"The difficulty of projecting and scanning color negative stock is the
reason why the discontinuation of 100D is such a blow for amateur and no budget
analog filmmaking."
This is indeed the dreadful blow that has been dealt to low budget film
enthusiasts, film students (as opposed to students of digital video) and
experimental filmmakers everywhere.
________________________________
From: Florian Cramer <flrnc...@gmail.com>
To: Experimental Film Discussion List <frameworks@jonasmekasfilms.com>
Sent: Saturday, 25 May 2013, 15:34
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] a question about negative film stock for s-8mm
Hello,
The colorist said that my material was not excellent, but well within
>the normal-to-good range for S8mm. He said I should have worked with
>reversal film, because Super-8 cameras were never designed and
>calibrated for negative stock and cannot thus yield good results on
>negative emulsion.
>
Sorry for my language, but you've been told utter bullshit. Of course, Super 8
cameras can perfectly expose negative stock - just like any analog photo camera
can expose negative stock. After all, analog photography and cinematography are
about a lens, a shutter and film emulsion, and your Schneider is optically
better than many photo camera lenses!
Negative stock is much more difficult to scan because of its orange mask and
high dynamic range. You need a scanner whose sensor chip has deep color
resolution and a high dynamic range - 13 f-stops for Vision3 50D, for example.
Otherwise, there won't be enough color information to filter out the orange
mask without muted colors and clipped highlights/shadows resulting. Which is
what you got.
Most low- and mid-end film scanners (such as MWA Flashscan and Müller HM73)
that are typically used by affordable film scanning service providers use
industrial video cameras such as the Pike F-145 for the scanning/digitization.
The Pike is equipped with a Sony ICX285 CCD sensor that has a dynamic range of
about 67db, the equivalent of 11 f-stops. So you'll lose at least two f-stops
when scanning Vision3 with one the above scanners. Reversal film has a much
lower dynamic range - 100D about 8 f-stops - so scanning it on these systems is
unproblematic.
I'm no expert on good scanning services for Super 8 stock (AVP in Munich has an
outstanding reputation and works with a Rank Cintel), but
here's an example (not exactly my cup of tea of film) of Vision3 Super 8
scanned relatively inexpensively by Ochoypico [http://www.ochoypico.com] in
Spain, a company whose scanning results always struck me as very "filmic":
http://www.filmkorn.org/scharfe-vision-200t-und-500t-in-super-8/ (You could
still criticize the result for having a green tint, but probably this could
fixed with run-of-the-mill digital color correction.)
The difficulty of projecting and scanning color negative stock is the reason
why the discontinuation of 100D is such a blow for amateur and no budget analog
filmmaking.
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