16mm film project digitally transferred-what is best format/codec?

spidermonkey wrote on 3/10/2003, 11:21 AM

Hello All,

I have a friend who shot a feature in 16mm. He has edited the thing on a flat bed if you can believe it but now wants to forego the purist's path and switch to Digital and use Vegas for sound editing and touch up. I believe that his ultimate format will be DVD, probably MPEG-2 but he may want to retransfer back to 16mm for film festivals upon completion.

He is having the 16mm film transferred to a digital format. The question is, what digital format would be best?

He has a fairly decent new editing system with a 2GHz Xeon processor machine and lots of RAM. Not sure what vid. card he ended up with but I can get that information. I don't think he went SCSI on the drives but it should be fast enough to get by.

I did some searches and couldn't find any previous posts that specifically related to this topic.

Thank you,

Tyler

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/10/2003, 12:39 PM

I would definately suggest AVI. Probably a DV .avi file would be most useful. How long is the movie? DV is about 225MB/minute. Perhaps the transfer house can put the DV .avi file onto a MiniDV tape for him.

Any other compressed formats such as MPEG are not going to work well for editing. Vegas is build around the DV format and using this as the source will result in minimal quality loss. MPEG-2 should be the final format for the DVD after the editing is done.