Dirk DeJonghe

Yes we still do AB-roll printing, both contact and optical reduction/blowup or recentering from S16 to Std16 with optical soundtrack which we make in-house now. There is still a reasonable amount of Kodak black leader available in good hands, we can make lightstruck black leader if that runs out.

If there is a requirement, we could make a 1.78 mask on 4Perf to be used when optical printing 3Perf full frame to 4 Perf. There is little demand for this kind of masking, we mostly use 1.66 and 1.85.

If you do direct blow-ups or reductions, it is essential to print a black mask because the unexposed area outside of the negative frame would be transparent. We would take our standard 1.66 or 1.85 mask and then take the frame leader for this particular production and adjust the optical printer until the frame leader arrows fit exactly in the mask. If going via IP/DN this would be done at the IP stage.

We can time the film during optical reduction/blow up and make fades as well; our optical printer has the B&H light valves and fader. We did many hundreds of S16 productions where only a few direct blow-ups were made purely for festivals. First a trial print was made on S16 contact positive, then viewed and color correction fine-tuned, then in many cases only one blow-up print was made. We did the same for 3Perf, but no contact print here, only reduction to 4Perf direct.

A properly made direct blow-up from S16, with good lenses and good photography still is mind-blowing quality even today.

You would also have to provide optical sound recorders for 3 perf. I don't see that happening.

Very few 3Perf projectors around.

You need both an optical reduction plus a 3Perf to 4 perf change. This is done by having a 3Perf movement in the projector and a 4Perf movement in the camera of the optical printer. Once this is done, you still need to put a mask by exposing a mask film on a contact printer. It has been many years since we did 3 perf work on the optical printer, but all the parts are still there. What is more, when doing direct optical reductions from B&W negative to B&W positive, you may run into halation problems, depending on image content (black halation around backlit hair for example). This is because of lack of anti-halation layer in the B&W positive, this problem is much reduced when going via Interpositive/Duplicate negative.

We only use PFClean's automatic mode on shots that have almost no motion, on everything else manual dustbusting is done; if you are very good, you can do about 10 minutes in a day if the film is not too dirty. So, even just counting labor, we are talking about several hundreds per day.

We use PFClean with great success. See http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/. You can also send us the footage to process. Grain reduction is quite separate from manual or automatic dustbusting. It is a great program but with a steep learning curve.

We charge processing and cleaning per meter and telecine and scanning per minute. Some labs have a price for processing and scanning per foot, this means you get more minutes for the same footage when using 3Perf instead of 4Perf. Maybe this leads to the confusion?

The middle one is Ektachrome reversal, it has edgenumbers. I don't think Kodachrome ever had edgenumbers, maybe the Kodachrome Commercial but that was before my time.

It would be better for everybody if Apple would make the ProRes codec 'open' like Avid did with DNxHD.

On my scanner I can do 8, 10, 12 and 16 bit per channel DPX, but most applications I have won't recognize 12bit version. It is indeed open format, SMPTE approved, which means you are not vendor-locked into one particular workflow. Try combining Windows or Linux with a full Quicktime workflow.

There is nothing to prevent you from working in DPX 16 bit. If you need to change one single shot in the middle of a 2 hour program, DPX suddenly becomes much more easy to work with than any Quicktme codec. Just rerender the shot and you are done. That said, you need a fairly heavy RAID to playback DPX in real time without proxies.

After many years of remaining dormant, flashing is now used in our lab quite often these days when making proper internegatives from positives or reversal originals. We mostly use 200T stock preflashed and Pull processed to a particular gamma to get really good internegatives. This method is also used with the current crop of internegative stock from Kodak which is really 50D in longer lengths and on polyester base.

Yes, colour temperature influences the sensitivity.

If you use SEPMAG to do the editing, you would have to transfer it back to digital WAV files and then finish the mix in digital. Transfering digital to/from SEPMAG is quite straightforward.

When I started the Ektachrome print stock was 7389, later 7399. Making prints from ECO onto this stocks gave reasonably soft images. Making prints from Kodachrome onto 7389/99 you ran into infrared absorption problems making the shadows reddish. To avoid these reddish shadows you needed to print onto Gevachrome 902 reversal stock or onto Internegative stock with preflashing.

I think the ECO stock would work very well in Super 8 today with a good scanner.

There were only two ways to get the proper contrast from an ECO original. The first one was to print to Kodachrome print stock, not available except in the US and discontinued about when I started processing ECO in 1975 or so. The second most widely used method was to print to Internegative. If you needed to mix 7242 with ECO, it was customary to preflash the ME4 Ektachromes to match the ECO.

It would probably survive ECN2 process.Will be very fogged by now. The first developer in ECO3 process was Phenidone/hydroquinone based. D76 should work.

Edit: it won't survive ECN2 since it had a prehardener and neutraliser before the first developer. B&W developer is OK.

I had lots of customers using NPRs in the early seventies. The stock used was always B-wind but the exposed film was emulsion out. You cannot and should not buy A-wind stock for camera use. The exception is the Minima where you rewind your own, no longer supplied by Kodak.

The old internegative stock, 7271 was high contrast to be used with Ektachrome commercial low contrast reversal. The current IN stock is similar to 5203 and needs pull development plus flashing to work properly. It is not a trivial task, just read the instructions on the Kodak website;

We did a S16 job two months ago on 7213 200T. Pushed two stops for grain. The effective speed gain was less than a stop in the shadows, grain was as planned, serious loss of highlight detail not planned. More difficult to scan due to blocked highlights in neg.

I use a low-tack sticky tape as used by painters on delicate surfaces. Kodak doesn't use any tape to attach the film to the core. Maybe they wind the film to the core and attach the flanges later (easy to do).

In a Quicktime container the projector speed is just an number in metadata. If you capture at 24fps and change metadata projector speed to 18fps, it will playback slower but all frames will still be 1:1. It is only when you import the file into your timeline that fps have to match if you want to maintain 1:1. Obviously a clip running one minute at 18fps will be much shorter in duration at 24 fps while keeping the same number of individual frames.