35m to Beta SP

[Mike Smith]

Hi Boritz

Your friend’s feature could have been filmed in a number of different ways on 35mm film stock, for viewing in different film (or video ) aspect rations. The choices include (but are not limited to!) anamorphic widescreen, cropped widescreen and “academy ratio” – 4:3. Your friend should know what was used, and why.

The telecine operator will have tried, probably, to stay close to the desired original aspect ratio, and will have output either either “squeezed” (anamorphic) widescreen in 16:9, or just possibly, academy ratio – again, whoever commissioned the telecine should know. So you should be able to trace the desired picture aspect ratio that way, and compare that with your intended output ( why would you want to re-edit the feature, on video ..?)

Betacam SP with a good telecine supplying the images should have produced an excellent recording, in full broadcast quality. Editing it in DV will substantially cut the picture quality – not really desirable if you intend to broadcast your edited version, but maybe no trouble if you do not plan to add effects or try colour correction, and plan final output as DVD (just about), VHS or some compressed format.

Otherwise your choice of codec will depend on what your capture card will support – uncompressed 10 bit would be good, but put a heavy load on system storage and other resources. Unless you edit uncompressed 10 bit, it’s not likely that using DigiBeta would have improved the end result – and even then it’s quite likely that the quality of the telecine transfer will be the limiting factor …

Hope this helps.

[Boritz]

Thanks Mike I will ask what aspect, I’ve not seen the beta’s yet and was not sure if it could record anamorphic, however they are the rushes so want to keep up the quality. I do not have a capture card but was thinking of Cineform AspectHD or Huffyuv codec. I realise the correct way would be from film to hard drive but its been done now and there are about five hours of rushes.

[Mike Smith]

Good luck Boritz – sounds like a fun project.

I didn’t take in that you’re doing the main edit – slow of me.

I gues issues for you may include how to complete: if you don’t have a scanned hi-res version, and want film output, you may be wanting to go back to the negative and have a neg cut at the end – in which case you’ll need some system / software to track the negative edge numbers and tie them up with your video edit ..? I think you may be disappointed by a standard-def video-to-film transfer. If you are going to a neg cut, of course, you don’t have to worry nearly so much about quality / choice of codec – you can choose somemthing more compressed and ease the load on your system.

Don’t know how you’ll get the video onto your system without a capture card .. unless you maybe run it through something to convert to DV and take it in firewire. In which case you might as well capture in DV codec.

And five hours of rushes

[Mike Smith]

Good luck Boritz – sounds like a fun project.

I didn’t take in that you’re doing the main edit – slow of me.

I gues issues for you may include how to complete: if you don’t have a scanned hi-res version, and want film output, you may be wanting to go back to the negative and have a neg cut at the end for your master version – in which case you’ll need some system / software to track the negative edge numbers and tie them up with your video edit ..? I think you may be disappointed by a standard-def video-to-film transfer. If you are going to a neg cut, of course, you don’t have to worry nearly so much about quality / choice of codec – you can choose somemthing more compressed and ease the load on your system.

Don’t know how you’ll get the video onto your system without a capture card .. unless you maybe run it through something to convert to DV and take it in firewire. In which case you might as well capture in DV codec.

Five hours of rushes will take pretty well all of your disc space, in uncompressed … but it’s very little to play with to put a full length feature together ..

So definitely good luck!

Mike