Film processing and transfer is charged by the foot, except for a process such as grading, which is often charged by the hour.
SCREENING PRINTS
35mm prints are the favoured format for the screening of any films in a cinema projection environment. 16mm prints can also be screened at many festivals, but prints can only be screened on standard 16mm not Super 16mm; because Super 16mm uses the extra width of the film that would normally hold the magnetic audio track and perforations, it can’t be projected with a soundtrack, so standard 16mm with it 4:3 aspect ratio is the only form of 16mm screening print.
The creation of 35mm screening prints is a complicated procedure that takes place at a film lab. Films that have been shot on 35mm are usually edited from video transfers to produce an EDL. This EDL is then given to the neg cutter at the lab who reassembles the edit using the frame and roll time code references from the EDL. Any elements of the finished film that do not appear on the original negative such as effects, titles and credits have to be optically transferred onto a 35mm negative and spliced into the master negative.
Once the neg has been cut and spliced together, an initial positive print is made, referred to as a work print or mute print. From a screening of this at the lab, a fine tuning of grading or colour timing can be decided, with subsequent work prints then generated until it is a close as possible to the desired look. The next print produced and screened is a trial print, complete with the magnetic soundtrack strip that is created by the lab from the audio master. If this is satisfactory, then a final answer print is created, from which any subsequent screening prints are struck.
Prints can also be made directly from a video format. Depending on the resolution of the video master, this can be a straightforward method of creating a 35mm print, as no opticals need to be created; titles and effects can all be transferred directly from the video master. This video to film procedure is, however, extremely expensive.
BUDGET SAVING
Although film is an expensive medium, there are a number of ways in which you can reduce the potential costs involved. The costs of shooting on film break down into three main areas: buying stock, hiring camera equipment and processing.
When purchasing stock, it is possible to get substantial discounts. Distributors are competitive in their pricing so you should try as many as possible, and explain the nature of your production. Short ends and re-cans can also be purchased. Short ends are lengths of unexposed stock that have been left over from another shoot, while re-cans are entire rolls of stock that have been loaded into a magazine but never used, so resealed back in the tin. These can be obtained very cheaply and are perfectly fine to shoot a short film on. They should, however, be clip tested to make sure the stock is still good. Clip testing is when a small length of the film is processed to ensure it is performing properly.
There is a huge amount of film camera equipment available for hire. While large rental companies will offer you the latest, most expensive model of a camera, it is also possible to find small companies that will rent older gear that will be perfectly suited to shooting short films on and at fraction of the cost. Always check that any camera you use has been recently tested and is compatible with the rest of your equipment.
Post-production houses and processing labs also run competitive pricing policies, and will often have rates for short films or student films. Because processing and transfer prices are charged by the foot, small fluctuations can make a huge difference when you are processing or transferring thousands of feet. The other way in which you can save money is to provide your own tape stock. When transferring film to video formats, you will also be charged the price of the tape or tapes, and this will generally be much more expensive than if you purchased them yourself. So the cheapest option is to buy them yourself and give them to the lab when you are handing in your rushes.
FILM RESOLUTION
Film negative, though not initially composed of lines, is often transferred into a digital video format for post-production. One of the areas where you can see how far images captured on film out-perform digital capture is with new Digital Intermediate technology, where film negative is scanned into digital files. These files again have a resolution consisting of lines. Currently Super 16mm is scanned at 2K (about 2,000 lines depending on aspect ratio) and 35mm at 4K (about 4,000 lines depending on aspect ratio). 35mm negatives, however, contain so much initial resolution that they can be resolved up to 9K. This amount of information cannot at present be processed at the speeds necessary, but goes some way to showing how much higher-quality film images potentially are, compared to current state of the art digital capture such as HD.
14. SUPER 16MM (S16)
Super 16mm is a film format that is widely used throughout the film and television industry for low-budget feature films, TV dramas, commercials and music promos. It is a very high-resolution format that is ideal for shooting short films that have the necessary budget.
If you are after a cinematic look then S16 is probably the format for you. Although technically less than half the quality of 35mm and without quite the same shallow depth of field capabilities, when used with expertise it can deliver stunning results. Both Super 16mm and standard 16mm formats used to be synonymous with a grainy look that was not comparable to 35mm, but in recent years the technology involved in creating film stocks has improved dramatically. This has led to massive improvements in the quality of the images you can achieve with Super 16mm and made the format more versatile. When combined with the right post-production, its qualities can be enhanced even further.
Super 16mm is shot on 16mm film, but unlike standard 16mm film, which has perforations on both sides of the film and therefore a squarer frame, Super 16mm only has perforations along one side, allowing the rest of the area to be used for the image, giving it a widescreen aspect ratio of 1.66:1 which makes it perfect for transfer to 35mm film or broadcast on 16:9 widescreen television or for transfer to a 35mm print with its similar aspect ratio of 1.85:1.
SUPER 16MM VERSUS 35MM
Super 16mm doesn’t have the same image quality that 35mm does, due mainly to the fact that the image is just under half the size of 35mm; but this has many positive repercussions.
Modern S16 cameras and accessories are generally much more diminutive than their 35mm counterparts, in many cases at least half the size; this means that they are lighter and more manoeuvrable. This makes S16 perfect for handheld camera work and situations where the mobility of the camera is paramount. Nearly everything is downsized compared to 35mm, so you are generally dealing with half the mass of equipment, enabling you to move more quickly between shot set ups and even locations, which is vital when you are on a tight schedule and you need to remain mobile.
The smaller image size of Super 16 also means it requires much smaller quantities of light to achieve a properly exposed image. How much light you will need for a given scene depends on what style of lighting you are trying to create and the scope of the shot, but S16 requires less than 35mm and so has better capabilities in situations where you are limited by the amount of artificial light you can obtain. Yet again this can mean substantially less lighting equipment to hire and move about.
The third and very important factor in choosing S16 is the amount that you can shoot on it. Again due to its smaller frame size, a standard 400ft roll of S16 film will allow you to shoot for longer periods than 35mm. At 24 frames per second (FPS) a 400ft roll of S16 will last roughly 11 minutes, whereas a 400ft roll of 35mm will last about 4.5 minutes. The results of this are manifold. On a practical level this means that you can shoot continuously for longer periods, which results in less time being lost changing magazines and loading new ones.
However, the really important benefits of this stock to shooting ratio become apparent when you look at the entire workflow of shooting on film. Not only do you need less stock in the first place, but you also need less processing, transfer, printing and storage capacity.
This is often th
e reason people choose to shoot on S16 rather than 35mm. Generally most processes, whether it is negative development, telecine or digital scanning, are worked out as a price per foot of your negative. So, for example, if you were having 60 minutes of rushes that you had shot at 24 FPS developed and telecined onto another format, you would be paying an agreed price for each foot of the original negative to go through each process. An hour of rushes on 35mm would be approximately 900ft; on S16 it would only be 364ft.
When you start to look at the financial ramifications of this, then S16 becomes a very cost-efficient format compared to 35mm. As an example for budget comparison, let’s imagine that you were going to shoot an hour’s worth of rushes on either 35mm or S16mm, then have the negative developed and transferred to a digital format. To achieve this on 35mm you would need roughly 14 × 400ft rolls to shoot for an hour. (35mm colour stock can be anything from 10% to 90% more expensive per roll than S16, but generally about 70% more.) An hour of rushes would be roughly 5,400ft of 35mm negative. On S16 you would need roughly 6 × 400ft rolls of film. An hour of rushes would be roughly 2,160ft.
When you begin to work out the costs entailed you will begin to see how shooting on S16 compared to 35mm can cut costs by dramatic amounts. Obviously it is not always as straightforward as this and can depend on what workflow you are intending to use. If you wanted to have a 35mm screening print at the end of your workflow then there are the costs of getting an optical blow up from S16mm to take into consideration. But as far as shooting and developing are concerned S16 can work out at as much as three times less expensive than 35mm (see format price scale).
For post-production, however, the size of S16 is a drawback. S16 positive prints cannot be screened in cinemas. Because the widescreen aspect ratio uses up the section of the film where conventionally the sound strip would have been, either an expensive 35mm blow up needs to be performed or it has to be transferred to video involving a loss of quality.
SUPER 16MM VERSUS VIDEO
The resolution and performance of S16 is way above standard-definition video. However, high-definition video is only a tiny bit under the resolution of S16 transferred to digital, with many S16 workflows being transferred to HD for post-production and screening. So as far as detail of the image goes, HD is certainly a close rival of S16. However, this is just resolution, and what makes film look like film is the latitude of the colours it can reproduce and the way in which it records the image, allowing for creative use of features such as shallow depth of field, variety of lens types and variable frame rates. There are HD cameras that can reproduce nearly everything that can be achieved with S16, but at present these are the very high-end HD cameras, that may be more expensive to rent for a day than hiring a S16 kit, buying stock and processing.
POTENTIAL WORKFLOWS
Once you have shot your film on S16 there are various different ways that you can work with the rushes to produce a finished film. Due to the fact that S16 is a very high-resolution format, the workflows are designed to preserve its quality. These are examples of common workflows that filmmakers use when having shot on Super 16.
Workflow 1
Shoot on S16 – develop negative – telecine to DV – offline edit – neg cut from EDL – 35mm blow up from 16mm negative.
This workflow may seem complicated but it is actually fairly straightforward. The film stock that has been shot is taken to a lab where the negative is developed. This developed neg is then transferred to video via telecine. The quality and format is not of primary importance here, as this video version is only for offline editing. So for example it could be transferred to MiniDV that could then be loaded onto a computer-based editing system like Final Cut Pro. The footage is then synced with the audio on the computer and edited until a definitive version is finalised. An edit decision list or EDL is then produced from the editing software and given to a neg cutter at the lab who uses it to recreate the computer edit with the original negative. This is then optically blown up to a 35mm print to which a master of the audio can be added thus creating a screening print for exhibition. This is an expensive but very high-quality workflow.
Figure 30. Workflows 1, 2 and 3.
Workflow 2
Shoot on S16 – develop negative – telecine to Digibeta master – online edit – 35mm transfer from Digibeta.
This workflow involves a neg development then telecine transfer to Digibeta. Another version on MiniDV could also be produced for an offline edit. The online edit could be performed on an Avid suite with the Digibeta until the final version was reached. This would provide a Digibeta version for screening and could also be transferred to 35mm for exhibition screening.
This is a much more economical workflow, but much of the quality of the original negative is lost in the final version.
Workflow 3
Shoot on S16 – develop negative – digital scan to hard drive at 2K – online edit – 35mm transfer from digital version.
This workflow uses Digital Intermediate Technology. It’s very efficient and less expensive than workflow 1, but relies on using a high-end editing system than can handle the large files involved in playing back and manipulating the uncompressed footage. S16 is digitally scanned at a resolution of 2,000 lines (2K), which produces very large digital files.
15. 35MM
35mm film is the industry standard format for shooting and screening feature films. It has been used for filmmaking for over 100 years and, although it has been through many incarnations, still remains unsurpassed in its resolution and general performance.
Despite there being much talk about HD video formats beginning to rival the quality of 35mm film, they are still nowhere near the quality that 35mm provides and the recent improvements in film stock technology have ensured that it will remain the highest resolution format for a very long time.
Everyone will be familiar with the look of 35mm; nearly every major feature film has been shot on it, and in the right hands it has huge capabilities. The colour reproduction and shallow depth of field make it ideal for capturing any type of look.
The only major drawback to shooting your film on 35mm is that it is extremely expensive. This does not just mean that the film stock itself is expensive, but also the cameras, lenses and grip gear that go with it. A larger format than S16, 35mm also requires more light to achieve an adequate exposure. 35mm does not really lend itself to any projects that require small crews and fast working speeds. Choosing 35mm as an acquisition format not only means that you have to have the financial resources, but also the time and patience to create the right conditions for its use.
Academy
35mm is called 35mm because that’s how wide the frame is; the film has sprocket holes (perforations) along the edge. The conventional aspect ratio to shoot 35mm at is 1.37:1, which is referred to as academy. This means that each frame has four perforations down its sides. It is, however, not always screened at this aspect ratio. Often it will be letterboxed (see aspect ratio) to give a 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio.
Figure 31. Academy and 3-perf aspect ratios. Image courtesy of www.wikipedia.org.
3-perf
Because the academy aspect ratio uses the full four perforations of each frame, the resulting image is much larger than is needed, if it is only going to be projected or screened at a 1.85:1 widescreen ratio. This results in there being a lot of waste film that is never shown. 3-perf is a camera system that only pulls down three perforations to create each frame with, which results in an aspect ratio that is instantly closer to 1.85:1 which means less stock is used. The effect of this means a 400ft roll of film will last considerably longer than at normal 4-perf, meaning that processing costs also come down. The only problem with 3-perf is that it cannot be projected, so it is only viable for films undergoing a Digital Intermediate process.
POTENTIAL WORKFLOWS
Film is now usually transferred into a digital form for post-production. Conventionally, 35mm film was edited from an offline edit and then the neg
ative was cut from the EDL and prints for screening were made. This is rapidly becoming an obsolete process, however, with more and more 35mm films benefiting from an entirely digital post-production before being laser-scanned back out to a 35mm print. With the advent of cinemas switching to digital projection, the 35mm film screening print will potentially become redundant.
Figure 32. Workflows 1 and 2.
These are examples of common workflows that filmmakers use when shooting on 35mm.
Workflow 1
Shoot on 35mm – develop negative – telecine to DV – offline edit – neg cut from EDL – create positive screening prints.
This is a very traditional workflow for 35mm. Creating an offline DV version allows the film to be digitally edited on a computer, with no need to touch the negative until the final version is ready. A neg cutter then assembles the negative according to the EDL and prints can be made for screening directly from the negative. The drawback to this workflow is that any titles, credits and digital effects need to be created for the 35mm screening prints too, which can be expensive processes.
Workflow 2
Short Films Page 11
