Antti Näyhä

Yeah, I agree that raising awareness about the issue in the hobbyist/enthusiast circuit is not a bad thing. Even if the film is stored in room temperature, using readily available molecular sieves helps a lot.

Surely this cannot be breaking news to any film professional…? Properly stored in archival conditions, acetate film should last at least 150–200 years before the vinegar syndrome even kicks in.

No, but they get misused as synonyms a lot. Dynamic range is the whole range of light intensity that your device can capture. Latitude is your "margin of error", ie. how much you can under- or overexpose before your footage is screwed. As Georg pointed out, there’s no single correct way of measuring the dynamic range of a camera or a film stock – and latitude is an even more subjective thing, as it also depends on the scene being shot. Check out this Wikipedia article or just google it up.

I suppose when you say ”latitude”, you really mean ”dynamic range”. The answer might be the Arri Alexa – check out the link in this thread.

I just saw this Estonian film shot in 2009 on ORWO 35mm black & white neg. Watched at a festival between modern-looking films, the look was just fascinatingly old-school. Just like watching an archival print of a classic film, except without the scratches and dirt! I don't know if they did a DI or not, but if they did, they kept it extremely subtle. Compared to the color-to-b&w route, you get more grain (the beautiful real silver stuff!) and harder contrast, which in turn makes the picture look sharper. Obviously, you get less latitude and much less options for adjusting the look in post. Definitely a look worth going for, if you feel it suits your material.

In my native language, movies are called ”living images”. To paraphrase a friend, digital cinema is undoubtedly ”moving” images, but they’re certainly not ”living” in the same sense as film is – if that makes sense to you. :)

It has been done in real-life features, for example in Carlos Reygadas's "Japón" and Gaspar Noé's "I Stand Alone". They used a custom adapter (according to some sources, the very same unit). It's a specific and quite beautiful look really, although I can imagine the technical inconvenience compared to Super 16. At least "I Stand Alone" was printed on 35mm Scope with thin black bars on the top and bottom, yielding an aspect ratio a bit wider than 2,39:1. I haven't seen "Japón" on 35mm, but they might have done the same (at least the DVD is around 2,66:1). Did you already find this thread?

You might know this, but just as a clarification: For the IMAX prints of TDK, most IMAX shots were printed photochemically. Only the effects shots went through a 8K/5.6K DI. And as far as I can remember, the majority of the FX shots were shakycam & rapid-fire editing anyway, so they might even have got away with 4K as no-one in the audience had time to really look at picture details anyway… And I'm only half joking here.

Also, watch this space: http://in70mm.com/now_showing/index.htm Baraka seems to playing in 70mm in Melbourne soon. :)

Detail is comprised from grain. Please read this again: Also, just out of curiosity, what kind of 6x9 camera did you use for your test?

4k is definitely not enough for a real IMAX screen (not talking about those sad multiplex installations). On Transformers 2, they did a 4k DI for the IMAX shots, and it was quite obvious that the resolving power was compromised compared to contact-printed 15/65mm IMAX.

As Adrian noted, Tron Legacy was completely shot with digital cameras. In IMAX theatres, around 40 minutes of the film is just presented in the full IMAX aspect ratio (close to 1.37:1), while the rest of the film is shown in letterboxed 1.85:1 (?). So it's no wonder you got confused. This is similar to what The Dark Knight and Transformers 2 did, except they only used the full IMAX ratio for scenes shot in IMAX, which kind of made sense. In Tron's case, however, it seems they're actually using less resolution for the "enhanced" scenes – unless the F35 can somehow shoot native 4:3? Whatever the case, the trailer looked very digital to me, although the look seemed to suit the virtual reality scenes. Hoping to catch a 2K 3D screening this week.

Wow, that is interesting indeed. I think you might have stumbled upon a new look. Almost looks like some kind of rotoscoping (à la Scanner Darkly).

There's already a thread for Black Swan.

At least Barco, NEC and Christie should be rolling out their 4K projectors early next year. Apparently they're all based on the same TI DLP chip.

Some films are definitely distributed as 4K DCP's already. I personally handled and projected a 4K DCP of Inception recently. I can post photos if you wish. :) The D-Cinema spec actually defines downwards compatibility between 2K and 4K, so all 4K DCP's should run on 2K projectors and the distributors shouldn't have to make separate 2K DCP's at all. It's done in a really clever way technically, no less: each frame is first stored as 2K, and then there's an additional layer in the file which contains just the extra resolution information for a 4K system. So there's no need for processor-intensive (and possibly image-deteriorating) downscaling. Of course, that's the way it works in theory, and there might me compatibility problems with older hardware/software. Dunno. But at least for me, the 4K DCP worked beautifully with our brand-new setup (a Barco 2K projector and a Dolby screen server). It's actually quite ironic that Inception was distributed in 4K in Finland. There's just one 4K projector in the whole country, and that's installed in our National Audiovisual Archive's reference cinema, where it's being used for demo purposes and special screenings. They're showing 4K restorations of Dr. Strangelove and The Bridge on the River Kwai in a couple of weeks – I hope to catch at least one of them! I completely agree. Also, the Sony 4K SXRD had worse black levels than a 2K DLP – at least back in 2006.

I've only seen Dersu Uzala on the big screen as a 35mm reduction print made in the 70's. It was very soft, visibly worse looking than your average 35mm print of a 35mm-shot film of the era. I guess the optical printing process they used to make the 35mm prints wasn't exactly high end. The film is absolutely wonderful anyway. Here's hoping that I can still catch a 70mm screening of it one day...

Hi Rob, have you tried attaching the red connector in the picture to "200"? I have one of those Mark 8's, and it seems to be quite picky about correct voltage setting. The voltage here is 230 V, and my projector won't start when set to 240 V (even though most other devices work fine when set up like that). It might just be that your converter's output is not quite 220 volts, in which case the motor wouldn't run when set to expect that amount of voltage. But try my suggestion on your own risk; I guess you will risk damaging the power supply. Regarding transferring Super 8 to Digital: you can certainly project the film and shoot it off the screen with a video camera, but this doesn't give you the best possible quality. Dedicated telecine machines / scanners are recommended instead. There are plenty of such services in the US, and some of them quite affordable; you will surely find some recommendations by searching this forum and others like it.

Um, not quite. You have to remember that 15/70mm IMAX runs horizontally, so the image is much larger than even 5/70mm. The 15/70mm frame is about 40% wider compared to 5/70mm.

That's the screening copy (print) format. Valhalla Rising was shot on the Red One, and the digital origination was quite obvious from the 35mm screening that I saw. I had no problem with that per se, but the very artificial-looking digital grading did make me wince several times.

Not surprisingly, Film Rescue states that they can't process Kodachrome into color film anymore: http://www.filmrescue.com/old-movie-film-services.html#KodachromeAgfa However, they do offer a service where Kodachrome is processed as a B&W neg. You might get some more tonal range this way, if color is not important in your specific case. For color processing, Dwayne's is still the only option in the world. Whatever you end up doing, be sure to post your experiences here! Also – and this goes for both of you guys – please change your display name to your real name, as required by the forum rules.

Some anamorphic lenses (particularly old ones) do indeed cause such distortion as you described, often called the "anamorphic mumps". This film, however, was shot in flat 35mm with spherical lenses, so you're probably right about something being wrong with the TV settings. The flares were probably digital effects added in post-production. That seems to be quite popular nowadays.

I have found an old undeveloped roll of K40 and sent it for processing, on two different occasions. Both times the film came back completely clear. Note, though, that these rolls were a bit older than yours; something like 15–25 years. As suggested, pulling might make more sense than pushing, although I have no experience on this.

Well, he has been advocating the evolution to 48 fps for years...

Apparently it was composed for 4:3 while protecting a wider 16:9 image. The region 2 DVD is not cropped; you can think of it as a "horizontal open matte" transfer that shows some more image on the sides. See this HTF thread for further info and screenshots.