Calling all the Gurus

[David Roth weiss]

Nestor,

Throw out Option 2 immediately. Low-resing all the HD material to SD is absolutely nonsensical.

To simplify the matter, the only important decision you really have to make is whether you upres the SD via Teranex, Teranex mini, or Kona 3.

Before proceeding you should do a test. No film lab worth its salt will turn you down. Trust me, if you rely on anyone else’s judgement in such a matter, you will always wonder if you made the wrong decision.

Select one or two critical SD shots from your project, preferably a shot of human face and an exterior of some sort, and run them through each of the processes and print them all to 35. Then compare them for yourself in projection at the lab.

As far as all of your questions regarding tge 35mm blowup and how its done, the lab would never go through your video shot by shot and adjust for SD vs HD during the blowup. That would take an enormous amount of time and cost, making the process prohibitively expensive. For the most part, you should consider the master you are delivering to the blowup to be as close to perfection as possible, including color correction done by someone who knows what they are doing, with gamma set specifically for a filmout.

My 2-cents…

David

“No job is worth doing more than once…”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Gary Adcock]

I agree with David

use as much of the HD content as possible, and use your existing system to do an uncompressed HD master

for this type of usage the big terranex will yield the best results, have the facility convert the SD content to HDCAM masters and use those for the offline / online process, it will give you better results and cost less than trying to do it all in facility by the hour.

every penny you pinch here will be seen on a 60ft wide screen, make your decisions carefully.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[David Roth weiss]

[gary adcock] “for this type of usage the big terranex will yield the best results”

Yep, I agree, but since its going to cost decidely more I thought Nestor should really see where the money was going by doing a test.

The rest of what you said is also great advice.

“No job is worth doing more than once…”

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Steve Covello]

I agree with not going to SD on this.

Here’s my penny’s worth: If you are satisfied with how HDV looks upconverted to HD 1080 UC via K3, then go with that as your online format in FCP. Do the cross-convert or upres [whichever you call it in this case, semantics be damned] of HDV to HDCam 1080 UC.

Then make a selects layoff reel of your SD DV footage and have it upconverted to same HD 1080 HDCam with the best process you can afford outside of just upconverting it via K3. If you don’t mind a laborious matchback process, you can save some dough by at least consolidating all your SD stuff to one or two layoffs instead of handing them over a few boxes of tapes and an EDL.

Then you can layoff your master to HDCam and do a proper color correct as mentioned previously. Be aware, also, that if your film will be making the rounds to other venues who DO NOT use film as a projection medium, you may need to have an HDCam color corrected master for HD projection, which is a whole nuther set of blacks and luma issues. And if you make a DVD in SD at some point, you will have to consider which of your “masters” will be downconverted — the online FCP version, the film-out version, or the projection screen version.

Definitely ask about this at your facility BEFORE you commit to the room setup that you book for color correct. There may be a compelling reason to do so in a projection environment rather than on an HD CRT. I can’t really say which is the best option, but I’ve at least had to explain to clients why each setup is different, and why their damn vhs screening copy doesn’t look like it should.

This may be another way of saying the same thing as the other guys just said, so pardon my redundancy.

steve covello

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Roth Weiss] “Yep, I agree, but since its going to cost decidely more I thought Nestor should really see where the money was going by doing a test.”

Depends on where you go. We have one Terranex house here in Atlanta that charges Ferrari prices, another that charges Chevy prices. Guess where I go? Also, the Terranex will be so fast and easy, it will yield the best results with the least amount of headaches.

Yeah, it will cost money, but it’s definitely the easiest way to go. I’ll second Gary on everything else.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Nestorl]

Thank you Walter. Would you mind sharing with me the name of the Atlanta facility that charges Chevy prices. You can email the info to nestorlld @ explorart.com. Also could you share in your email what would be the estimated cost of up converting a 100 minute project.

We will likely edit to tape all the raw footage we used and send them only about 100 minutes of footage in 2 tapes. Hopefully this may save some costs vs having them recapture everything from the original tapes.

Thank you so much. Nestor.

—————————
Nestor L. Lopez
Executive Vice-President
Explorart Films
http://www.explorart.com

——
Statements presented in the message are statements of opinion only and should not be considered legal advice. Please contact a qualified entertainment attorney.

[Nestorl]

Thank Steve, this is very useful. We never thought about the decision of the color correction step. It is unlikely that the film will do digital projection but we are 100% sure that it will be released in dvd. So we will for sure discuss this with the colorist. Thank you. Nestor

—————————
Nestor L. Lopez
Executive Vice-President
Explorart Films
http://www.explorart.com

——
Statements presented in the message are statements of opinion only and should not be considered legal advice. Please contact a qualified entertainment attorney.

[Nestorl]

Thank you David and Gary. It seems going with the up-converting the sd to HD prior to 35mm transfer is the option that will give us best results. Yes, we will do several tests and see if going full Teranex is doable (in terms of cost vs difference against the K3 or Terranex mini).

But I am still curious if this would still be the best option had we had only SD material (no hdv). In that case, would doing the hd intermediate would still give better results than direct to 35mm? My curiosity is about what process is used by the 35mm transfer facility to up-convert the sd material and whether provides lower quality than what a Terranex can do before the 35mm transfer. In our case, its a bit different since going sd would mean down converting the HDV footage which makes little sense.

So, anyone knows how the sd to 35mm resampling is done?

Thank you both for your help.

—————————
Nestor L. Lopez
Executive Vice-President
Explorart Films
http://www.explorart.com

——
Statements presented in the message are statements of opinion only and should not be considered legal advice. Please contact a qualified entertainment attorney.

[Sean Oneil]

Use Option 1. It’s a no-brainer.

FYI, Teranex will actually improve the quality of the DV footage.

Sean

[Uli Plank]

I’d also discuss it with the person responsible for audio. A theatrical release needs a different mix than the one on DVD, don’t rely on automatics.

Another option you may want to test is one that we learned from “American Cinematographer” and we used it for the film-transfer of “Lost Children”: Uprezzing with Photo Zoom Pro (ex S-Spline), normally used for stills. Our footage was progressive (from a DVX-100) and sometimes very noisy (undercover shooting at dawn). It looked pretty impressive on film, but sometimes a bit like ‘painting’ instead of ‘photography’. The Process is tedious and slow, since you’ll need to work with batches of single frames.

So you see, up-rezzing depends very much on the footage you have, you’ll need tests of the full workflow under any circumstances.

If you need to skimp anywhere, don’t skimp on color correction!

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.