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kodachrome


Guest cruz

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I just got a roll of kodachrome, I have no idea how should I expose it. It looks to be 10 years old, how do you think should I expose it i.e. overexpose it or underexpose, what characteristic does it have is it a negative or diapositive?

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Whether a roll of ten-year old KODACHROME film produces good images depends very much on how it was stored. Film characteristics change with age, and cold storage slows those changes. But ambient radiation (e.g., cosmic rays) eventually cause undesireable changes, even with refrigerated stock.

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No link, that's just what the Kodak sales rep told me. Pretty sure Dwayne's has some left.

 

Looked in John's Kodak link above... didn't see reference to 16mm (did they ever make 35?) just Super 8.

 

Wow, i wished, 35mm kodachrome 25 in motion picture, would have probably blown all modern stocks away in good lite.

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Wow, i wished, 35mm kodachrome 25 in motion picture, would have probably blown all modern stocks away in good lite.

 

For motion pictures, even K25 would have a hard time "blowing away" the new Kodak VISION2 50D Color Negative Film 5201/7201. And color negative films are MUCH more suited to modern duplication methods required for release prints or telecine.

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For motion pictures, even K25 would have a hard time "blowing away" the new Kodak VISION2 50D Color Negative Film 5201/7201. And color negative films are MUCH more suited to modern duplication methods required for release prints or telecine.

 

Being an amateur and only ever requiring a camera original for direct projection, i agree kodachrome is no good for duplication etc.

Just looked at the MTF curve for k25 and 7201, am i reading the curves correctly?, k25 appears to have the greater resolving power compared to the new 7201. I know k25 is a thing of the past, just curious.

http://www.kodak.com/US/plugins/acrobat/en...rves/7267MT.pdf

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Being an amateur and only ever requiring a camera original for direct projection, i agree kodachrome is no good for duplication etc.

Just looked at the MTF curve for k25 and 7201, am i reading the curves correctly?, k25 appears to have the greater resolving power compared to the new 7201. I know k25 is a thing of the past, just curious.

http://www.kodak.com/US/plugins/acrobat/en...rves/7267MT.pdf

 

Hard to compare those curves, as K25 used the old method of publishing only the "visual response" MTF curve, where more recent films have all three (red, green, blue) curves published. I think 7201 holds a slight edge over K25 for sharpness.

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For motion pictures, even K25 would have a hard time "blowing away" the new Kodak VISION2 50D Color Negative Film 5201/7201. And color negative films are MUCH more suited to modern duplication methods required for release prints or telecine.

 

 

And yet we see more and more films from the 60's and 70's being retransfered that look positvely spectacular. These older films probably have internegatives with just as much contrast build-up as a Kodachrome original, yet these newly transferred internegatives being broadcast on television look quite spectacular.

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And yet we see more and more films from the 60's and 70's being retransfered that look positvely spectacular. These older films probably have internegatives with just as much contrast build-up as a Kodachrome original, yet these newly transferred internegatives being broadcast on television look quite spectacular.

 

Master positives and duplicate negatives normally have a "gamma" very close to the original negative, near 0.55 to 0.60. Even with possible contrast build-up, easily handled by modern telecine. A reversal original or projection print has a much higher gamma, usually greater than 1.6 to 1.8 projection contrast, and much more difficult to telecine transfer without lost shadow and highlight detail.

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Master positives and duplicate negatives normally have a "gamma" very close to the original negative, near 0.55 to 0.60. Even with possible contrast build-up, easily handled by modern telecine. A reversal original or projection print has a much higher gamma, usually greater than 1.6 to 1.8 projection contrast, and much more difficult to telecine transfer without lost shadow and highlight detail.

 

Even internegatives from the 60's and early 70's?

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Your talking a double whammy here John. First the stocks from 30 years ago weren't more contrasty than now, they you're talking about a copy made from a more contrasty stock. The end result wouldn't rival what can be done nowadays.

 

Regardless of any possible slight contrast buildup from the duplication process, a projection contrast original is much higher in contrast than any duplicate negative. KODACHROME motion picture film is just much harder to duplicate without distorting the tone scale. It was designed primarily for direct projection of the processed camera original.

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Regardless of any possible slight contrast buildup from the duplication process, a projection contrast original is much higher in contrast than any duplicate negative. KODACHROME motion picture film is just much harder to duplicate without distorting the tone scale. It was designed primarily for direct projection of the processed camera original.

 

No disagreement from me on that point. However, the digital intermediate step pretty much renders the issue of Kodachrome being primarily a projection print irrelevant. Whatever is on the Kodachrome original can be preserved via the digital intermediate.

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No disagreement from me on that point. However, the digital intermediate step pretty much renders the issue of Kodachrome being primarily a projection print irrelevant. Whatever is on the Kodachrome original can be preserved via the digital intermediate.

 

Color negative film is also much more suited to scanning using current motion picture scanning technology. Again: Projection contrast reversal films are best suited for direct projection, not duplication. Their use in professional production today is primarily to obtain a unique "look", typically one of high contrast, high saturation, with some loss of shadow and highlight detail.

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Color negative film is also much more suited to scanning using current motion picture scanning technology. Again: Projection contrast reversal films are best suited for direct projection, not duplication. Their use in professional production today is primarily to obtain a unique "look", typically one of high contrast, high saturation, with some loss of shadow and highlight detail.

 

I've seen 16mm kodachrome shot on the Galapagos Islands and the shots were stunningly good. I admit it's been a while since I saw the footage and perhaps I would view it more critically now, but I seem to recall how incredible it looked.

 

If I can see a full spectrum of Kodachrome colors from an original image projected on a standard 16mm projector throwing a 6-8 foot image across a screen, in my opinion that should be completely preservable with today's transfering technology advancements.

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Alright, I've got to say it -- somebody has to say it. John Pytlak, you are wasting your time and effort responding to Alex (Alassandro). This is a man who believes emphatically that K40 super 8 would have worked perfectly as b-roll for shots in LORD OF THE RINGS and most any Hollywood production and can't understand for the life of him, no matter how many times it's spelled out, why that angle wasn't pushed by Kodak as a way to save K40. There are many, many posts -- probably hundreds for all I know -- where he tries to pursue that and other amazing things which have nothing to do with reality with regards to K40. A film stock which did a terrific job doing what it was intended to do, capturing home movie moments in the days before home video, and who's time has past just like three strip Technicolor and other motion picture stocks and processes which have now been surpassed or are no longer valid to produce any authentic viable business model or technical argument for.

 

There, I said it. Sorry, Alex, I like a lot of what you have to say sometimes, occasionally agreeing, you have many positive things to contribute to super 8, but this is ridiculous and embarassing. I am embarassed for you.

Edited by santo
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Alright, I've got to say it -- somebody has to say it. John Pytlak, you are wasting your time and effort responding to Alex (Alassandro). This is a man who believes emphatically that K40 super 8 would have worked perfectly as b-roll for shots in LORD OF THE RINGS and most any Hollywood production and can't understand for the life of him, no matter how many times it's spelled out, why that angle wasn't pushed by Kodak as a way to save K40. There are many, many posts -- probably hundreds for all I know -- where he tries to pursue that and other amazing things which have nothing to do with reality with regards to K40. A film stock which did a terrific job doing what it was intended to do, capturing home movie moments in the days before home video, and who's time has past just like three strip Technicolor and other motion picture stocks and processes which have now been surpassed or are no longer valid to produce any authentic viable business model or technical argument for.

 

There, I said it. Sorry, Alex, I like a lot of what you have to say sometimes, occasionally agreeing, you have many positive things to contribute to super 8, but this is ridiculous and embarassing. I am embarassed for you.

 

Well, that's a flame and a half, and not very accurate either.

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There's no flame here. Just somebody who watches a person from afar with lots of experience and positive things to recommend him go on and on about something which makes no sense. I could easily provide a lot of links to many threads and posts elsewhere to prove it, and anybody who has read filmshooting.com over the past 6 months or more has read many of them, and there are other sites, but it seems pointless to do so.

 

Get over it. Alex. S8 K40 is dead. It wasn't that great to begin with and was not even remotely suitable for the rigors of professional film production -- for if it was, we would have seen it extensively exploited by professionals for more than just the odd special unusual home movie effect or as "bad film" in music videos. After all, as soon as negatives became available in the format, few even bothered with K40 any more for the most part.

 

I know you're a big advocate of betacam, often selling it over DV. The two formats are close, so I don't think anybody will hold that as odd. "Fine, so he's a "beta guy", it's still pretty good for SD." But to argue the merits endlessly of Kodachrome K40 home movie stock, suggesting all the silly stuff you have since the announcement of its end -- I mean, a person with your experience in small format -- it's so hard to sit through these posts and see something one would expect from some kid who doesn't know any better.

 

If you would simply shoot a couple of rolls of Vision2 200t -- and I'm not talking about extreme 2 stop over exposure and pulling it a stop and all that stuff you're all worked up on -- but just with a modest over exposure of half a stop or whatever, you would realize that you have wasted hours of your time writing hundreds of posts trying to sell the world on a hopelessly outdated film stock. Once again I point out that, for the purposes of short filmmaking and whatnot, in this world of digital NLE, Kodachrome makes no sense whatsoever except for projecting your home movies. There is nothing wrong with that. But to suggest it is suited for very much else other than the odd special effect is ridiculous.

Edited by santo
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And the BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was shot on Hi 8 video. It doesn't look worth a damn, either, but it works for that unique project as a special effect. The point to learn here is is that if miniDV were available widely in 1998/99, they would have used that instead and it would look a lot better. And filmed today, the doomed young filmmakers would probably use HDV and nobody would think twice watching it, other than there'd be a lot less headaches and nauseau...

 

...but they'd still film the black and white sequences on black and white film! :D

Edited by santo
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