Favorite place to get color negative processed? (USA)

[Guest Giles Sherwood]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm gonna be shooting my sophomore final on Super 8 in the spring, and I've found a place I'm happy with for processing my black and white reversal, and there's really only one place to get the four packs of K40 I have left processed, but where do you all send your Vision/Vision2 to? Who's reliable? Any labs to avoid?

 

Thanks,

Giles Sherwood

[Chris Keth]

Hey everyone,

 

I'm gonna be shooting my sophomore final on Super 8 in the spring, and I've found a place I'm happy with for processing my black and white reversal, and there's really only one place to get the four packs of K40 I have left processed, but where do you all send your Vision/Vision2 to? Who's reliable? Any labs to avoid?

 

Thanks,

Giles Sherwood

 

 

What do you know, it's Giles! Super 8 sounds pretty sweet for your 1 quarter...can I shoot it? :D

 

Unfortunately, I can't answer your question. I have favorite labs for 16mm stuff, but I don't know if they'll take super 8.

[steve hyde]

Giles,

 

www.fordelabs.com

 

They do my B&W, E6 and color negative Super 8. They have been processing motion picture stocks since the 1950s.

[Anthony Schilling]

Giles,

 

www.fordelabs.com

 

They do my B&W, E6 and color negative Super 8. They have been processing motion picture stocks since the 1950s.

Second that, always good quality work.

[Guest Giles Sherwood]

Thanks Steve. I was impressed by the stills you posted in another thread, so I'll take your advice!

 

--Giles

[steve hyde]

Thanks Steve. I was impressed by the stills you posted in another thread, so I'll take your advice!

 

--Giles

 

 

...let me offer a few more suggestions. You will save yourself a bit of time and money and probably have a better all around experience if you consider a few things:

 

1) Forde does an excellent job with prepping for Telecine. They have an "ultrasonic" film cleaner that cleans chemical stains off the film.

 

2) Color negative film has an anti-hallation backing on it that prevents static charge to protect the film in the camera. This backing is removed during processing. Once it is removed your film will attract dust.

 

3) When film is prepped for telecine it is prepped into 400 ft reels (forde charges 20.00 for ultrasonic clean and prep) This is, of course, 8 carts of Super 8.

 

Therefore, I suggest you try to work in batches of 8 at a time so that you can send them to Forde and have Forde send it directly to your posthouse.

 

That said, I have had good experiences with CinePost in Atlanta www.posthouse.com

Forde sends them a lot of film....

 

hope this helps,

 

Steve

[Mike Crane]

I recommend Spectra in N. Hollywood for both processing and telecine. In both categories they do excellent work, which saves me a great deal of trouble and cost.

 

Spectra has a high-end film cleaning machine made by the same people who built forde's ultrasonic (Lipsner/Smith). But, they only charge 2.00 per roll for prep and clean.

 

If the film is shot well, their telecine delivers razor sharp images (the sharpest I have seen) with their V3 gate optics and newly purchased scanner tube.

 

I have not tried Forde, but they seem to have a good rep.

[Will Montgomery]

Fordelabs keep coming up for a reason... they're great. And they can handle any type of film you can imagine except K40 which of course is only done by Dwayne's photo in Kansas. Fordelabs has great people that actually seem to care about your film.

 

I've had good results with Bonolabs and Pro8mm (yes, they process Kodak Vision2 stocks) as well.

 

Make sure you send your film FedEx or some type of carrier that will pay attention do your DO NOT X-RAY markings on the package. This is really important, I learned the hardway on some Vision2 500T recently where the stock was x-rayed and a nice reocurring fog showed up.