David Cunningham

Talk with Bernie at Super16 Inc. he serviced my ACL and now you can barely hear it running unless you are holding it against your head on your shoulder. I've even had my actors ask if it's really running. It should be about as quiet a camera as you'll see, certainly for the lower cost side of things.

Just an FYI that I just received my most recent Fotokem process and "one light" print and again it is amazing and might even be better than some places' fully timed prints. Beautiful work! That is all.

I am pretty sure they use a Spirit 4K Datacine for their transfers. If you export to Prores 422HQ you should have most of the original information except the ability to re-grade. That should be small enough to upload to dropbox or even a google drive folder you could share.

It would be nice to have a real RGB full frame sensor 4K Super 8 HDR scan, especially for reversal and print films. I'd be very curious to see a comparison. Like Perry said, though... definitely no reason for a Super 8 10K scan unless you're talking an 8K presentation.... then maybe it might make it look more like an actual film projection and avoid up-scaling artifacts.

I bet the grain is there in the original. You can see it in flashes. I think it's the compression.

Oh yes... I use them all the time for processing and printing of my 16mm projects. They are pretty much on par for pricing for those things as well. As for transfers, I still go with MetroPost and Gamma Ray Digital because their prices are way lower and I think their scans at least on par if not better than what I have seen from Fotokem. Unfortunately, Youtube compression makes it impossible to see how good these scans are as the grain is all blocked up. The color and sharpness as a whole look excellent and your exposure and composition look great! Any chance we can get some full quality downloads to get an idea what those scans really look like?

Very interesting...

Thanks Ted! So, assuming you mean this one: With Kristen and Drew, I did use quite a bit of 500T because of the heavy overcast to start the day and the extremely yellow light from the tent. When using light meters I was getting color in the 3000 to 4000 range pretty consistently. That said, I do try to avoid 500T as much as possible. Obviously, the bright sun scenes are all 50D and the color, saturation and grain are excellent! The 500T is a necessary evil sometimes, but the result is just SOOO much better with 50D. The 500T is just too grainy in this small format. In fact, moving forward, I am probably going to do exclusively outdoor weddings because the on-camera LED light is just too intrusive and the 500T just never turns out as good as I'd hope. I'm actually in the process of completely re-coloring, stabilizing and framing this footage as I was just not happy with the way it came out the first time. I hope to post that soon. I have shot indoors with a bright light using 50D. There are two major problems with that. 1.) Your subject is the only thing that shows up in the footage. All the background is completely black even if the room isn't. 2.) You need to open up your f-stop to full or nearly fully open. These Super 8 cameras, even the good ones, have very soft lenses at wide open. I try to keep my lens stopped down to at least f4 and if possible 5.6. The ideal image comes in the f5.6-8 range on most Super 8 cameras. So, in super 8 I aways get a 2K output because that yield a 2048x1536 image in 4x3 Super 8. This is a MUCH higher resolution than HD in this case, 1920x1080. If it were "max 8" or super 16 (widescreen) then you would only get a 2048x1080, so no real advantage over HD. For all my wedding shoots I sample at 5K, however. This is not for resolution gains but to properly render the grain which is critical in these small and grainy formats. The result is a perceivably "sharper" image. The resolution doesn't end up higher, but the grain is better resolved and results in a perceived increased sharpness. It's very subtle. In Super16 I also always sample at 5K and, depending on whether I intend to stabilize or reframe, I will either take this raw 5K overscanned output or down-sample to 4K with a locked-in 4K cinema crop. My workflow for Super 8 is to take the 2K (2048x1536) Prores 4444 overscanned image and first apply a color grade. Then, in the same pass, I stabilize and crop the image on a scene-by-scene basis. At this point I render out to a Prores 422 2K file. Then I use that graded and stabilized 2K file to edit my films, then add a window mask around the outside and export to my final format, be it HD or 2K. With both youtube and vimeo one of the best tricks to get Super 8 to look as good as possible is to upload the highest resolution possible. In fact, I sometimes up-res my HD and 2K files to 4K before upload. This forces vimeo and youtube to increase your bit-rate if you select the 4K stream. This helps to keep the film grain from getting blocked up too much due to compression. Thanks for all the compliments! I'm blushing. :) Dave

Exactly what Perry said. I always overscan (both frame and resolution wise) so that I can frame and down-sample as I please. For example, there is not 2K (2048x1536) of image on a Super 8 frame. However, I always scan at that resolution for my HD Super 8 work so that I can stabilize/zoom in and put my 1920x1080 frame wherever I want. It makes a huge difference in the final result. The second you start scaling up a digital image it looks terrible quickly, especially grainy film.

Yeah. The more modern systems are capable of zooming in or out or centering however you wish, with cropping of course. It sounds like the spirit is probably centered for super35 so it ends up off center for standard 35mm. Unfortunate. I would do a 5K scan at Gamma Ray or Cinelab with frame overscan so you can crop and frame however you wish, even scene to scene.

In Super35 you can kinda see what I mean in this link. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_35 What would be odd, however, is for that crop to not be centered. It shouldn't be mostly left or right.

I believe with the likes of the Director at MetroPost, the Xenia at Cinelab, or the ScanStation at Gamma Ray Digital you can adjust the zoom on the frame to catch as little or as much of the frame lines as you want. However, the frame itself may not be exactly a 4K aspect ratio. What format is the film? If the aspect ratio of the frame on the film doesn't match the scan aspect ratio there is no way to avoid cropping something to make it all fit without seeing the frame lines in an "overscan".

I'll be posting samples soon! Amazing results both projected and scanned.

I'll be post

Truly the best super 8 scan out there, even for reversal. I'll be postin more great scans shortly!

That turned out great... I'd almost say I like it better than most "correctly" exposed 500T I've seen.

I find the 5K scan to 2K output on the ScanStation to be worth it even with Super 8 solely for grain rendering. The grain is much more finely resolved this way compared to a regular 2K or 1080p scan. It's true there is not even HD worth of information on a Super 8 frame... and barely on a Super16 frame. However, the grain being more properly rendered results in a sharper and cleaner looking image that is more pleasant to watch and is closer to the real projected image. It's true HD is probably "enough". But, to get all the information, consider grain to be information, the higher the better. Here's my most recent 5K sourced Super 8 ScanStation footage. Be sure to view it in 2K... for the extra high bit-rate. Again, not necessary for actual resolution but to get enough bit/s to not block up the grain structure.

Note that he doesn't usually recenter the lens as most 16mm projectors have wide enough lenses to cover super 16 as is. You'd just send him the gate from an Eiki or Kodak pageant.

You can currently get it from retro8 in Japan and Pro8mm will be posting theirs online early next week. Keep a close eye out.

You definitely want to stick with metering E100D at 100 even when it's old. Attempting to compensate for degradation with that stock will just result in more severe color shift or loss and blown out highlights. If frozen the 2009 reels should be perfect. The 2001 rolls may have a bit of fog, some magenta shift and/or some loss of contrast. (The black might not be so black. ). The good news is Provia is now available in super 8 and perhaps 16mm in the future. Also, the film Ferrania group should be releasing their 16mm color reversal soon. I'm sure it won't hold a candle to e100d. But here's hoping its at least decent.

Neat video is horrid for 500T though. The grain is way to chunky. Your footage would end up all blochy looking.

Where?

Yeah... A feature on super 8 isn't really reasonable and likely not something anyone would ever want to watch for 2 hours. But Super16 is definitely doable. I love the cinematography in Black Swan.

This is sample footage from my test run of Pro8mm Provia back in 2014. (yes, it's been an ongoing mission of Phils for that long). I was lucky enough to get to shoot 3 rolls of this amazing film. It became my favorite reversal film of all time... Well... After Kodachrome of course.

What perry said.