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Super 35mm, Post work flow for best image quality


cira felina bolla

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Hi All,

 

I just shot a "short" project on Super 35 and composed for Scope 2.40:1.

 

In order to maintain the best quality image once we enter the digital work flow for transfer and editing prior to out put to film......Is it best to:

 

1. go to Telecine, transfer to hard drive/ fire wire...

2. do our edit/ assembly cut (Final Cut Pro)

3. go to DI and out put to film for the Answer print

 

Would we loose any image (right or left) on the final out put back to film to make room for the optical sound track or would it be blown down equally to accomodate the sound track.

 

I'm concerned as we framed hard right and left at times.

 

Pro's and Con's ?

 

Thank you in advance!

 

Respectfully,

Cira

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The Super-35 image area is digitally resized when output to 35mm to fit within the projection format you choose. In your case, the Super-35 scan will be cropped vertically to 2.40, then squeezed by 2X and formatted to fit within the 35mm anamorphic projection area on your digital negative (I.N.)

 

So the 2.40 picture you composed within the width of Super-35 will be preserved in the output, within limits (there is always a tiny bit of loss of the etreme edges of the negative -- but your 2.40 frameline markings would have taken this into account... plus many theaters don't quite show all of the 2.40 frame on the screen, sometimes trimming the sides slightly.)

 

The original telecine transfer (usually to NTSC or PAL) and offline editing is just to get an EDL, after which usually selects from the camera rolls are rescanned/retransferred to a higher digital format like 2K and then autocomformed into an edited digital master, then color-corrected, etc. The final crop & stretch to anamorphic is done by the Arrilaser doing the film recording. That 2K digital master is also used to make final downconversions for home video distribution.

 

Unless you plan on doing the original telecine to 4:4:4 HDCAM-SR as a master and then making downconversions for offline editing, then going back to the original HDCAM-SR transfer for conforming.

 

My point is that the most common method is to make a cheap SD transfer to tape for editing, because that transfer will never be used for the final product, whether video or film. It's just to generate the EDL, which allows you to go back to the camera rolls. But some people do use the original transfer for the final D.I. work, but that requires using a much better transfer machine and storage format, something like HDCAM-SR. Many people find it unaffordable though to transfer everything to HDCAM-SR.

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The Super-35 image area is digitally resized when output to 35mm to fit within the projection format you choose. In your case, the Super-35 scan will be cropped vertically to 2.40, then squeezed by 2X and formatted to fit within the 35mm anamorphic projection area on your digital negative (I.N.)

 

So the 2.40 picture you composed within the width of Super-35 will be preserved in the output, within limits (there is always a tiny bit of loss of the etreme edges of the negative -- but your 2.40 frameline markings would have taken this into account... plus many theaters don't quite show all of the 2.40 frame on the screen, sometimes trimming the sides slightly.)

 

The original telecine transfer (usually to NTSC or PAL) and offline editing is just to get an EDL, after which usually selects from the camera rolls are rescanned/retransferred to a higher digital format like 2K and then autocomformed into an edited digital master, then color-corrected, etc. The final crop & stretch to anamorphic is done by the Arrilaser doing the film recording. That 2K digital master is also used to make final downconversions for home video distribution.

 

Unless you plan on doing the original telecine to 4:4:4 HDCAM-SR as a master and then making downconversions for offline editing, then going back to the original HDCAM-SR transfer for conforming.

 

My point is that the most common method is to make a cheap SD transfer to tape for editing, because that transfer will never be used for the final product, whether video or film. It's just to generate the EDL, which allows you to go back to the camera rolls. But some people do use the original transfer for the final D.I. work, but that requires using a much better transfer machine and storage format, something like HDCAM-SR. Many people find it unaffordable though to transfer everything to HDCAM-SR.

 

 

Thank you David!

Cira

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