Tyler Purcell

It tells you exactly what it looks like. If it's acceptable through a photochemical finish, it's fine for digital finish.

I can't imagine it being anything to do with the S16 conversion as the extender only shows what the regular viewfinder does. From my recollection, the extension only goes on ONE WAY. There should be a mark of some kind that lets you know which direction it goes on.

I have 15,500 feet of Fuji Super F and Eterna stock in my refrigerator that I'm going to use on a feature soon. I've tested several rolls and the stuff looks great. Fotokem's clip test says it's at the max fog level permitted. Yet, I've shot a few rolls all the way through and outside of the noise floor being higher then new, the colors were spot on. As long as each of the three color channels went up equally percentage wise, you should be fine. The fotokem sheet will show you what they should be and of course, what they are. So all you need to do is calculate the percentage of shift. I'd say shoot a test in a controlled setting. Do exposure tests to see what the latitude is of the stock and where the noise level is. I'd even get Fotokem to make a print for you, so you can see it projected. This way you can absolutely be assured what it will look like. Sometimes the digital scan hides the reality of the camera negatives condition.

In your world perhaps. Then again, I've made a living at being a jack of all trades. I've made a living enjoying myself and not being forced to conform for the sake normalcy.

I work at LACHSA, the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts. We have a fantastic class which shoots exclusively on film. Hit up our facebook page! https://www.facebook.com/celluloiddreaming/

I have no idea why people segregate, it doesn't make any sense to me. Editors are storytellers, cinematographers are artists, actors are entertainers, people who do these and all the other positions on set and in post, shouldn't be pigeonholed based on prior experience. It's the same with production and post production techniques. Camera and post capabilities have left us able to do amazing things and the days of being bound to "classical" workflows are dwindling. Today, workflows are more diverse then ever and so are the people who are willing to experiment and grow. That's the future of this industry, not the guy who only knows Avid and whose system can only cut DNX36. I'm not confused about anything. I may say things that confuse people, but that's because they don't understand the context. Like I said above, I'm not trying to use classical workflows because I can't afford the time and money. The money we save on not having a DIT, on not having an AE, on not having much help on set for the camera department, on editing camera originals, is money we can put into actors, sets, locations, camera, lenses, stuff that pays dividends in the final product. This is filmmaking 101 stuff and in a world where $250,000 movies are the new norm, you've gotta save money where you can. This workflow works for any type of production, the only reason bigger shows have more, higher paid people, is because they're union. Big shows need that "security" for the insurance bond.

Ohh I didn't know that. Gangs of New York is a very interesting movie technically as well, supposedly made without any substantial grading in post and 100% photochemical finish. Also Daniel Day Lewis is amazing of course, but story wise, not my cup o' tea. I should watch it again if a print shows up at my local 35mm only theater.

HA! LOL whoops! I knew "christ" was in the name somewhere. :P

Ohh cool, do you know what resolution it is?

Well, there are many things to think about... First and most expensive problem is lasering the image to 16mm print stock. The only way I can think of doing this, is to laser out a 16mm sized image onto 35mm stock 1:1 with optical sound track and somehow doing a contact print from 35mm to 16mm. Or simply laser out a 35mm IP and make a reduction 16mm IN. All of this is very expensive, several thousand dollars worth of labor and stock/processing. Second, 16mm prints have horrible optical audio. Yes, there are some solutions, but all of them are custom and won't work for general audience. You could figure out a mass-produced timecode decoder box with CD playback like DTS, which reads the pulses off the optical sound track. That's totally doable but the cost would be exorbitant and I doubt highly, the studio's would allow 1:1 DTS soundtracks to be released to the public without paying some kind of royalty. Sound now a days is as important as picture and without a solution, it's a non-starter in my book. Third, Anamorphic... remember, 16mm is 1.33:1 aspect ratio, so pretty much every movie will need to be squeezed onto the frame using some sort of anamorphic process. Since the frame is so small, putting black bars at the top and bottom would simply loose a large amount of image quality. SO now you're talking about anamorphic lens adaptors which are again, expensive and don't work on all projectors. So you're restricting the amount of projectors that can run these special "new" high quality prints. Fourth, 35mm in the long-term around the same price as 16mm because it's more widely used. The average 35mm print costs $1500 to make, which isn't bad. There are several european manufacturers of table top 35mm projectors, it's just a question of importing them for collectors. 35mm has all the digital sound track stuff standard and it would be very easy to develop a dolby digital decoder bracket for the portable projectors. All you'd need is an anamorphic lens adaptor and you're good to go. You can buy any old projection print you want and throw it up. The best thing is that with 35mm, you can get real technicolor prints that never fade, you can get polyester theatrical prints that will last for decades and look WAY better then any 16mm reduction print and you can get modern digital audio. Plus, you can rent your prints to theaters who want to screen movies! So it's an investment that over the long term, could pay you back some dividends. Fifth, A standard 16mm print is around 1k worth of information, so it's a lot less quality then a standard BluRay disk. I've struck dozens of prints off my 16mm camera originals and the 4k Digital scans really show the lack of information in the print and that's directly off the negative. When you deal with the process required to strike 16mm prints from 35mm, there are tremendous losses through the optical path alone, let alone all the different print stocks used to make them. With UHD HDR laser lit home theater projectors, slowly working their way into the market place, the point of projecting a low-resolution, low quality audio 16mm print, becomes not as interesting. I too have a few 16mm prints and honestly, it's awesome to thread them up and project them. It's not about the quality, it's about the "film" experience. At the same time, I don't see that much of a market for "new" 16mm prints of modern movies. I think collectors probably don't care that much about modern movies, so it's not a priority. Personally, I'd much rather have a 35mm setup anyway, I care about audio just as much as picture and for ME the optical sound track is a deal killer. No matter what though, you aren't going to get better quality at home then a UHD HDR laser lit home theater projector, with UHD source. So it's not about quality at that point, it's about the experience. If I had the room, I'd have a Century JJ with 35mm/70mm gate and platter system. I'm sure my roommate is glad I don't have the room. LOL :P

I hope Marty doesn't disappoint with his "passion" project. I wasn't to enamored with his last passion project; "Passion of the Christ". At least his NEXT project will be another gangster movie. :) Looks like Rodrigo Prieto want's an Oscar! Trailer flat-out looks amazing cinematography wise. Some shots make me wonder if he did a photochemical finish, even though IMDB says "DI". Also, someone had the audacity to put "Fujicolor" on IMDB as well, which makes me also wonder if some stuff was shot on Fuji. Some of those blue/green shots absolutely look like Fuji. OHH so excited! I hope someone around me gets a 35mm print! :)

Dude, I work on dozens of shows a year and I do a myriad of jobs, based on my clients needs. I've done DIT on some shows and other shows I've been the cinematographer. I've also done both on multiple shows, including two this year. Sorry it's "confusing" to get it all organized, but I don't even remember half the poop I do. Today I worked on 3 different shows, coloring one and editing two others. It's a constant stream because I know the tools and I make the time for my clients to be in front of them, so when they have bigger jobs -which they do- I will be front and center. There is no confusion, that's why I wrote out a detailed explanation above so there would be no confusion. A show is a show in my book. I don't believe in segregating based on project type and budget. I use the same tools for the majority of my work, outside of personal work, where I experiment more with different cameras, lenses and editing tools.

If you shoot the same thing with all 3 stocks, you'll notice the very subtle difference. The problem is that most people who shoot 500, tend to push it a bit more then the other stocks. This is why people -myself included- always say the 500 is the grainiest of stocks, where it's really not that bad in the long run. I wonder if I scanned the print, would it be enough to show this, or would the digital scan negate the subtle differences by showing more of the grain then simply projecting on a screen.

Sounds like we're performing the same transcode. I mean maybe the specs of the computers being used are way more then anything I have access to. A lot of DIT's I know carry TWO, $10,000 super fast 12 core machines, so they can have one chewing on camera A and one chewing on camera B. I don't live in that world unfortunately, my shows RARELY have a DIT at all and when they do, it's a kid with a Macbook Pro. In the world of making "dailies" for people to see, yea you want someone on set to make that decision, so the files are somewhat approved before people see them. It's also my experience that professional editors don't want to cut with anything but off-line, proxy media. That's simply because they perform one job. When they're done cutting, they move onto the next project. When you're a filmmaker and perform multiple tasks, with quick turn arounds, being able to work in the camera original files is critical. Remember, not very many people are capable of performing one job their entire life and making a living out of it. Most of us have to diversify in order to make money.

Well, there are a lot of variables. I mean, every show has a different shooting ratio. I was giving you the show with the highest ratio as an example. I've worked on 4 XAVC 410Mbps 4k shows this year so far. Some of them we had zero problem doing the transcodes as we went along because we were so inefficient in our days (shooting 2 - 4 pages max), we weren't racking up the media. On other shows, we were pushing the DIT to the absolute limit, shooting 10 - 12 pages a day. When you can spread the shoot across a lot of time and all you've gotta do is transcode a few hours worth of content a day, that's nothing. There is no magic... if your DIT has time to download AND transcode during a given day, you aren't feeding him much material. I didn't question the necessity of making dailies... My comment is about an all-new method of editing which has become more of a reality in recent years then in the past. Editors are working with camera original 4k material without any transcoding and coloring as they go along. You'd be surprised how many writer/directors are cutting their own stuff today and for many of them, thats the workflow they use. This is where things like Pro Res really come into play.

Unfortunately, the only way to see photochemical color is to watch a movie projected on film in the theater. The digital versions of these movies all pass through a conventional color correction suite. Yes the DP usually approves the grade, but it has to conform to REC709 which has a narrower dynamic range then a film print can deliver.

Anyone with a laptop? We had the last generation Macbook Retina onset for the feature I just finished cutting. It was a 2.8ghz i7 quad core with 16gb of memory and we had very fast thunderbolt storage. It was transcoding at around 6fps from XAVC 410Mbps 4k to Pro Res HQ 175Mbps 1080p. It would have taken weeks to do what my tower did in a few days. Honestly, with modern software like Final Cut X and Premiere, the LUT is applied within the software automatically. So you don't need to transcode anything, which saves tremendously on time. Again, on bigger shows with a lot of moving parts, time isn't a problem because you can fight it with manpower and hardware. It is a problem on smaller shows where you don't have the money and you've gotta turn around product in a week or two WITH client notes. Lets face it, most shows these days are small. I rarely get to work on bigger shows and honestly, I don't like it because I get frustrated being pigeonholed doing one job. I like being a cinematographer/operator and editor/colorist. It's fun to have so much creative input and work with the director on multiple levels on set and off. You're a true collaborator when as a cinematographer, you're thinking about how something will cut together. It's one of the reasons I like working on smaller, more intimate shows with directors who are open to having one main collaborator. I shoot most of my personal projects in LOG with my Pocket Camera. I edit the whole thing in LOG directly from the camera originals. I then push the project to DaVinci, apply a LUT to everything, do some basic correction and spit the project out from DaVinci. Yea, it doesn't look pretty whilst cutting, but I know it will look fine in DaVinci, so I'm not concerned and there are no clients over my shoulder. On bigger shows with clients over your shoulder, I understand the necessity of having good color for clients, it's a huge problem we have today in this industry, people need to see what the final is going to look like even before it hits coloring. I waste so much time doing pre-color and cleanup shot replacements whilst I edit because someone on set screwed up and the shots aren't even close to matching. Each codec has a specified dynamic range. Nobody really discusses this because everyone shoots LOG today, so the dynamic range is compressed into the codec. However, I've been doing lots of tests and have studied the codecs very closely. There is absolutely a pattern with higher bit rate, higher bit depth and greater color space codec's, rendering a higher dynamic range imager over their lesser bit rate, lesser bit depth, lesser color space alternative codecs. IE; 10 bit 4:2:2 XAVC iFrame 410Mbps vs standard 8 bit 4:2:0 AVC Long GOP 50Mbps, using the same camera/imager. It's hard to do these tests because not very many cameras support both a high quality and super low-quality codec, but some do like the Canon C300MKII. Next time I get my hands on one, I will record a test to show what I'm talking about. Until then, there is no reason to bicker.

Well, on the last two shows I worked on, we were delivering scenes during production and had quite a bit to watch the day after the show was done. This is the new way to make low-budget shows, you literally cut as you're shooting. In order to make that workflow possible, you've gotta work with camera original formats which work natively with fast editors like Premiere and Final Cut X. With those editors, we can bang out scenes so fast, it'll make your head spin if you're watching from the sidelines. On the last industrial show we just wrapped, it was 5 x 20 minute shows, wall-to-wall dialog, 2 camera with one AC between the two of us. I was the cinematographer and A camera operator and the AC was the DIT. I'd bring the drives home at night and transcode right off the A drive set to my raid. It would actually just about finish before I had to leave each morning. So 24hrs after the shoot was over, I'd have everything into Avid and ready to edit. I had first cuts of all 5 shows by the end of the first week. That's how fast we do things today because sometimes client notes take a week to turn around and we've gotta get moving onto the next project. So here is the math... It was 10TB of total footage = 3300 minutes (a and b camera) The transcode engine (with lut applied) was rendering at 14fps. So one second of processed footage took around 1.5 seconds total. That means it took around 4500 minutes to process everything. So it took 3 days +/- a few hours, to transcode everything. Then we had to sync all of the audio. I used Pluraleyes for the bulk, but because we had wind noise in the camera and no timecode thanks to the cinematographer and audio guy not thinking it was important since we had a timecode slate... dumbo's. So I had to sync around half of the project by hand, which is very labor intensive. So that's why it took 9 days... 3 days to transcode and 6 days to get the audio synced so we could start editing. The show we just wrapped, I was the DP, so we had audio put to the camera via wireless and the timecode matched on all the equipment including the slate. Obviously with digital that's the only way to do it and it's annoying when people choose not to.

I'm discussing playback, which is a "decoding" process. To playback in real time 1:1 R3D files, requires special hardware. My system will make LUT applied Pro Res XQ files from 4k RED code at around 30 - 35fps. Most computers without the special hardware, are around 5 - 9fps. When I mean "master" this refers to the final edit and color correct with embedded multi-track audio from the final mix. This will be the file used for the entire life of the product. Nobody goes back to the camera originals unless the "master" has been lost somehow -which has happened many times. For television, they want the master to be the same format as broadcast, so again Transport Stream 50Mbps 59.94 1080i. We'll also do DNX115 29.97 or 59.94 1080i deliverables for syndicated shows, as this is the codec MOST shows finish in, so many distributors will accept it today. Once one of these files is handed off, we will make an archive Pro Res master and textless master with splits. We'll also do a decompose/consolidate and store it on LTO. For commercial work, almost all of it is done in Pro Res, with the exception of a few Avid editors who refuse to switch from DNX because they have older systems. We'll make final deliverables based on the requirements, 9 times out of 10 its Pro Res HQ, with a few companies asking for lower-res DNX files as well -generally DNX115 like broadcast-. Again, once finished we'll make textless masters with splits and decompose/consolidate. The entire workflow is Pro Res though and the masters are 100% Pro Res. For industrial work, it's slightly different because most industrial clients don't know what they're talking about. So they don't have specs. We generally shoot and edit in 1080p 29.97 and deliver Pro Res masters with .h264 Quicktimes at varying resolutions with textless masters and splits. Again, the masters are always Pro Res. For feature, documentary and narrative, the workflow is pretty much the same. The only difference is making a DCP, which is not required for any other workflow but cinema. The DCP's are generally sent to a different department then the master, as we have different Aspera login's. The master hand-off is 9 times out of 10 Pro Res with some clients using DNXHR as a backup incase the post house is using PC's. Most content distributors -not ma and pa clients, but the big boys- pay for a 3rd party to make those files during the archiving process. All we do is upload the files to Aspera and the rest is done through the archiving agency. They also QC the files to insure there aren't any technical issues and they'll securely upload the necessary files to the different delivery locations. - A "master" is the final finished edited and color timed show. - "Camera original" are the original camera files. - "Camera transcodes" are the files an editor will use to cut with. - "Mastering" is the process of taking the camera originals and conforming them to the edit. - "Deliverable" is a file a client requests based on the "master" in most cases. I think you'd be surprised how many shows use Pro Res camera originals and/or transcode from camera original to Pro Res and never look back.

Yea, we just did a film with brand new Vision 3 7203, exposed perfectly and the print had actual noise, but the 2k scan was practically noise free. I know the scan was RAW and colored by some bloke over at FotoKem, so maybe they applied some NR? I can usually see that, but I didn't see any signs of noise reduction. We also shot 13' and 19' on the same show, all of it looked pretty much the same when printed. The 19' stood out on the digital scan because it was slightly under exposed, but you couldn't tell the difference between the 03' and 13', they were nearly identical on the scan. Probably thanks to proper exposure... something a lot of people these days don't understand. I've got some 35mm stuff, but no way to project it. My flatbed is down for the count and I don't have a projector locally I can throw stuff up on. I will at some point soon though, I'm looking high and low for a portable 35mm projector for my school.

I've done quite a bit of work print's with 16mm 7213 and 7219 sources. Honestly, the 13 is more fine grained, but the 19 looks totally fine if you expose properly. It falls apart when you try to push the stock too much in how you light and expose. I've pushed 19 two stops before and it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected it to be. At the same time, I've been working quite a bit with 7203 recently and I'm not enamored by the difference between it and the 19. The prints appear to be just as grainy, it's only when you digitize that things look crisper on the 03. Point being... the added grain from the print really changes everything. I use to get work prints from my 35mm commercial work, but we'd use a flatbed to view them, so it's hard to know what they'd look like on a big screen.

Yea, I saw my mistake. I misread the article and assumed based on what I read that Deakins uses Pro Res whilst shooting. In reality, the entire workflow is Pro Res until final color, where they go back to the Arri Raw and color that. Sorry about the confusion. Most features are mastered in Pro Res XQ. It's the "common delivery" format today, with DNX being the "backup" deliverable. For television, Transport Stream 50Mbps 1080i 59.94 is what most people will request. Most studio's also request DCP's, but that's ONLY for digital cinema projection, it can't be used as a master like what you'd use for marketing and make BluRay/web versions from. That's why they request a more mainstream codec. Shooting is a different story, there really is no good reason to shoot Pro Res vs Cinema DNG, Red Code and Arri Raw. The file formats aren't much bigger for RAW and obviously there is a huge advantage of RAW being frame based, which means less likelihood of corruption. With that said, we're seeing a steady trend of more and more shows either being shot in Pro Res or being transcoded and never going back to the camera originals. These aren't necessarily features, though there have been a bunch of very well-known documents of this workflow on major features like 'Focus', of which I'm intimately aware of their workflow because I had meetings at lightiron to help them develop it years before they shot the movie. The only mistake I made was with the Deakin's quote, you couldn't even spell his name right. Actually the JPEG2000 codec that RED uses, requires special hardware to decode at full resolution. Most high-end GPU's can handle it without too much fuss, but there is a pretty heavy cost associated to get it playing back 1:1. Pro Res 4k, is a multi-threaded codec that decodes using the CPU. So if you have a crappy processor, it won't decode. The more cores and threads you have available, the better it decodes. I don't have a crazy computer, but it decodes every codec flawlessly outside of XAVC 410Mbps 4k. That's the only one I've ever found to simply not work properly.

Umm yes, that's what I'm talking about. I know it sounds odd, but it's a VERY common thing to do today. Computers are very much up for the task and on very fast turn around shows, where you literally can't afford the transcode time, you need to edit material right away. Also, when you need to deliver a cut 24hrs after the shoot finishes, you simply don't have the time to futz around with transcoding. All of your off-line editing duties should be syncing, logging and doing an initial cut, not waiting for 4 days to transcode everything. That's an exaggeration, but it's really not. As I said before, it took 9 days to transcode the material from XAVC 410Mbps to Pro Res 1080p HQ, with a very fast Mac Pro chewing 24/7.

That's exactly the workflow, never said anything else BUT that. Everyone who uses XAVC transcodes and it works fine if you do that. Not trying to say anything, XAVC 410Mbps iFrame 4k has plenty of dynamic range.

Yea, they change cards all the time. I've been working on features and television shows in the camera department for years. I actually developed one of the original real-time replay systems for early digital cinema. Everyone swaps cards, there is still a "loader" on digital sets, it's quite amazing. I haven't seen that Cfast to SSD box before, that thing looks brand new. I know a lot of top DIT's who work on huge movies and they've told me, even on bigger 4k shows, they rarely go past 100TB. Heck, this show I'm cutting now is a 4k feature shot with 2 cameras and the bulk media is only 10TB. The biggest show I've personally worked on was a bit less then 50TB of camera raw. We condensed it down to 4TB after transcoding from 4k to 1080p for editing. So yea, I don't think it's a problem... just don't shoot 100:1 ratio! LOL :P