Cinema Tools help!

[Steven Gonzales]

I’m not sure I understand what you’re trying to do.

What stage of the production are you in, and what process is Fotokem going to do with the information you give them?

[Cobrastrike]

Sure, I have film that needs to be colored at FOTOKEM.
I want to send them an ALE or FLEX, so they can color just the footage that is on my timeline.
That is, through Cinema Tools I can give them data to pull shots from my rolls of film.
I have never before used CT and would like to read some persons experience on how to do it.
Thanks again!

[Steven Gonzales]

I haven’t sent ALE files or FLEX files back to the lab before, so perhaps some other person will have better ideas than I.

I’ve sent film lists to labs. The way I’ve worked with Cinema Tools is:

1) The lab telecine’s the negative to video. They give me an ALE or FLEX file, which give me information on which film address (camera roll, lab roll, and film edge code location for the film frames) is linked to each videotape address (tape ID number, video timecode frame).

2) I take this information and build a database in Cinema Tools. Thus for each division of the telecine process (usually each shot, sometime each camera roll) there is a Cinema Tools “card” (record) which has all the information from the FLEX or ALE, of which the most important is the film addresses (frames and camera rolls) and which video address they were transferred to (tape ID and video timecodes).

3) From this information, I use the video addresses to capture from Final Cut Pro to quicktime files. Once the footage is captured, I go back to Cinema Tools and connect each quicktime file to the proper Cinema Tools database record.

4) Then when I am done editing and need the lab to put the negative together, I create film lists. This process basically has Final Cut Pro report which quicktime file and which frames were used in the edit. This is passed to Cinema Tools, which calculates “oh, I am connected to that quicktime file. Those frames and their video timecodes match these film adddresses (camera roll and film edge codes / keycodes). ”

5) There are two versions of these lists. One is the show, in order as the shots run and tell the story. This is great for putting the movie together, but murder on pulling the negatives from the original camera rolls (since they are all out of order). So the same information is sorted not by the show’s sequence of shots, but by their order within the camera rolls. This is called a pull list.

6) At the lab, the negative cutter (or people preparing the Digital Intermediate) can pull the shots I used as they go through the pull list, grabbing each camera roll in order, then they can rearrange the chosen footage into the proper order of the film.

I don’t know if this will help you in your particular situation, but I find that an overview sometimes helps me figure things out.