Why no 1.66:1 HD scan option for super8?

[Matt Stevens]

This occurred to me as a kind of :huh:

 

If telecine places that do HD scans of super8 can zoom OIT and overscan, revealing a tad of the end of the prior frame and the beginning of the upper frame, why not zoom IN a bit the other way so we are cropping a tad of the top and bottom of each frame, giving us a 1.66:1 ratio? Is it simply not possible with the gates at Pro8mm, Lightpress, Cinelcious, etc?

 

Just wondering.

 

1.78:1 is awesome, but super8 shooters such as I are guessing if we frame for that ratio. We have no guidelines to work with in camera. It's all guesswork.

 

1.66:1 would give us some leeway for mis-framing. Zooming in slightly from 1.66:1 to 1.78:1 with Premiere Pro is not as resolution costly as zooming in from 1.33:1 to 1.78:1. I'm talking the % of zoom needed here.

 

Thanks, all.

[Paul Korver]

Hi Matt,

If you can expose it on the negative (including most of the perf area)... we can frame for it in the transfer session and deliver it in the HD quicktime. 1.66 is just a rare request but we can do any framing including overscanning the neg.

 

-Paul

[Matt Stevens]

Hi Matt,

If you can expose it on the negative (including most of the perf area)... we can frame for it in the transfer session and deliver it in the HD quicktime. 1.66 is just a rare request but we can do any framing including overscanning the neg.

 

-Paul

Ahhh Haa! An answer. B) Thanks, Paul. This is good news. I was discussing one project in particular with the DP yesterday and we are very much settled on the idea of the NYC sequence (which is act 1) being 16mm and 1.66:1 (to emphasize the height of the city), with the Vietnam shot material being digital and 1.85:1.

 

Then there are the Super8 projects I'm thinking of and I would much prefer 1.66:1 on them.

[Jock Blakley]

The only trouble with 1.66 is that it's been thoroughly forgotten by practically everybody, and it's not a darling of the presentation world either - you have to pillarbox it to fit it into HD which makes it look "outdated", you can't show it on Super-8 or 16mm because none of those projectors can be made to show anything other than 1.33, you can't distribute it on 35mm because only a handful of rep houses have 1.66 apertures and everybody else will use 1.85, and even in D-Cinema it looks a bit wrong unless the auditorium has movable maskings and the projectionist is actually permitted to reconfigure the projector.

 

Which is a pity because its a very versatile ratio.

 

But as Paul's response indicates, any facility with a decent scanner should be able to give you a 1.66 extraction.