Michael McInerney

Right, right, it was the transfer that was anamorphic, my mistake. They were printing the film last time I was at Technicolor.

With the Wrestler, I believe they shot anamorphically, actually.

Haha, you work in rentals at Able Cine Mike? My friends just came back from renting some lenses only like a few hours ago, and I know Jeff who works in repairs, I believe. I'm hoping ProRes HQ is great; I've only heard fabulous things about it, whether firsthand, or in magazines, or from professors. I'm going to be getting it in HD, so maybe I won't even need to do a conform (it'd be nice $ wise). I guess I'll just see as time goes on. If anybody is curious, we would have spent about $4450 or so from everything from tape stock to post costs thus far. That is, a 120 and 40 minute HDCAM SR tapes, cost of development, HD transfer, and digitizing to hard drive. Hard drive cost not included due to the fact that I have many already, haha. And all of that is at a student rate. If you go to HD, expect to pay an hourly rate of 2-3 times the amount of recorded footage you have (more if you have them sync sound instead of doing it yourself). And this is all for 16mm, too. We handed in about 4500 feet alltogether. As far as hard drive space is concerned, wiki says Prores 422 HQ in HD is 220mbit/s, which I believe translates to about 27.5 megabytes/second, which is about 1.65 gigs a minute, which for us, with 2 and a half hours of recorded footage is about 248 gigs alltogether (though if I'm wrong on any of this, feel free to correct me!).

Wow, I like how in my last post my point "b" became a smiley, haha. I'll let you know about the process as I'm going through it, Adrian. I don't know if they finished it last night (they said yesterday that they started it the previous night, the flex file too awhile to set up, and they had to do a second session, which was either yesterday night or tonight). I've got to drop off a hard drive for them when they're done. And yeah, it was unsupervised, but we had all our filtration/framerate/color temp. feels indicated on the camera reports, as well as a few sentences of instruction (everything was pretty much universally overexposed by a stop), and about six stills that our set photographer took that has the sort of look we want in the scenes we shot. So it's a "guided" unsupervised transfer, sort of. If and when we can afford the conform, we'll do a supervised coloring session then. The idea is to have a completely uncompressed final, which I'd be unable to do myself as I don't have an online editing system - even if I had a disgusting setup (which I don't), Final Cut imposes it's own compression on anything that comes in/out of it. This way (the conform) I'd like to get a master uncompressed Blu-Ray and HDCAM SR final. Not doing the transfer supervised is basically a money/time (mostly money) issue. This is pretty much all coming out of pocket for us.

As far as uncompressed, I definitely don't have a proper rig to handle that for an offline - I'd like to edit the Apple Prores and then bring in the EDL and do the conform back to HDCAM SR if we get the money to do that in the end. Adrian, the footage is being transferred tonight, and we should get it soon. I'm just hoping we a) get our money together and B) the workflow is easy enough when we do get it. What did you want to know about SR -> Prores?

Yeah, they said that it'd be a simul-transfer, but regardless they said that the DVCAM charge was a 20 cent a foot charge, the SR charge is $400 an hour for transfer. The hard drive option is going to be a few hundred dollars cheaper, primarily because I already have available hard drives. When I called back they agreed that Prores was pretty much the best I could get, or near it.

So I'm waiting on sending an e-mail back to Technicolor, got a quick question on something I'd like a second opinion on. We've got about 4500 feet of Super 16mm film, that's being transferred to HDCAM SR, and being converted from that to a digital file to be be edited offline (which turned out to be cheaper than going to DVCAM at 20 cents a foot). Now, I THINK that the best, or most reasonable codec to go to (as a Final Cut editor) would be Apple Prores 422 HQ, but I can't say that for sure because I haven't gone through this process before. What codec would you suggest I have them use to put our footage to hard drive, considering filesize and such? Would it be possible to go to HD with the digital footage, at a reasonable bitrate so that I'd be able to edit easily in Final Cut? Thanks for any help.

So regular HDCam and not the SR then...and from what it sounds like, it would probably just be a bit easier to scan it all into an HDCam tape and have the house import it to a hard drive via final cut in one go. Though when dealing with the color sampling, HDCam uses 3:1:1 as opposed to SR which is 4:4:4 compared to DVCPro50 or Digibeta which is 4:2:2... I must say I don't fully understand color sampling (besides 4:1:1<4:2:2<4:4:4), and where a sampling rate like 3:1:1 comes into play. My DP also mentioned that HDCam has a 7:1 compression, as opposed to SD Digibeta, which is uncompressed...but wiki lists HDCam as being the HD version of Digibeta. So many tape stocks. We had been planning on doing a supervised transfer, but if we went the route of getting it back on say DVCPro50 (as we already have the deck for that at school) and going back to get selects, what would I need to do, or deliver to the post house for them to get the selects for me?

So I am about to shoot my first of...many thesis films this year. Three, actually. Each will be going through a similar process in post, so this is a kind of catch-all. A quick technical overview - we'll be shooting S16, (for the purposes of this project) probably about 10 rolls of 7218 on the SR2 or SR3 (our eyepiece is busted and our equipment manager is lazy). I edit in Final Cut Pro. What I'm concerned about is post though, not shooting. Usually when we've shot anything on film in the past few years, on a few rolls (maybe more sometimes), our school has sent out the film to DuArt, and we've gotten back DVCAMs or at times, depending on the material, DVCPro50. However, the school has stood on it's stance of "not paying to develop senior projects", there's a whole bunch of politics that I don't want to get into with that, in any case - we'll be going to a lab ourselves with the film, which I was already intending to do anyway. As the editor of my projects, I want these to have a final output better than that of our normally compressed footage. There have been a number of things considered - my DP first suggested going to Digibeta. Then two of our friends, one who's gone to D5 with a S16 project and another who works in post at a TV/Production studio, have said that digibeta is a pain, not worth it, etc. I don't know. I've never worked with Digibeta. One professor claims that going HD to a hard drive is very pricey and a bad idea, and another suggests the opposite. One has mentioned an HD tape stock. I've spent a lot of today reading other threads and researching through the internet, and it seems that HDCAM SR is excellent for output quality, but insanely expensive - $300 for a 2 hour tape, and a $1,500 a day rental fee for the deck? Now the obvious question is "what is the final form this project will be outputted to?" That, I honestly do not know at this moment. As a realist, it is probably just going to remain as a digital file or go to SD DVD, however, I might have the option through a friend of a friend of outputting to Blu-Ray. And this project, as well as the others, is a planned festival-runner, and it seems that every festival everywhere has different requirements as far as the final output. I have also been looking Cinelabs and Bono Labs' options to go straight to hard drive as uncompressed HD quicktime files. Bono seems to have reasonable rates and an easy to understand workflow, but I have seen the comparison between their transfer and Spyposts in another thread here, though I don't know how up to date that was, as someone else mentioned in a similar thread. I read another post of someone who says they stand behind the quality of Cinelabs, who also seem to have very reasonable rates, and have options to output to Digibeta or HD files on a hard drive. Also on this forum, I've read very good things about PostWorks and their dealing with student projects. One thing in particular that interests me about Cinelabs (albeit selfishly) is their option in "telecine 2" to teach you how the telecine works for those interested in perhaps becoming a colorist (one of the things I am considering). Digibeta sounds great because of the color and lack of compression, but I've read there's little difference between it and DVCPro50? How much of a difference is there? Also, from having edited in HD and SD, I feel it is much easier in an HD format to do color correcting/image control and feel if I had an SD product (digibeta) as compared to and HD one (straight to hard drive) it would be less easy to work with. Though I'm not sure what's more integral when considering compression vs. bitrate vs. color sampling vs. resolution. What should my priorities be in this case? If we do go digibeta, would the lab/house be able to capture straight to hard drive there for us in a form usable for me (final cut pro)? Also, what kind of hardware would be needed for running/editing both types of file? At home, I have a 2.8 dual core imac with 4gigs of ram, but at school I might have the possibility of using a computer that has significantly more ram, an xserve (although the files/project would likely remain on an external), and an uncompressed card, though I don't know what kind, if it's Kona or whatnot. In the case of the files being far too unmanageable in realtime, how would making compressed versions of them using Apple ProRes 422 work? How would you edit an offline like that, and then create an online with the original uncompressed? My concern is more on the technical than the financial, but for reference sake, let's say I'd like to spend about $2,000-3,000 on the post process.