Tyler Purcell

11 hours ago, Heikki Repo said:

I just tested the lens on my ACL again and it holds focus perfectly, it's just that the infinity isn't reachable.

Do the focus indicators match the measured focus range? 

17 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

BTW, your Water film restoration is outstanding.  I can’t begin to guess how many hours that took.  I have one partner.  He and I work on my films, and they take forever to restore.  Even with automatic filters in Diamant, there’s still a ton of manual labor that we put into making these films look good.  Yours look great.

Thanks, yea that was I think at least 8hrs to scan and another 30hrs of hand, frame by frame work. Phoenix did a good job cleaning up much of the scratches and dirt, but we had to do a lot of frame by frame work after its initial pass. Over-all, it think we had close to 50hrs into that restoration. It's unfortunate the client we did it for, didn't really care. We did another one of their films without the frame by frame cleanup and it didn't come out as good. 

17 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

If I uploaded that film to Getty, I would cut it up into several shots.  That long tilt down shot of the waterfall would be one clip.  That POV shot inside the car on the city streets would be another.  And there were others as well.  See how you could turn one film into many sellable clips?  That’s what I’m talking about.

Yep! I totally see how there is some value to that footage. I'll have to converse with the client about that. 

23 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

Also, I don’t upload pictures.  (I’m guessing you mean stills.). I now only upload vintage public domain film footage.  There’s a ton of it.  It makes much more money than me shooting my own stuff.

Ohhh you said car show, I assumed you meant new stuff. 

Interesting. We do a lot of public domain stuff as well, we have our own scanners, wet gate system and do a lot of public domain stuff. I've little to no luck uploading to anywhere for money. 

Here is a sample of the kind of work we do. Mostly with a mix of wetgate, Phoenix and Resolve. 

Yea it's gotta be the adaptor, doubtful the lens back focus is randomly wrong. 

19 hours ago, Todd Ruel said:

I never know if my metadata tags are useful or effective.  Getty provides zero feedback about the metadata I create.

I didn't know you could upload without metadata. Honestly, how anyone would find your pictures at all, amongst the hundreds of thousands from the same event, tells me you have excellent metadata. So sounds like you know your answer! 

7 minutes ago, Todd Ruel said:

I've been a Getty Images contributor for 20+ years.  I specialize in automotive footage.  I shot footage at the Detroit Auto Show for 20 years.  That footage is still for sale on Getty's site, and it earns peanuts compared to vintage car films, industrials, commercials, etc.  I've made $137,000 since 2009, and the vast majority of that income has derived from the vintage public domain stuff.

Yea it's a niche market you found, which I guess others could also get into if they wanted. Gotta be in it for the long haul tho, and as you said, it's all about flooding the site with content. The problem I always had was metadata tagging. You need to do it as a full time job. 

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. 

On 5/2/2024 at 1:20 AM, Gautam Valluri said:

As I understand it, ORWO's perf-pitch problems arose from that fact that they pitched their camera negatives to "long-pitch" which is meant for print stock and 35mm still film?

I don't know how the perf-pitch machines work but I wonder if they can set it to "short-pitch" for stock meant for camera negatives, run those batches and then switch back to long-pitch for still camera/ print stock film?

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

9 hours ago, Samuel Preston said:

I hope they do, we are pushing them to. Its much better than the NC500/NC400 

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. 

9 hours ago, Samuel Preston said:

The delivery issues partly come from the fact that the films are produced in batches. Also the films are not distributed in any reasonable way, meaning we in Europe cant get UN54 right now (it would get shipped from the USA), and maybe you guys cant get nc500 in the states? 

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? 

9 hours ago, Uli Meyer said:

I would suggest the price has to come done first, otherwise more people won't take it up.

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. 

1 hour ago, okto simaia said:

Actually, it makes a couple of false, misleading, and ignorant statements (wrong dimensions, discussing resolution in linear units, not accounting for film's resolution being a fixed physical property not affected by aspect ratio), and it wasn't obvious to OP.

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. 

13 hours ago, Mark Wiggins said:

Why would they do that? They’d be shooting themselves in the foot.

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. 

25 minutes ago, Mark Wiggins said:

As I say, I saw the rushes of everything I shot straight from Cinelab London. Unless  lots of ORWO execs were hiding in the lab ready to pounce on the rushes the moment they came out the bath, standing over the guy doing the scanning, I don’t see how they could have doctored the rushes.

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. 

25 minutes ago, Mark Wiggins said:

The tests I shot were being done for internal ORWO consumption and use. They wanted to evaluate certain characteristics of the stock that they had been working on. I assume the problems that you saw with the stock were being worked on which means the stock I tested and the stock you tested are not exactly the same.

i never thought any of the tests I shot would ever be made public. The fact that ORWO decided to publish a shot from my test says something I think.

Yes, I hope this is the case. 

8 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

Now, Tyler, could you be a bit more positive towards efforts to make a new film stock?

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. 

8 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

There is a lot of financial risk involved for anyone doing this. Give this manufacturer a chance for heaven's sake and let them improve the stock and make adjustments to it. Okay, so you got poor results earlier on, with 16mm. Fair enough. We get that. But as Mark said, the stock is no doubt being improved. It's looking really, really promising so far, what I've seen on 35mm.

How do you know what Mark got was the same stock released to the public? 

8 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

Just dwell on this thought: it's always difficult to make something that's good. It's very easy though to find fault, and to bring down. Don't always assume things are going to turn out 'like crap'. Because if that's what you always assume that's what you'll get. Give people (and new products) a chance.

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. 

10 hours ago, Mark Wiggins said:

As I say the second video was from the manufacurer.  I posted it because people seemed to be interested.  The original post, the first world war soldier,  WAS SHOT BY ME.

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. 

On 4/26/2024 at 1:16 AM, Gautam Valluri said:

I really like the "personality" of the 35mm NC500, it might even be worth the cost increase vis-a-vis Kodak if they solve the perf-pitch issues and sort out delivery times of their film stock.

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. 

On 4/26/2024 at 1:16 AM, Gautam Valluri said:

Is the gate weave in these 35mm ORWO stock tests caused by ORWO's well-discussed perf pitch issues? I thought that was just in 16mm?

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

On 4/24/2024 at 11:40 AM, Mark Wiggins said:

I just shot the tests and went away again and a couple of days later got sent the 4K scans of the rushes by OWRO. Every shot had a greyscale and Macbeth chart at the beginning so I assume Cinelab used them.

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. 

On 4/24/2024 at 2:11 PM, Luis Chavarry said:

I see, Thanks for the info, this very interesting/informative, so just to understand,  a DI finish printed back to film has more consistency in terms of color overall than a photochemically finished film ? Do you think Nolan should start doing DI’s moving forward instead of a photochemical finish to have more consistent colors like he did in Tenet ? But at the expense of losing resolution ? 

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. 

9 minutes ago, Mark Wiggins said:

Maybe. I don’t know if it was or not. But then it’s the results that count.

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. 

9 minutes ago, Mark Wiggins said:

Daylight from outside the windows and a soft box above and smaller tungsten units inside.

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! 

8 hours ago, Gautam Valluri said:

Of course, the current colour grading tools are very capable of simulating the rich blacks of a photochemical print but eagle-eyed experts can still tell the difference.

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. 

13 hours ago, Luis Chavarry said:

Based on what you said, do colors have better saturation, contrast when it’s photochemically finished ? If their isn’t much of a difference why didn’t Nolan didn’t Nolan Do a DI for interstellar in your opinion and all prints would have come from the negative ? Sorry for asking so many questions, you are very knowledgeable on this and I would like to keep learning. 

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.