Karim D. Ghantous

These are absolutely fantastic, Mark. Superb work. I love how you didn't have to do a lot of post work for these. This might be 'only' 16mm, but they look better than anything digital - and also some 35mm imagery I've seen. Obviously the capture medium is not the whole story, but if you don't know that, you shouldn't be on this forum! It's footage like this which makes me shake my head when TV shows choose digital over film. What are they thinking? I love the RED (I'd love to own one) and there are lots of other nice digital cameras, no question about that. But film looks better. It's not complicated. BTW I'd love to see a full resolution frame. I've seen quite a few 2K 16mm frames, and even pushed 7219 looks really good. I recently finished season 1 of Sex and the City. Damn it looks good. Sort of like what you're showing here, but toned down a bit.

I would like to second Satsuki's post. Some people rate 8mm 7219 at 320, FWIW. I can't imagine how that would be a problem, except in very rare situations. You might lose a bit of sharpness but IMO it's not a bad compromise. I had a reference I wish I could show you (how a specific film reacted to overexposure) but for some reason I lost the URL. If I find it I'll post it below.

Is it not possible to amplify the signal? It will be noisy but at least you can see what you're doing. If there are no HD video taps, I would find that surprising.

If your camera has a video tap, would that solve the issue of using NDs? If that's the case, maybe it makes sense to shoot one stock, such as 7207, as Mark did. It would keep things somewhat simpler.

That test is quite revealing, and says a lot about the capability of film (even though photographers have been successfully pushing colour negative film from 400 to 3200 since the '80s). However, the smaller the gauge, the less you can push the emulsion and get usable results. That's just a rule of thumb, so you have to judge for yourself.

According to this, it won't automatically register 500 speed film: http://super8wiki.com/index.php/Minolta_XL_401 But that doesn't matter, as you have an external light meter. Use this tool to calculate shutter speed from shutter angle and frame rate: http://super8exchange.com/shutter_speed.php Remember that Super 8 cameras assume that your film stock is tungsten balanced, so the filter switch should match your situation. I.e. your filter switch should be set to daylight for outdoor use. That means your film speed will reduce by 2/3 of a stop (e.g. Kodachrome 40 goes down to 25 ASA outside, which is 2/3 slower than 40 ASA). So when you meter for daylight, your film is not 500 ASA, it's 320 ASA. And one more thing: some people recommend over-exposing 7219 by at least a third of a stop if you can. If you do, you end up with a 250 ASA stock in daylight, in which case you might as well use 7207 250D.

Maybe contact this American lab: https://www.littlefilmlab.com/ They do ECN-2 films in C-41, and they accept films with Remjet (so you don't need to buy CineStill).

I do have another idea which I would like to share here. There must be, surely, a method to make a low contrast positive film that has the latitude of negative film, but with RGB layers instead of CMY, and without the orange mask?

Hmm, 7203 is grainier when printed than when scanned? I am surprised. Would the printer light be the problem, i.e. not diffuse enough? In any case, pushed 7219 looks really good.

David, I'm glad to hear that progress is being made. The range of products that I know about so far are quite unique - you definitely made the right choice to stay away from yet another b&w emulsion. There are some applications where transparency film is unsuitable, but for some applications it's probably the best solution. And scanning transparency film should be much easier than with negative film. The problem for photographers (and not cinematographers AFAIK) is not so much the cost of the film, but the supporting infrastructure. The problem unique to slide film (in photography) is that the cost of developing, at least in some regions, is prohibitive. A problem that plagues photographic customers in general is that scanners are mostly crap compared to cinema scanners. I don't know why, but 500T Super 16 looks no more grainy than 8-perf 35mm scans. I don't know if Ferrania can fix either of those problems, but they are worth considering. And yes I'm aware that we are chatting on a cinematography forum. :-)

If any of you have not yet seen Eyes Wide Shut, please do so (I bring up this film a lot). ;-) The stock was 5298, pushed two stops, for the entire picture. I haven't seen it in HD yet but that would be preferable to DVD. The film stock has long been superceded, so 5219 should look much better (I have seen Super 16mm 7219 pushed one stop and the 2K scans looked great). See the top three paragraphs of this page: https://www.theasc.com/magazine/oct99/sword/pg3.htm There is also the discussion of whether you need to push at all if you are using a DI. But I will leave that to those with experience. Suffice to say that photographers do not necessarily push negative film when they underexpose it, whether it's colour or b&w, especially if they're scanning. But slide film is always pushed if you underexpose it.

I first shot Super 8 Kodachrome back in the early '90s. It's amazing stuff. I haven't shot any in a long, long time, but I definitely want to shoot it again. As for pricing, we know that the retail price for a 50' cartridge is about US$35. Add developing and scanning and postage, and what would the price be? Ideally, US$50. But it might be more. One thing that we don't have in Super 8 is a camera with lenses that have OIS. I hope Kodak's camera supports that.

I've seen several examples of 2K scans of all three Kodak Super 16mm stocks. They're all amazing and they surprised me at how good S16 actually is. Even 7219 pushed by a stop looks amazing. You do need sharp lenses, of course. I agree with Saumya that a lot of people today are almost deliberately ignorant of film's performance.

Love the graphics. Very sharp. And I would not be surprised if this product is actually real. I wouldn't even be surprised if the chemistry was ECN-2, not E-6. It's surprising how well 8mm film holds up, given its tiny surface area. Using a proper scanner and a sharp lens is important, though. KH, that sounds like an interesting project. ;-)

I have a small collection of 35mm trailers, most of which would have been struck from film 'masters' as opposed to being digitally printed (or a 'film out'). So I wonder, would they be the same number of generations away from the camera negative as the release prints are? My oldest trailer, FWIW, is one of the first two Indiana Jones films (I forget which). My newest is, I think, Titanic. Speaking of Titanic, and keeping in mind Jurassic Park, those films had lots of VFX shots, which involved scanning the film, then doing a film-out. I wonder if the trailers for films like these would have been edited digitally and printed with something like an Arrilaser? Or would they have been done the traditional way?

Nolan and Pfister did that for one scene in the second Batman film. I think the RED Dragon sensor can handle a lot of overexposure, but I don't know how much. Edit: BTW, I'm amazed at how good 16mm looks given its small surface area.

It seems that there isn't much of a strong preference. I suppose the only way to know if the wine is good is to taste it yourself. Too bad Kodak doesn't have a lot of sample scans to look at. That would be very handy. Kaminski overexposed and pulled a medium speed stock for 'War Horse', but that's not quite what I have in mind.

This is purely for the sake of curiosity. You have a choice between a 50 ASA stock or overexposing a 200 ASA stock by one or two stops. The situation: a high contrast scene. So, if anyone has faced this situation - who has chosen the overexposed stock instead of the slower stock? How did you find the highlights? Was it one or two stops over?

Firstly: thank you, thank you, thank you for making available a high quality version. It's hard to find 35mm scans for personal inspection. I don't think that even Kodak has sample scans to download. Secondly: lovely footage, especially the shot overlooking the city. Film really looks great. Even though this is only 2-perf, which is not that much taller than Super 16, it looks better than a lot of 8-perf images from photos scanners like the PlusTek or Epson flatbeds. There is something very wrong about photo scanners, and the results are probably one reason why so many photographers switched to digital. Once again, thank you for sharing it!

Aaron, what stock is that? I'm guessing 7207. Every time I see a scanned frame of 16mm film I am amazed at how good it is. I am also reminded at how bad photo scanners are. Everywhere I see scans of 8-perf 35mm Tri-X or Portra and they don't look as fine as this. Even 6x6 negatives show grain that just shouldn't be there. I can see why 16mm is going to have a long life. :-) The sad bit is that many of the productions that are shooting digital could be shooting S16! Edit: cute little chick. :-)

Ari, I have seen the results of pushed T-Max 400 - albeit online. However, the photographer made large prints from those pushed negs. If T-Max 3200 can be pushed by six stops, T-Max 400 can be pushed to about 4 or even 5 stops. It's not a hypothetical. :-) The only drawback is that for every stop you push (i.e. underexpose, as you don't need to push negative film) you lose a stop of shadow detail. Pushing makes it easier to print but stretches the contrast. I think you need to use Diafine for best results, though. In 1985, at least one sports photographer I know of pushed Fuji 400 by three stops and got very usable results. If you can do that with 1980s colour negative technology, you can do it with T-grained b&w film.

I've seen HD scans of 7219 frames pushed one stop and they looked great. The person who posted them eventually took them down, so I can't link to them. Take my word for it. :-) Ari, as far as fast b&w films go, from what I've seen, it's better to rate T-Max 400 at EI 3200 than to use T-Max 3200. Those super-fast b&w films are quite useless unless you actually want that type of grain.

These are probably not going to be helpful, as they are Super 16 scans. But they are interesting in their own right. I am guessing that they are 7207: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?134963-Shooting-16mm/page4

I have a cunning plan (albeit a naive one). You could set up the print between two reels, with nothing else except a diffuse light source behind the film. What you would do then is to set up a decent camera and photograph each frame at a time. You would then use auto-alignment software to correct your manual frame advance. I'm no expert on film printing but the best results are obtained with the use of fluid between the source and target films. It would take over an hour, which is not that bad. If you took 5 seconds to set up each frame, that's 24x35x5 = 4,200 = 70 minutes.

If you're scanning the negative, why push at all? From what I've seen you don't need to push. Pushing is definitely needed if you're using positive film, or if you're doing traditional IP/IN (it's just easier). But negative film in general (and b&w film specifically) does not need pushing.