Jeremy Cavanagh

Wow!

My mistake - two X 3 TB disc drives were specced as a RAID, not 1.5 TB as I said in my previous post.

Perry, I'm thinking of building my own scanning system and I wanted to ask a bit further about the info you put here. A colleague has specced the desktop components for me and as part of this he has set out two 250 G SSDs to handle all the operations and then two 1.5 T disc drives arranged as RAID to be fed by the SSDs along with one video card (GPU in the system). I am hoping this can work with 2K DPX and even 4K DPX. I put your comments about moving 500 MB/sec to him and he said the 2XSSD/2X1.5T Disc RAID arrangement will handle that, are you saying a larger RAID array is needed?

User logins? Good grief, it's a grading program, not a nuclear launch control system. Get the drivel out of the way and let me work. As a broadcast engineer I find that very funny and very apt.

JL, Both the 50D and mk-of look extremely good and the mk-of showed a lot of work went into the shoot. I'm assuming this is a client commission and if so I'm curious as to how you persuaded the client to let you shoot in Super 8 rather than 16 or digital or even 35?

Thanks Carl, But I'm going to go for bigger photo sites, ideally larger than 5 um.

I think the proliferation of small format scanners is key to keeping super 8 going. I hope to build my own DIY version over the next year, however, ambitiously, I am hoping I might be able to afford a 2K or even 4K mono CCD sensor with large photosites e.g. 5 um and larger with 10 to 14 bit O/P (mono because I would like to try R,G,B scanning to get over Bayer filter limitations plus add the possiblity of HDR or infred scratch removal). Anyone happen to know where I could obtain such a sensor or am I just being too ambitious?

There are a couple of small operations that processed reversal using E6 and did a very good job and I can think of one that has worked hard to expand their service offerings since the demise of Ektachrome (e.g. by offering Wittner's Agfa 200D). It would be good if one of these small operations took on Super 8 neg processing. From talking to the people who took me through neg processing I understand ECN-2 can be processed by C-21 chemistry with the addition of a stage to remove remjet allowing hand processing (which the small operations doing reversal used) and their opinion was that the resulting colour differences could be made up in telecine but I have no experience of this. BTW, Pav, the approx £100 you quoted for a 400 ft roll from Kodak, is that based on having an account with them and placing an order over a set amount or it buying through a reseller?

A mistake I made in my previous entry was that the processing costs I quoted were for reversal and the super 8 stock prices were for neg and the price I have just looked up for neg processing is £17 so bringing the total cost I quoted to £40. I didn't quote postage because you have transport costs whether you pay for petrol to drive over to a lab or send it second class post. I have been learning to process neg (including removing remjet) from other people so I would be surprised if there isn't someone in the UK doing neg processing of Super 8. Does Bucks perhaps process Super 8?

Thats very interesting info Pav. Thanks

Silverprint in London has super 8 cartridges of Vision 3, 200T and 500T for £16.50 and I have asked them about obtaining 50D and they are certainly willing to try. You can avoid the usual suspects for reversal processing in the UK and get it done for £13 and telecine for £12.00 which gives a total cost of £36.50 per cart excluding postage and that price would be different if you telecine more than 50 ft at a time. I am not sure how you arrive at £11.00 for processing 100 ft of 16 mm as a one off, I would've thought that would only apply to a batch of 16 mm considerably longer than 100 ft but I could be wrong.

I also look forward to any pics you post about the system you have built, I am hoping to build one myself. Did you use an ordinary projector and substituted a motor with specialised control to advance frames? Did you use a filter on the neg material? The 50D stuff looks really good, I haven't used this stock yet and would love to. BTW. Machine vision camera manufacturers and distributors must be starting to wonder why they are getting one off orders from individuals who obviously don't run production lines.

A colleague did some engineering work at I-dailes a few months back and at the time told me that they were expanding. Quite encouraging.

I've been shooting on and off in the streets here in South London for a short film I'm making using my DS8 converted Bolex. On Sat a young guy cycling past (BTW, I'm getting shots of cyclist) saw me, shouted out "cool" and hopped off his bike and started chatting, turns out he works for an animation company that still uses film, a few weeks back on the same stretch a guy walked past and said, "hey, a Bolex H16", I explained it wasn't but turned out he was also an animator also using film and the funny thing is aside from these two when I've been filming down Brixton way all these Caribbean guys middle aged or older would stop and say excitedly things like, "man, you are using FILM, Great"! and earlier this year filming the London Marathon all the police came up to me really interested to see someone using film, they all knew what it was about. The point of writing this is perhaps there are perhaps a lot of people about who won't be fooled by this sort of thing.

A friend of mine recently contacted me to say he had been rebuffed in trying to place a large individual order of film directly with Kodak UK. Like a number of individuals he has bought direct from Kodak UK for years but now Kodak UK has told him he has to go through a UK reseller and this came with no warning. Does anyone here know if Kodak UK's policy on selling direct for large individual orders of either 8 or 16 mm within the UK has changed and are they only going to sell via resellers even if the individual order is a large bulk order? If this is what Kodak is doing then is this a useful way to support the market? Buying direct from Kodak means a good deal on pricing through bulk buying, but going through a reseller at the retail to semi professional end of the market means individuals with the get up and go to buy large amounts of film may now have to pay more. Now don't get me wrong its good to support UK resellers and if Kodak UK is seeking to support UK resellers and the retail to semi professional market for film in the UK that is to be commended but if Kodak UK is now making every individual go through a reseller that doesn't actually grow the market for film within the UK. As individuals we all have finite means and if you and I have to pay more then we will end up ordering less stock i.e. at the end of the day Kodak will make less money. The other thing is since the demise of Stanleys here in London resellers here are not geared up for large orders such as what my friend was after unless you go up the chain to the likes of Panavision UK (and lets face it they are very, very unlikely to bother themselves with 8mm if you are a 8 mm shooter). We have some good activist, retail based resellers in the UK (bordering on heroic at times given the situation these past few years) but there is not the means nor the will across the market to grow it across the UK i.e. mostly you see a few rolls sitting by themselves on a shelf and no attempt to market them. Do people here have any ideas or suggestions as to how individuals could place large or bulk orders for film here in the UK or Europe if Kodak UK has changed its policy e.g. would it be possible to buy direct from Kodak in the US or Kodak elsewhere if the order was large enough?

Thanks Lasse

What is the url/address for the webpage?

I had a phone conversation with the Kodak UK sales rep a while back and he said minimum order was £400 for individuals like you and me and I asked if people could band together to put together that minimum order but didn't get a satisfactory reply. On another note, before that conversation, I was talking with the guy who runs Idailies and he told me that kodak had approached Idailies about becoming an outlet for Kodak film but whether that went any further I don't know.

Not necessarily, from my somewhat faulty memory this whole thing was concerned with digital distribution to the transmitter sites across the UK not digital broadcasting itself.

It may not use more bandwidth in terms of bitrate, instead it may just increase the latency.

Very good point Stuart. A fair while back us engineers gave this sort of material an engineering technical label. We called it: 'Producer Cam'.

Hey! Don't blame us engineers! I mean, guys and girls who have worked in broadcasting here, tell me, when, when has an engineer told a producer what to do on non budget, creative aspects of a drama or documentary!? Yeah, like I'm going to turn around to someone like Stephen Poliakof and say, "mate, I'm telling you as an engineer you aint gonna use film from now on". However, I have a vague memory of being at the IBC conference session in Amsterdam when Andy Quested the beeb's HD guru made the announcement that film was being dropped as an acquisition format. So I am interested in Stuart Bereton's comment and if he can point me to some documents that the beeb may have produced on this ban that would be really useful. Are the contributors on this thread sure some gadget boy or girl (i.e. a non engineer) in an executive position made the decision to axe 16 mm as an acquisition format based on the idea that film wasn't part of the thrusting 21st century image the beeb liked to imagine for itself . Two things about this story that I find odd: 1. Its made me start going over old papers to remind myself of the effects of random noise on DCT based compression chains. The only thing I can think of is that some very grainy shots may have had an effect but that would've been the same for noisy video shots (e.g. night shots during a football match with rain and 9 DB of gain wound into the cameras for long shots) except that noise from a chip based sensor video camera doesn't have a random structure. I am not sure why something like MPG4 AVC would find random noise a problem. Perhaps someone who isn't as rusty as me on the ins and outs of compression e.g. the DCT and thresholds of energy levels wrt noise can fill me in. 2. The big irony is that the BBC continued to show each season of Spooks (MI5 in the US) which was shot entirely on Super 16 for its 10 season run and this so called ban came right its middle. And there is more irony because when the beeb was heavily promoting HD it led its promotional campaign with being able to watch Spooks in HD! So if there as a ban due to 'technical' reasons why wasn't Super 16 production for Spooks shut down and why was the beeb confident of using this film product to lead its launch of HD? Can anyone here tell me if the BBC transmission systems went to pieces whenever this Super 16 originated program went to air in either SD or HD? The other thing is that Spooks was produced by Kudos Productions and they either stuck two fingers up at the sections in the BBC who told them they had to stop originating on film or no one told them they had to stop originating on film. Can anyone answer this? Not only that but the entire series of Merlin was shot on Fuji film so what is the real story about this 'ban'?

I can vouch for how much time it takes to service a film camera and how much expertise is required. I've been teaching myself to pull apart bolex cameras and various super 8 cameras and its very, very difficult to understand the various functions and how things just work. I've wanted to give up at various stages and that's even with the generous advice and encouragement of experts such as the late Roger Sharland. I expect it will take me years to become competent and as a professional engineer I had many years servicing down to component level broadcast cameras and vtrs from plumbicon based pickups through to CCD (before tackling film cameras I thought getting the alignment correct for the tape path of a BVW 75 was the most difficult thing in creation). So I think the camera service guys out there are worth it and as another poster here put it their work adds value to a camera. How their expertise is going to be replaced should be a concern (I'm no spring chicken).

Hmmm, sounds like a cheap fare Melbourne to West Coast is in order, might save on the final bill from the quote by this Melbourne house as well. Otherwise what about Sydney? BTW. What storage medium were you planning to use?

We processed it no differently from the Tetenal instructions i.e. we had a moment's doubt about processing times between 100D and 200D (no doubt due to our lack of experience) but plunged in. I am enjoying self processing but only have access every few months or so but can imagine doing this on rainy Sunday afternoons with BBC R4 on in the background as it seems to evoke the same calm in me as concentrating on lining up or lighting a shot.