Film to video transfer.

I have a feature shot on Super 16. It has conformed A/B rolls used for a blow-up festival print. I want to transfer the A/B rolls to HD for eventual television sales, perhaps even to Germany which is picky about their television product. I want to tweak the film and add new titles in Final Cut Pro. I have no need to do effects that might require a 4K transfer. The question in two parts:

What format should I transfer the film to, and should I send a hard drive (suggested brand or type?) for the film to video transfer. I'm presuming a balance between ease of post in FCP and quality.

1080/24p ProRes would be the simplest and would give you plenty of quality to do a decent enough film blowup- assuming a quality lab and all.

Noah

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> ease of post in FCP

ProRes HQ.

>quality

Uncompressed if your drives are fast enough.

If you're on FCP 7, you could try getting it onto ProRes4444. That would allow you to stay in RGB 4:4:4 and you could send that out to HDCAM SR, but that really depends on your delivery specs.

For hard drives, you may want to look at a Caldigit Firewire unit, it's configurable to RAID 1, and of course, you back that up.



www.strypesinpost.com

i know uncompressed in theory should be better than the compressed ProRes,
but i've heard of test where practically NO difference could be seen between the two.

i'd agree with Noah that the balance between ease of use and quality lies with ProRes HQ


the problem with doing a telecine direct to drive, as opposed to tape, is you don't have a super-sturdy back up.
so make sure you either store your master on a good raid-protected drive,
or have a backup of it on another drive.


nick

Eh. I think the line between ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ here is a pretty fine one. I don't personally think it'll help ? since this stuff isn't going to be color corrected or composted ? but the extra storage required would be pretty marginal. So flip a coin.

But ProRes 4444 would definitely be overkill. Since he didn't say anything about pulling keys, I'm assuming he's not planning to, so the extra chroma subsampling won't help. And the extra two bits per color channel aren't necessary since he doesn't need any extra latitude for color grading after the fact.

Anyway, that's just my take on it.

From a workflow perspective, though, I'd rather have the SR tapes than just a drive full of DPX or TIFF sequences I have to subsequently make Quicktimes from. Even if I wanted to pay the transfer house to convert them to Quicktime for me, I'd still rather have the SR tapes. But that's just me.

Hmm... Perhaps ProRes4444 would be overkill, though he did ask for quality, didn't he?

>From a workflow perspective, though, I'd rather have the SR tapes than just a drive full of DPX or
>TIFF sequences I have to subsequently make Quicktimes from

Not for me. I'd go with a drive of Quicktime in ProResHQ as that's easier to ingest into FCP (drag drop, rather than a 1:1 capture). But yea, a good RAID-1 drive (none of that WD or Lacie crap), and a single drive backup (a second RAID-1 would be better) and the RAID 5 editing array. An LTO copy would skip the 2nd back up. Then after that go to tape once the titles are done.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yup, I agree. In principle. At this point, it comes down to personal preference, I think. Me? I like having the tapes there. It leaves me free to didge them however I want ? whole reels in one go, shot-by-shot, whatever I need ? and more important, makes archiving the job trivial when I'm done. Just make all the media offline, save off a few dozen copies of the ever-precious project file, and store the tapes someplace safe. If I ever need to work on it again, I just select the media in the timeline, say "I'd like all this back please," then feed tapes into the deck (rented, borrowed, whatever) until done. That's my own personal comfort zone.

It's not true, I don't think, to say that way is objectively better or safer than the way you described. But hard drives fail far more often than SR tape, and restoring from LTO can be a fiddly, annoying, software-dependent operation. So my personal preference would be to ask for tapes.

Unless I were doing a 2K job, obviously. Since this is going to film-out, there is an argument to be made for a really high-quality, professionally supervised 2K scan of the source film ? even if it's just 16mm. Would such a transfer look better on 35 than an HD transfer? I dunno, I'm not a film expert. But if the job were to be done that way, obviously we'd be talking about DPX sequences either handled with Glue Tools, or converted to 2K ProRes 444 for editing and mastering.

I think that gets to the heart of the "trade-off" issue. If it were my film and I had the budget for it, you bet your ass I'd finish it in 2K. Because I'm an obsessive nerd. Would it really make that much practical difference in the end? Meh.

It certainly is personal preference. For me, I worked on a project where the audio master came back on digi-beta tapes. Is a real pain when I'm used to getting back wav files, which goes straight into the timeline and back out to tape. It's not too bad if it's a one off, but for every friggin' episode when the tape comes back, i have to time my lunches so I eat while it's ingesting.

Not sure if i'll request 2K for tape outs (unless it's going for finishing with a theatrical release).



www.strypesinpost.com

Whoops. I must've misread this:

Quote

It has conformed A/B rolls used for a blow-up festival print.

I thought Michael meant he was making a new print. If the job's just for tape-out, then yeah, HD transfer and an HD finish.

(Course, if it were my personal indie film, I'd want a 2K DI master that I could downconvert to HD. See above, re: obsessive nerd.)

I'll ask for 28K so the footage will match with the release of Epic. Future proof for 2010. OpenEXR/DPX whatever will store that...



www.strypesinpost.com

A 28K scan of 16mm film?

Sure, why not. I've always wanted to see the molecules.

Quote

he did ask for quality, didn't he?

sort of:

"a balance between ease of post in FCP and quality."

Thanks everyone. For clarity, our 35 blow up print was used for film festivals and reviews. From this point on, there will just be sales for domestic and foreign video and television. No plans for a new 35 print. From the consensus, it sounds like an output from the AB rolls to ProRes HQ makes sense. And captured on either a Raid drive (with backup) or SR (with backup). Last chance for input and thanks again.