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Single Perf Pulldown?


John Sherman

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I'm looking for a bit of a sanity check on a potential cost-saving measure that a buddy and I worked up.

 

We are currently in possession of an Arri IIc, and intended to modify it to shoot 2 perf. However, if an anamorphic lens was attached to the camera sideways (squishing the image vertically rather than horizontally), we could theoretically shoot 2.35:1-ish using only a single perf per frame.

 

As neither of us have much experience shooting in 35mm, that leaves us with a couple questions. Is grain going to present a big issue with such a small area being used for each frame? More importantly, are we going to run into problems trying to get it scanned? Are there hardware/software limitations on scanners that might limit our options as far as scanning goes?

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A rough guide is that the more non-standard the format is, the harder it can be to create or keep savings because of your limitations in post choices, but in this case, I don't know how to deal with a single-perf 35mm frame in a scanner. Obviously you could scan 2 frames at a time if the scanner was set-up for 2-perf and then perhaps somehow split the scanned frames into two pictures, but I'm not sure what the procedure would be.

 

But assuming you could deal with it and any timecode issues for conforming, in terms of negative size, obviously 1-perf would be twice as grainy as 2-perf plus you'd have to find 2X anamorphic lenses that squeezed vertically instead of horizontally (I guess get a 2X anamorphic lens mounted sideways somehow, i.e. rotated 180 degrees in the mount or get the mount rotated?)

 

I did some rough calculations and 1-perf 35mm (squeeze or not) would be slightly larger in negative area than full aperture Super-16 (shot with a 1.3X anamorphic lens to get 2.40), but pretty close. I think in the end, the cost of shooting 1-perf 35mm would be the same as Super-16. And the graininess would be similar, which begs the question, why not buy a Super-16 camera instead?

 

My opinion is that if you don't have much experience with shooting 35mm, stick to 2-perf with spherical lenses, that's already a somewhat uncommon format as is, I don't think you should make your life even more complicated by inventing an entirely new format.

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Well technically we could scan it on our Xena Dynamic Perf scanner, it's sprocketless and uses machine vision perf recognition so it would be just a matter of making a transport profile to run 1-perf.

 

That said...

 

2-Perf is pretty good.

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1 perf doesn't sound very economical or practical. I can't imagine the movement being able to work because it needs time to rotate off the frame and rotate back onto the next frame. That particular camera requires quite a bit of work to get 2 perf, I can't imagine getting 1 perf.

 

2 perf is really good AND Super 16mm with 1.3x squeeze anamorphic lenses looks amazing! So if you're trying to save money, just shoot 16mm.

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