Tyler Purcell

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. 

52 minutes ago, Mark Wiggins said:

There is no grading.  This clip looks just like it did when it came back from the lab.

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. 

28 minutes ago, Mark Wiggins said:

Yes. I read you postings about the tests at the time.  Everything you say about colour balance and film speed concur with what I discovered.  At the time I read your posts I was actually doing the tests for ORWO so couldn't really say anything.

 

What color balanced light did you use for the shoot? 

1 hour ago, Nicholas Mirro said:

Externally by HDMI.  My prior 5 camcorders and 6 camera bodies all met their HDMI output specs.

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. 

1 hour ago, Jon O'Brien said:

I think the size of grain in film images as opposed to digital has to be perfect for a particular project. It has to be just right. Just enough and it adds interesting texture. Too much and it's a distracting noise that does nothing for the story or the subject. For 16mm at the moment I'd go for Kodak film stock but so far, in this test by Mark Wiggins at least, I really like the look of the Orwo for 35mm. The level of grain seems to be good for a gritty, period drama story. It has an almost hand made, artisanal look but still a high quality look if that makes sense. That's my first impressions anyway, fwiw.

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.

23 hours ago, Luis Chavarry said:

Hi, I’m new to this forum due to my interest in filmmaking, I would like to know what are the advantages of a photochemically finished film as oppsosed to DI. Why does Nolan avoid DI’s for his films ? Is the contrast, saturation, resolution better retained ? And if so aren’t release prints 3/4 generation copies anyways ? Wouldn’t be better to do a DI and have all prints made from the negative ? I may be wrong on all of this but I thought I’d ask since you guys are way more knowledge than I am. Thank you. 

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. 

Wait, you bought a camera that can't capture it's entire list of frame rates internally? 

1 hour ago, Travis Shannon said:

Sorry did I just fall into a time warp to 2008 or are they reusing the 5DmkII name on another project? 

Sorry, D5MKII, I'm so use to putting those numbers the old way lol 

8 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

that is hard to believe considering how absolute garbage the Z6 camera was. low quality sensors (bad pixels from the factory etc) and wrongly designed sensor electronics with random channel noise/flashing etc.  The dynamic range was really poor, they claimed 14 stops and the real dynamic range was something like 9 stops or so... outright scamming as the real specs were so different from the published ones. Not the most reliable camera either, had to be rebooted now and then though still not that bad. Additionally their image processing was very poor quality, it could remove the black hole sun effect on simple highlight but complex highlights like overexposed tree branches had black edges all over the place as that confused the in-camera processing. Firmware updates did not help. I just got rid of the camera after the indie feature was shot, it felt like escaping the prison when the camera shop accepted it as a trade-in for the Panasonic I have had some years now.

Yea I'm new to Nikon digital imaging cameras for sure, but everyone loves the Z9 and Z8 cameras, both MUCH newer tech. 

I'll say this much, the R5 we currently shoot digital on, has to be one of the worst cameras I've ever used in my entire life. It's absolute garbage, horrible borderline unusable noise floor with FPN and pathetically bad rolling shutter that can't be fixed. At least Nikon has the rolling shutter problem solved. You can't even remap Canon cameras to get rid of bad pixels, it automatically does it and if the automatic stuff doesn't work, then you're screwed. No way to fix it. DR is also pathetically poor as well, thanks to the high noise floor. To get HDR you need to take two images which are blended together, like... what? LOL 

So yea, I think all of these cameras struggle with this tech and you kinda just deal with them. 

I couldn't stand the GH4 and GH5 cameras FYI, I thought they were utter garbage when I've shot with them. Panasonic is 3-5 years behind everyone else with their tech. Color science was the worst of any modern digital camera I've shot with and the smaller imager, kinda negates the point of shooting digital anyway. The FF imager is where it's at, especially for wider shots, getting that sweet shallow depth of field. Sony begrudgingly fixed their color science issues over the last few years, so at least they've made a decent camera for once, codec withstanding. 

I look forward to playing with the Z9 when we get it, hopefully by the summer. We would get the newer version (Z8) but it doesn't have the heat dissipation aspects of the Z9, so video is limited. 

To me, the important things are in order; color science, codec, resolution and imager size. 

1 hour ago, Jon O'Brien said:

Tyler, what about the Canon C300 Mark III? Many seem to forget about the existence of this excellent camera. How is usable DR calculated from advertised DR? Canon say it gives 16 stops of DR when filming in CLog2 because of its dual gain sensor.

The Japanese brands have this weird internal competition and completely negate what the consumer wants. Nobody has really reinvented the wheel since the FS7 came around, what in 2011? Since then, all the cameras have been revisions of one another. Where it's true, the Canon C series are very good cameras, especially the C300MKIII and C500MKII, they are negated because frankly, why wouldn't you buy an FX9 or Red Komodo instead for that kind of money? Price wise, they don't fit into the marketplace at all. They've made a lame duck series of cameras, which as you pointed out, delivers excellent images, but is $3k too high for the market they're targeting. The medium end guys will shoot red and lower end guys can't afford the canon. 

Now to be fair, canon has 4 new cameras releasing this year. The EOS-RMKII, The 5DMKII and two cinema cameras. I'm not sure why they wouldn't bring a new cinema camera to NAB, so to me that was an odd decision in waiting. However, they will never introduce a killer camera for lower price, because they would then not sell any of the cameras they currently make. Canon and Sony purposely limit their lower end cameras so they aren't capable of doing what their higher end cameras can do. 

This is why I like Blackmagic so much, they don't play that game. If they release a better camera that undermines the previous generation, they will keep the pricing the same and they'll just blow out inventory of the older cameras. When I first picked up the Nikon Z9, I was blown away because they don't have any cinema camera. So they took all their high end tech and threw it into a camera and it's incredible. It's even large enough to dissipate heat, so it will record 8k 16 bit raw just like the red does, without any issues. So the Japanese makers CAN make really good cameras, if they didn't fight against one another. Sooner or later, people will simply stop buying their cameras and they'll have to release a small box like the Pyxis for $5k. 

On 4/20/2024 at 7:47 PM, Aapo Lettinen said:

Anyway, great that we created at least some amount of good conversation after all!  Personally not sure about the viability of the Pyxis design but surely it fits at least some special purposes.

It's basically the same shape as nearly all the professional cinema cameras have been for the last what, 8 years or so? 

It also has a good OLED viewfinder system, something only Arri really has. 

On 4/20/2024 at 7:47 PM, Aapo Lettinen said:

Would had hoped for a better sensor, the backup HDMI along with the existing SDI connectors and some kind of good wifi remote control similar than z-cams etc have. would make it so much easier to rig and use. the OLPF is good as well as the L-mount which is easy to convert to PL and most stills mounts. easy to use for indie and documentary stuff.

The new sensor will come, BMD aren't going to give up on that aspect. I'm certain it will be one of their fancy new imagers like the 12k. SDI is the industry standard, HDMI is long dead and only exists for consumer equipment. People with HDMI monitors, aren't going to be buying a $5k camera (how much it actually costs to use) and then not buy a $549 SDI monitor along with it. The DSLR crowd is entirely different and most of them HATE HDMI and would sell all of their HDMI gear if they could have a camera with SDI, even mini-BNC. 

1 hour ago, charles pappas said:

Yes, I think reversal to reversal "release" prints were fairly common way back when; I had two short films shown as part of two Architecture and Film series and had one such "release," print made of each film. I seem to recall there was also a specific film stock for that that wasn't Kodachrome.

The print stock used a Kodachrome process, it wasn't "camera" stock tho, it was lower ISO and specially balanced for this positive to positive workflow. Depending on the age, it was kinda rare for 16mm to be used as "source" on educational films until the mid 1960's. Most of the time they still used 35mm since the workflow was easier to deal with. Remember, with 35mm you don't need A/B roll and blind splices. All the editing facilities were also 35mm. So the added cost of 35mm was worth it. You start to see this shift in the 1960's, especially into the 70's when cameras like the CP16R, 16BL, Eclair ACL and eventually Aaton, made shooting on 16mm much lighter, quieter and easier. People then developed editing solutions and by the mid/late 1970's, it was quite fashionable to shoot on positive stocks and do exactly the workflow you're describing. I have dozens of films (original camera elements and prints) from educational and documentary films made this way. The workflow was a lot easier. 
 

1 hour ago, charles pappas said:

The prints were priced as answer prints - about $1.25 or less per foot (more than one-light). There was informal break-even formula for the number of reversal release prints that could be made until it was cheaper to made an internegative. Maybe 5 to 10 prints - of course this was all for semi - amateurs.

Color timed prints were pennies per foot back then. Even today, I think $1.25/foot seems awfully high for a timed print if you already have the timing tape. The cost to time was not related to the actual print itself, it was a separate line item. The big thing was soundtrack and we found every single one of the 16mm films we had all the source elements for, had 35mm 3 stripe mag original soundtracks and no optical soundtrack. They would create the soundtrack on the prints from the magnetic 3 stripe on the fly, as you said using electro-printing process. Pretty nifty! 

5 hours ago, Aaron Yang said:

Thank you so much Tyler, I watch Cine Workbench a lot I really appreciate it! Can I have your contact?

Hit me up info@narrowgaugefilms.com

14 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

They seem to be still using the same over a decade old Pocket sensor technology...

Nope, the 4k pocket imager was from Sony. The 6k was their first internal designed imager. 

The original 6k camera came out in fall 2019, so we're talking 5 years ago. The FF variant came out in September 2023, so this all-new imager is less than a year old. 

Your argument about the imager being old, is literally the reason why David is calling you a troll. The original pocket, the 4k pocket and the 6k pocket, have entirely different imager technologies, they aren't even REMOTELY close outside of being Bayer pattern imagers. 

14 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

basically it is just the full frame Pocket with fixed display, no hdmi, larger sized and couple of other quirks.

The pocket cinema camera design is horrible. Nobody liked it. Not only was there not enough room to put a decent sized battery, but the screen on the back prevented anyone from using it, WITH a decent sized battery. The. body shape wasn't good for anything and everyone complained for years about it, which actually drove DOWN sales. Blackmagic was struggling to sell them, hence the price cuts seemingly every 6 months. Also, HDMI? What planet are you on? Nobody wants HDMI, not a single person on the planet wants it. The display on the side, is because you would need some way to access the touch screen menus. Red do this by having a little tiny display that nobody can even see on the top, really bogus. The solution can't be on the back, where would the battery go? So they threw it on the side and SURE, they could have made it flip out, but that would take up a lot of space and they NEED that space for the cooling system. Clearly a gen 2 camera would probably have a fold out screen as an upgrade, as well as ND filters. 

14 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

The price is not bad but I don't see that much value on this camera other than it might be slightly easier and more secure to rig and it may look cooler to uneducated people so one's customers might think it is "better camera" because it looks "more professional" to them 😄 actually the fanboys seem to think that this would be technologically much better than the PocketFF because it looks "cooler" when they seem to be exactly the same sensor and processing wise.

Umm, the original camera ergonomically is trash, complete throw away design. Nobody in their right mind would buy one unless they had no choice. This box camera, has a beautiful OLED viewfinder, cheese plate and handle accessories, which are awesome. No need for a cage. Add your favorite bottom/rail kit to it and you're in business for full fledged shoulder shooting, something that is 100% impossible on a pocket, unless you really wish to look like an idiot.

Also since the announcement only a few short months ago of the 6k FF camera, BMD have added a feature in Resolve that gets rid of the rolling shutter issue automatically when playing back the footage in your timeline. It's a check box for gosh sakes, so it creates an image that is just like a global shutter camera. The function had been there for stabilization, but they added the function for removing global shutter. This makes the 19MS refresh of the 6k open gate imager, not be a problem anymore.

Plus, the double card slots are a HUGE benefit. When shooting open gate 6k, you do gobble up quite a bit of storage. Having it automatically split the clip between two cards, is vital... let me repeat; 100% must have, for anyone serious person doing interviews. I can't tell you how many times I've had to swap cards on Red cameras, but never on double card Sony's. To me, the double card feature is worth the upgrade and another reason I would have never bought that pocket version.  

14 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

I would had hoped more dynamic range (15 stops would be standard nowadays for stuff which tries to give an impression of being even remotely 'professional'),

The only camera that hits 15 stops of usable dynamic range (without cheating like the Reds do) is the Alexa 35. It's a $80k camera when built. 

The Venice 2 and Burnao? 13 stops of usable DR. 
Sony FX9? 12 stops of usable DR. 
The Red Raptor? 13 stops of usable DR. 
Arri Alexa mini and OG LF ? 14 stops of usable DR. 

So where are these magical 15 stops of DR cameras? I would DIE to know what cameras you're talking about, they surely aren't DSLR's either, as all the DSLR's we've tested, are in the 11 - 12 stop range, even with HDR mode on.

The brand new Blackmagic 12k, boasts 16 stops, but I bet it has 14 in real life. That would put it better than all of the competitors, but the Arri Alexa 35 for what, 1/8th the cost?

The pocket 6k full frame has an advertised 13 stops of dynamic range, the same guys that performed the tests above, wait for it, say it has 12 stops of dynamic range and the only reason they didn't say 13 stops, is because they felt the blacks at 13 stops were too muddy, there is just less definition than expected. 
 

14 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

higher fps capabilities (the 60fps-ish is just very very basic.

Yes, this one pet peeve I agree with. I do think they could have done higher speeds. It does feel like a cop out. I think they chose not to, purposely so they could still sell their pocket inventory. Had they made the new camera much faster in that way, the pocket would be worthless and they have a lot of inventory to sell still. So this first generation of Pyxis camera, will be updated shortly I bet, once they run out of older cameras to sell. It would be easy to drop a faster processor in there. 

14 hours ago, Aapo Lettinen said:

(no one could operate the camera using a display fixed on the side of the camera and it will absolutely get damaged in use and when transporting it). 

I will have that issue fixed in 10 seconds using my 3d printer and 4 magnets. I bet Blackmagic will have a fix even faster than I can get ahold of one. 

16 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

As far as printing lights go that is a bit of test and see how the stock and exposures resolve on the IN stock to print.

Very cool! You're probably the last guy in the US willing to do that workflow! Super cool. 

Kodak use to make Kodachrome print stock for this purpose. You'd be able to make positive prints from your positive originals. This isn't necessarily how they'd make theatrical runs however, because you still need to add things like soundtrack and most of the time, that was done on 35mm for theatrical releases.  So the positive original, would be blown up to 35mm internegative, which would then be used to strike prints, on low budget films. Theoretically, one could still do that today, but I can't imagine it looking good with Ektachrome. 

Many people did shoot on reversal stocks, especially VFN (video news film) and other variants of Ektachrome, designed for high speed photography. I've been managing an archive of original Ektachrome camera rolls for over a dozen films that my friend (now passed) made back in the mid to late 70's and into the early 80's. They're all done using the same process of reversal to reversal. The quality of the prints is soft, but the colors are good. I can't imagine there being any real benefits compared to shooting negative and printing that way. 

Quite a lot of DP's overexpose negative, I for sure like that look as it adds contrast. For printing however, you really wanna keep the exposure consistent. Michael Ballhaus did this on Gangs of New York, shooting the film at the same stop and not doing any color correction and the prints look outstanding. I think it was a lot of work on set to match it all tho. I have also done a lot of printing of my own work and I find it to be hit or miss. If you light it perfectly, it can look really good, but for printing, I think it's imperative you nail the consistency of the exposure. You can't muck around if you want it to have any detail, especially in the blacks. 

For the record, here is by far the most difficult thing for film to do. 

R5 8k (28MP) at 800 ISO and Gold 800 35mm film scanned at 6k (18MP). Sadly, two different lenses. The R5 was a 24-105 RF and the 35mm was a 24-70 EF. However, you can clearly see the R5 is a winner in the res department, but at 5x zoom, the only thing holding back the film is the grain. 

R5 reference image: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/pozghhox2xrrslw5gmo2k/481-Depot-R5.jpg?rlkey=6ror9pkh89cljccj5zx9jm23q&dl=0

35mm reference image: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/xeynb9mcpcyg0pluw1icu/481-Depot-Gold-800.jpg?rlkey=p1yfdbbeqrbqjfeuzfcvatxo6&dl=0

I'm sorry, you do not have the proper instruments. 

You would first need a very good and high resolution lens, which could go between two different cameras of the same style. We used Canon EOS-1 camera and Canon R5 camera for our test. 

Next, you need to use fine grain stocks. I prefer shooting on Ektar 100 for these tests. Even though it's a bit cheating since the digital imager likes to be around 640 iso (native). If you're working on resolution tests, you want the finest grain film stock possible. 

The actual test would be a chart. We have a digital imager resolution chart that's 8ft wide and 6ft tall. It has resolution lines on it. You measure resolution through MTF and you can also do it visually, but only if your scan is high enough res. 

Flatbed scanners are the absolute worst way to scan film, 100% useless. First off, 6MP is horrible resolution, you're basically talking about a slightly larger scan than 2k. Second, they do not have accurate focus tools. They have a fixed focus range and they only know how to scan things at the level of the glass. A real film scanner, has focusing tools, which allow you to focus the image properly. The other thing, is that a real scanner will hold the film very flat. This is a critical aspect that flatbeds don't do for the most part. So we have a few methods of scanning. One of them is a 10k drum scanner system. Another is using a DSLR. The fun thing is to actually build a diffused light source and a little system for your DSLR to capture the stills. We have gotten pretty good results using that and our friends Sony 6k (18MP) DSLR. He has a very nice light source. 

On our initial tests using this method (this is our second attempt to do a resolution comparison test since we've acquired an 8k (28MP) stills camera), using the Sony 6k (18MP) imager to capture the 35mm stills from, we saw the R5 be a bit sharper with slightly more detail using the same 70-200 Canon L series EF mount lens. The film was clearly more noisy/grainy and the lines on the chart lost detail around 3 lines earlier than the R5. This was to be expected however, the R5 is a TRUE 8k imager and our 6k scans are not quite 6k, more like 5600x4000, in that range. So of course, the film scans would simply be softer and they were. The grain was punctuated very much throughout the chart and the main reason we saw no more detail, was due to the grain. Nowhere was the image "soft" like it was lacking resolution. 

The reason I haven't published this test, is because my end game would be to get the 35mm stills, scanned at 10k on a drum scanner. This is truly the only way to really get the right information we need to prove results. I have just been too busy to deal with one more camera test that nobody will ever really watch. So someday I will get around to it and publish my results, but suffice to say, seeing other peoples test results, the 35mm will never reach the sharpness of the 8k (28MP) R5. However, the R5 will never remotely get close to the color science of film. I have been beyond disappointed in the R5's color science, it's nothing like the older DSLR's like the 5DMKIII, which has one of the best color sciences of any camera I've ever used. The R5 just delivers horrible images from the camera, you have to throw it in Lightroom to get them working, almost like adding a LUT to a Digital Cinema Camera. Where the film scans, I get back and don't have to do anything.

In the end, film has a certain quality that digital doesn't appear to even attempt to emulate, like you see in the cinema world. What keeps me shooting film is that aspect AND the longevity of the negatives. Digital seems so temporary, almost like you do all that work and it only takes a hard drive to fail suddenly it's like you never even shot anything. Meanwhile a vault in our storage room, contains tens of thousands of feet of film, that will last 100 years without question. Will anyone care in 100 years? Who knows. 

Edit: Our 16mm film scans are 4k (12MP), you aren't even working at that resolution. 

2 hours ago, Jon O'Brien said:

We saw 'The Red Shoes'. It was a fantastic and very entertaining experience.

That restoration print is incredible isn't it? I saw it when it first came out and was blown away. 

16 hours ago, Justin Lovell said:

Is there a big difference between using PEC pads vs. 99% alcohol and crushed velvet?

PEC pads just seem to work the best. I can't imagine velvet working better. Plus, what do you do with the velvet when it's all dirty? Gotta wash or buy more. PEC pads, you can just grab another one out of the container and keep cleaning. 

I also have been using some cotton wipes recently that work well, still need to do more tests on scratching resistance. 

40 minutes ago, Asher Groh said:

Finally got some up – presents across all scenes.

https://vimeo.com/933381016/ddad0824d5

Could be a lot of things sadly. Usually when I see this on an SR, it's something pretty obvious like a crapped out drive belt, but ya never know until ya get it on the bench and start testing it. If you wanted to send it in, drop me a PM and I'll get you the check in sheet for repair. 

You can use DaVinci Resolve 16.5's "deflicker" feature, to remove this for your editing, so you can finish your film without any issues.