above, but I felt the results were mixed due to us under lighting where I wanted it to be.

What color balanced light did you use for the shoot?

According to a quick search of the specs, it doesn't say the camera can create higher than 59.94 FPS on the HDMI output. I assume it can only do high speed in camera when set to HD mode, per the manual.

Which FYI does not look like any of the other tests shot on NC500. So that's why I'm a bit dubious. When suddenly something looks too good to be true, generally there is something we don't know. Until we know more answers, I'm skeptical based on my own results and working with the stock myself.

We've done lots of testing with NC500 and so has a few of my friends with the same results. We've had ultra long discussions here about the stock as well. I do know ORWO has done a lot of experimenting with new formulas that may work better, such as a yet to be released NC200. They also had the NC400 which came and went so fast, but the tests of those, were much better than the NC500. The video sample above, is nothing like any of our tests OR our friends tests of the same exact stock. So I'm slightly dubious of what we're seeing. Is it an all new prototype stock they haven't released yet or was it so heavily color graded, that you just can't tell and whoever did that, bravo! The main problem outside of the grain, is the yellow ish first layer of the emulsion. This balances the stock somewhere between daylight and tungsten, around 4000k, which makes it pretty much unusable without some sort of filtration or light source which matches the color balance. In most tests (ours included), nobody accounted for this issue, but clearly in the test above, those filmmakers did. I personally never did a test with the stock indoors under fixed studio lighting at 4000k. It's one thing I'm interested in doing with the remainder of my test stock we purchased when it was first released. At the time, they did not have 35mm available, so we only got 16mm and with the extremely poor quality, it was silly to invest more since we were buying the stock, unlike the reviewers who got it free. No matter what, we couldn't alter the color balance to get any decent skin tones out of it in broad daylight. Considering, we buy Kodak 35mm stock for half the price ORWO is asking for their loads, it's a no brainer what we'd shoot in the future. I also know the company does have some issues creating more stock since the first batch sold out. They haven't had any 16mm stock for sale in 8 months or so. There also hasn't been any word on updates to the stock or even a rebuttal from ORWO corporate from the video's we made, which got a lot of traction. I hear through the grape vine, they weren't happy with our tests and discoveries, which is kinda silly since I'm the target audience and wasn't paid to write a good review (something I would never do). To me, good products are very rare and if you're making a brand new film stock in 2024, it better be comparable to Kodak or it's not worth it.

Well, photochemical finishing of an entire film today, even a short film, is very expensive and time consuming. Plus, when you're dealing with formats us mere mortal's can use (8mm, 16mm, 35mm) the benefit of perhaps making an answer print off the original camera negative for the purpose of showing your movie, where it's downright cool to watch personally, doesn't offer your audience anything unique really. So what's the difference? Well think about it from an optics and loss standpoint. If you print film to another piece of film, even a contact print, you lose quite a bit of resolution first. So if your 35mm negative is 4k, your answer print is 2k. Now you have to project that print, which is another loss. In the end, you probably have 1000 lines on the screen, even with the best 35mm answer printing. Sure, the grain will be softer and it will be a more pure color science, but you lose so much in the process, it seems hardly worth it, even for 35mm. Nolan gets away with it because he shoots large format and when you're dealing with a negative 5x larger than 35mm, the losses in printing/projecting, aren't quite as great. Plus, the IMAX projection system is higher resolution then a standard ol 35mm projector due to how the film is pushed onto a piece of flat glass when it's illuminated by the lamp source, which is also way more even. Even 5 perf 70mm was a huge jump forward in on screen brightness, but it struggles with a lot of the same issues 35mm does. With digital finish, your film is scanned at high res (hopefully greater than 4k) into the computer, preserving the entire resolution of the image AND with good digital imagers, the color science to boot. Then you finish your film digitally in even HDR and distribute digitally. If you want a print, you can simply have someone record one out on a Cinevator, which is a 2k machine, but the quality isn't horrible. It's actually crisper than any standard 35mm print and it retains much of the dynamic range in the digital source, something that's hard to do with a photochemical finish. Where I've been impressed with what Nolan and Tarantino have accomplished in recent years using photochemical timing, I don't think any of that technology is available to the mere mortals. I agree that some parts of Dunkirk and Oppenheimer look pretty good, I don't think the films over-all have a better look than the HDR UHD version I saw at home. Tenet on the other hand, looks stellar on film because from my understanding, they recorded the entire film out. So the IMAX and 5 perf prints, are absolutely flawless. I remember reporting at the time of its release, how damn good the timing was, best I had seen on film in a long time and no way done photochemically, the blacks were too perfect. In the end, if your audience is watching on a tablet, phone, laptop or TV, grading photochemically makes no sense. If your audience is watching a film print only and you will never have a digital version, there could be an argument for making a print if you had the cash, but I would STILL do a digital finish for the sheer fact of having more control over the finished results.