Will Montgomery

Film transfer is all about the colorist; the guy who takes the scan and makes the color what you want. Next time tell the transfer house that you want to boost up the color and contrast.

Another thing to think about is limiting your pans. With super 8 long pans across a landscape are hard to watch sometimes...you may be better off just stoping, re-framing and start shooting again or at least do very slow pans.

We run all types of B&W

Good to know! Even the crazy Fomapan? I tried that once and got the most bizarre brownish nasty processing...don't remember where I sent it since it was like 8 years ago but I later found out it was a special B&W process.

Hate to send you just one roll of regular 8, I'll try to get some more together before shipping.

Who's left that can process B&W regular 8mm film? Maybe Spectra?

Just finished a reel and realized I don't know where to send it. Dwayne's for E6 of course, but not clear on B&W regular 8mm...

I'm really going to have to try your ScanStation because I can't believe I'm hearing someone say "avoid older hardware like the Spirit." Not so long ago a well-tuned Spirit was amazing. But maybe it usually came with a very good colorist that made all the difference.

Oh I see yes...

I think it's interesting that this firm Gratispool were selling and processing their 8mm "Kodachrome" film about one third cheaper than Kodak's, even with buying their chemicals.

That's because Kodak was making money like crazy. That of course led to it becoming giant and bloated.

If you already paid for all the research, owned the buildings and machines, I would think you'd still be able to make money making and selling motion picture film as long as you treated it like a startup, lean operation.

Ok gents… spent a week working on this one.

 

Take a gander see what ya think!

 

http://tye1138.com/stuff/fullerguitar16mm.mov

Nicely framed and shot, especially the b-roll. Great stuff.

The crossfades are throwing me off a bit, I feel like you wouldn't see that many crossfades in a real film piece. I would also probably have gone for a less film look on the talking heads, save the "film effect" for the b-roll. That might make it a little more easy on the eyes to watch.

Just personally I find the sepia a little too strong too throughout the entire piece. Maybe I'm just used to regular black & white film, but since real sepia hasn't generally been done for 80 years or so it seems out of place. Maybe straight B&W on the interview and sepia on the b-roll?

This would be better as a new thread probably, but I've found that DP's coming from film and Arri cameras tend to love the Alexa, while DP's coming more from video production tend to like RED (extreme generalization, I know).

Colorists I deal with have no problem with either, it just comes back to how you shoot and if you know the camera.

So if E6 is a flatpack wardrobe, K14 is a pile of planks, a hammer and some nails. And you have to hire a carpenter.

But the carpenter will have to where a hazard suit.

I recently worked on this Pinterest spot where we shot with the Epic Dragon except for the ECU iPhone and tablet inserts for which we used a stock 5D Mark 3 with a Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens. Cuts seamlessly in 1080p in my opinion:

Just have to say I love the natural color in this, especially with the girls in the car. Beautiful shots. Great job.

especially when people bring up the "cinematic" quality of 24, and what the heck it means now that everything is exists digitally, even what we shoot on film.

The quality of 24 vs. 23.976 is the same. If you compare it to something shot at 60fps and projected at 60fps you will notice the difference. Even my 11 year old kid saw the difference and didn't like it when he saw the Hobbit in the theater. Whether 24 vs. 30 fps in more or less "cinematic" is probably more about what/how it's actually shot vs. the speed.

It also seems that if you apply grain reduction at a higher resolution like 8k (even just a touch) and then scale down to 2k or HD it would be sharper.

I do find it interesting that the highest end Hollywood effects shops rarely work in anything higher than 2k (except for some specialty shots). For them it comes down to rendering times and in their tests they don't see a significant gain working higher than 2k even when they outputted to 35mm...or at least a gain worth paying for. Tomorrowland & Ant Man (most Marvel movies) are two movies out now or soon that I know followed a 2k effects workflow. Of course film scans are a totally different animal than computer generated graphics.

Of course I love the grain, I just wish compression codecs could handle it better since it seems Vimeo and YouTube are the only ways we can share film projects effectively.

The best footage I ever saw in Super8 was about 10 years ago or more from flying spot in seatlle (now Lightpress I think?)

 

Freya

They did amazing work on their Shadow telecine, the only one I knew of modified for Super 8 and HD. Mostly due to their great colorists of course. I flew from Dallas to Seattle once to see them do a transfer for me, good folks. I think they were selling the Shadow a few years ago due to lack of film projects. Must be hard for those shops to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars on a machine and see the resale value go down to $20k.

What Tyler said.

But you can try this...

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL2?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

I can see the slight rotations that happen very smoothly but are the signs of software stabilization. The only reason I can even notice it is because the whole frame is visible. If it was cropped down to just the image you'd never know.

Great looking footage, I would still guess Super 8 if I had to but it is really close to regular 16mm.

We would expect no less. Rob's good people. :)

Don't get too hung up on how "short" a Super 8 cartridge seems. Trick is to shoot only interesting things unlike a video camera where you tend to just let it roll forever. I always wind up with 3 minutes of really good stuff because I only pull the trigger when there's something worth shooting.

If you are doing a 16mm film-out with an optical audio track, the only company I know doing this regularly is Video Film Solutions in Maryland. They deal with a ton of government archive work and have some great systems for doing this. Prices are great too so I would recommend having them do a test to see if it is what you're looking for. You'll wind up with a negative and one print for the price quoted on their website and of course extra prints are easy to do.

Kodak is making it difficult to buy 16mm print stock these days, they've raised the minimum order quite a bit so I would do this as quickly as possible before a 16mm print option disappears.

I've worked with Tommy there on several projects and he's always a great help and cares greatly about film and keeping options open for filmmakers. He grew up in the business.

http://www.videofilmsolutions.com/

When I hear movement and shoulder operation in the same breath I knit my brows. For shaky pictures you’ll be happy with a $200 Eyemo.

For 45 seconds at a time of course.

Might be easier just to buy another camera...aren't they about $150 these days?

I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of my 'new' Canon Scoopic M. The seller bought it new in 1978 and has run less than 1,000 feet of film through it. He had it modified to Ultra-16. While Ultra-16 must be processed by houses that do it, can it be used as standard-16? I can't think of any reason why it can't, but I only heard about Ultra-16 a few months ago and know little about it.

You can think of Ultra-16 as a "wide bonus" where you get a little more on each side of the film as long as your transfer system can handle it. Spirits usually can't see between the sprocket holes so you only get one side of the "extra" negative. Basically just make sure the scanner can see the entire negative including sprockets to get the full benefit.

Lately I've been using my Zeiss 12-120 Super 16 zoom (S16 modified 10-100) and I'm completely in love with it. Requires a PL mount adapter (wooden camera in this case) and of course the lens is worth 3-4 times what the camera is worth, but is sharper and easier to focus then my 2nd choice, a Nikon 17-35 with metabones adapter.

Two words: plastic gears.

I can tell you that as recently as 1 year ago ARRI NY worked on an Arri SR1 for me and brought the board back to life. There's one guy still there that can fix anything but they may not advertise it...

That CinemaTechnic article pretty much sums up everything about the SRs.

I would add that finding a Super 16 SR2 or SR3 might make sense since they are all so cheap these days. However that makes the regular 16 SR1's and SR2's crazy cheap too.

The condition of a $200 camera may vary, an overhauled Beaulieu would be a closer comparison for its market.

Sent my 4008 to Bjorn in Sweden for a complete overhaul. Probably $500 all in with shipping to Europe. So yes, $700 for a better than new camera.

On the Digital Bolex, I think the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera kinda took the wind out of it's sails.

The Digital Bolex is just a strange bird, has some pro features but not quite; kinda like a film Bolex. A film Bolex is like the best consumer 16mm camera you'd get. Costs more than the K-100's of the world but not quite up to an Arri SR.

The Blackmagic Pocket Cinema camera has a similar image quality/style and costs 1/3rd. Digital Bolex has a nice ergonomic if you're going handheld but bad view screen. Just strange.