Lester Mclewis

Hello me again, I forgot to mention that there are plenty of good and bad used Solitare film recorders on the market for under $10,000. You may have to have it serviced and get an animation head for it($6000 new at Oxberry) or you can find a used one pretty cheap($500-2000). These are CRT based film recorders but they are good enough for feature work. I believe the film "Polar Express" was bumped out to film using one of these machines, However I read that they bumped it out to 65/70mm(Yes a Solitare can do 65/70mmwith the right head) and then they reduced it to 35mm for duplication. I know a film recorder is big and bulky but the ability do DI's for the cost off film stock is a big plus in this game! Your supposed to use a special film when doing DI bump outs, But I'd be willing to bet you could experament with Negative film stock and have a direct negative without the interpos. I don't own one yet but I've got my eye on a couple for under $5000. The other option would be to build one using a High resolution crt Monitor and a Mitchell with an animation motor, or you could have a 144 degree shutter made for your 35mm camera and do a 35mm kinescope(This is only for transfering 29.97 out to 24p in realtime I wouldn't try running a 24p project out to a kinescope). Anyway here are a couple of options for getting your projects to 35mm cheaper than paying for it.

I've been interested in 2 perf for awhile now but finding one is about impossable so I've decided to modify a konvas in the next few months. As for the optical blow up and di intermediate, I would bypass the optical blow up and convert it into a 4 perf squished image using LINUX(Cinelerra and Main actor). I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that both programs will alow you to edit in the regular 2:35:1 ratio and squish it when you render your tiffs(or whatever you preffer) out for film recording. Cinelerra is free and is resolution independant so if you have a 16k file(if one exist) you can edit it in cinelerra. Main actor cost about $200.00 and has a ton of proffesional features included. If you sell your film to a studio they will most likely pick up your DI cost(At your royalties expense) I checked with duart and they can transfer 2 perf on a spirit to a hard drive so you can dump your footage in the computer and go, unfortunatly they don't have set prices that I'm aware of and I think you have to get a quote on the transfer. I know linux is kind of shunned on in the motion picture world but it is super stable and very FAST not to mention some of the biggest studios use linux(Dreamworks, ILM) If you want to try it I sugest downloading Red Hat Fedora core 3 or 4 and cinelerra and giving them a try, Another cool program that might do a squish is Jashaka(Again Linux). Hope this helps! :)