Questions about 2k & 1080 to film

[Juan Salvo]

A lot of films are going this route, provided you have a clean telecine this can be accomplished. The very best quality is attained by going to a HDCAM-SR tape in RGB Log, and doing your color correction and effects/compositing in Log space.

Hope that helps.

Juan

[Donatello]

so you took your super 16 neg and ??
did a HD 1920×1080 24p telecine to hard drive or you went to HD tape at 1080i ?
or you did a neg 2k scan to data files ?

[Adam Levine]

My $0.02, maybe worth what it costs 😉 :

I agree entirely with Jaun. Especially at HD-Cam SR, your picture will look brilliant. The picture I’ve seen from 35mm x-fers for HDCam SR look phenomenal on a good monitor though S16 definitely shows a lot more grain, as is to be expected (though depending on the narrative this can work in your favor). Though also, less expensive options like HDCam and Varicam will also yield excellent results, imo, but limited by their color undersampling. Also run off DVCam offline cassettes at the same time with both 60i and 24P TC burn, as well as film code and sound reel windows (I would pull up all the footage from your DVCam offline cassettes before you start and cut at 23.976). You can cut on any DV system and then online to an SR deck. I’m a total cynic when it comes to heavily compressed HD formats, but the Sony SR decks and cameras give an ubelievale picture (despite noticable pixilation when projected on VERY large screens i.e., over 25 ft tall). You will need a dual-link SDI card or Multibridge Extreme, and some mighty fast and copious drives for your online and color sessions.

A downside of doing such a high-end HD master is that you will have to downconvert and have a variety of screening masters for diffent projectors in different theaters/screening rooms (not to mention, duplicate textless masters for foreign). The last S16 project that I finished on Sony SR 4:4:4 12-bit looked phenomenal when projected natively, and even pretty good on the DigiBeta anamorphic downconvert I saw it projected on at a local film fest (this will also germaine to your DVD, unless HD-DVD somehow hit the market soon).

I must say, the interplay of the unevenely spaced and sized grain from film on a 1080×1920 pixel grid looked prety freaking cool and different, though not so much that it calls attention to itself.

One final point/question: why not just shoot on CineAlta SR and remove the middle man (processing/telecine)? They have setups now where you can spit out offline cassettes while shooting which is killer for assistant editors and editors.

[Aaron Neitz]

Thanks Adam!

We shot on super-16, the new Kodak 500 stock, because simply, it looked really good. We could shoot in low light/street conditions, pushing the stock, and get beautiful looking night shots…and in daytime the grain is super fine for 16. (That, and they gave us like 40,000 free feet of it.) For the project, film still gave us that look that HD acquisition couldn’t.

There will be some groundwork as we got Digibeta best-lite dailies, have been cutting at 24fps, and will have to re-align timecode as FCP still has a timecode relationship to the 30fps world.

[Aaron Neitz]

no, it’s been shot 16. we got best-lite dailies on digibeta 30fps, cutting at 24fps. Now that the possibility of a theatrical release is looming, we’re considering our options based on performace vs. $

[Donatello]

it seems your weakest link is the NTSC digibeta ( though it is a excellent format)

are you considering going back to the negative to transfer HD or scan 2k ?

you might be able to get your pulled neg ( shot used in film) for ?? 5K

look over at http://www.pixelharvest.com transfer 2k resolution to 10bit cineform codec ..