Dream Project - or is it a Nightmare?

CFong wrote on 7/24/2007, 9:08 AM
Hi all -
Before I get myself into a thicket of adversity I thought I'd get some sage advice from y'all.

My situation: I'm just getting my feet wet in editing video on a PC. My background has been 16mm industrial film production followed by industrial videotape and a several year hiatus ...

We use Vegas in our sound production facility and I've become semi-proficient with it in audio. We recently acquired a low-end video camera (Canon HV20) to experiment with making some industrial/demo videos for in-house E&T. The transition from audio only to video projects in Vegas has been pretty seamless.

Now for the Dream/Nightmare:
We've been approached by our local movie theatre to possibly produce a 'policy trailer' - 'Feet off the seats, use the trash bins" etc. The theatre runs 35mm film exclusively and has only dim, long-term plans to add any digital projection. ("It's too expensive right now and the standards are a moving target!" ) - But they want a 'personalized' trailer and are willing to pay for it...

In a previous life, our 'best scenario' workflow would have been Rent 35 camera, shoot, edit, print, deliver... (Been there, done that, mucho $$$ for good results.)

Second best scenario would have been "Shoot with our 16mm equipment, edit, blowup to 35, deliver... (BTDT, know how to do it and can avoid most of the pitfalls and get fair results for somewhat less than the mucho $$$ of option 1)

How crazy/nuts would it be to attempt Scenario 3: shoot with the cheap camera, edit on Vegas, convert to 35mm, deliver... ?

How bad would the end result be compared to the 16mm/blowup route?

Thanks in advance for opinions/suggestions...

C.

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 7/24/2007, 9:26 AM
I know how they convert film to video and digital video to tape but how do you convert digital video to 35mm film?

JJK
richard-courtney wrote on 7/24/2007, 9:40 AM
Using an optical printer. Kodak does this service and several others.
There was a great link on how "Big Idea" did there printing to film for their
Jonah movie a few years ago in one of the Linux magazines. I'll post the
link.

A laser machine "prints" each frame and burns the audio tracks.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/24/2007, 9:41 AM
they don't have a digital projector for those kinda of things? many theatures (even the local small town one) have some type of LCD projector. That would make things easier. :D

EDIT: FYI, SD looks pretty good on big screens if you have a decent projector.
rs170a wrote on 7/24/2007, 9:46 AM
...how do you convert digital video to 35mm film?

From DV film's FAQ page (#10):

Your NTSC master tape is captured into our computer system, and then selectively deinterlaced and resampled at 24 fps. PAL projects are deinterlaced and slowed down to 24 fps. The resulting image frames are then recorded onto 35mm or 16mm negative at 2K resolution with a proprietary film recorder. The audio from your master tape is transferred to timecode DAT, and then transferred to optical sound negative in Dolby SR (for 35mm) or mono (for 16mm). PAL audio is time-expanded 4% to play back at 24 fps without altering the pitch of voices. The picture and soundtrack negatives are then printed to positive film on a contact printer. The resulting print is compatible with any movie theater system, worldwide.

Here's the video to film conversion rate.
Be sure to check out their entire FAQ for more tips, suggestions, etc..

NTSC/PAL/Quicktime to 35mm transfers
Short Films: US$350/min*
Features: US$275/min

NTSC/PAL/Quicktime to 16mm transfers
Short Films: US$250/min*
Features: US$175/min

* 3-minute minimum charge for all sound print transfers.

Mike
Paul Fierlinger wrote on 7/24/2007, 9:50 AM
I'm on the same track to convert digital video to 35 mm film, though I haven't arrived there yet -- just researched this a bit. Vegas seems to be already designed for preparing its time line for the task of scanning digital images to film. Under tools/Scripting find "Render Image Sequence" at the bottom of the menu. This is all you need to take to a conversion house.

There are many facilities around the world that will take your image sequence and scan each frame to 35 mm film. If you are on a low budget, look into facilities outside of the U.S., beginning with Canada and ending with the former East European countries. I've been told that Denmark offers very good and inexpensive services too.
bakerja wrote on 7/24/2007, 10:22 AM
I would think this service will be very expensive in the near future. With movie theatres switching to DLP projection, film has a very limited life expectancy.

JAB
Paul Fierlinger wrote on 7/24/2007, 10:37 AM
I wanted to make some conversion tests right away to see what I am dealing with and my producer told me not to rush, because our distributors may not even have to go the film route by the time I'm finished -- which will be late 2008 or early 2009.
farss wrote on 7/24/2007, 3:47 PM
Before you even start the idea has a basic flaw.

35mm prints do not last very long, I've never seen this done in a cinema for that very reason. The "Switch off you phone" type things are either projected from a LCD projector as graphics or from a 35mm slide projector. Keep in mind that ads etc have to be spliced onto the start of the reels and you'll get an idea of the problem. They'll need a large number of prints of this production, not that short run prints are that expensive just that the whole idea seems backwards compared to what is normal cinema practice.


Having said all that the norm for a 35mm film out is a dpx sequence, pretty big files, my 2K dpx files are 13MB / frame, not really a show stopper for a 60 second ad. Many film out places can also print from the Cineform codec, saves a lot of disk space.

But to save money here's what I do. Shoot 24p with any of a number of HDV cameras. Edit in Vegas and export an image sequence. Add titles and graphics using PS and export as a tiff or dpx sequence. This keeps the text and graphics as sharp as possible, they're what the eye really notices. If the HDV starts to look a bit wonky, like too soft, scale it down in the frame. For best results work at 4K res, get a copy of the SMPTE specs for the frame sizes. Keep in mind you're only looking at around 1,000 frames probably so batching through PS is very practical. Also keep in mind that HDV is not 24fps, it's 23.976. Shouldn't be an issue with such a short production and working with image sequences should negate this problem.

Bob.
Spot|DSE wrote on 7/24/2007, 5:46 PM
We've done a few of these, including hosting a contest for this on the VASST site last year. Delivery has always been DVD in wide format. It looks very good projected,. provided that as with all compressed formats, you try to keep contrast high, avoid super-reds, and try to avoid large areas that contain gradients. Compression, regardless of source formats isn't kind to gradients or high motion, and by minimizing this sort of content, you can get great results for DVD delivery and projected imagery.
Cost is very minimal, one of the small theatre chains we've done this for is planning on stepping it up to BD fairly soon, as the owner is somewhat of a techhead.
farss wrote on 7/24/2007, 6:09 PM
I assume the cinemas you did this for had a suitable video projector?

I've shown many movies off DVCAM in cinemas through a 2K lumen LCD projector and the SD DV sourced material looked OK, just like watching a giant TV. As spot said if going down this path keep everything brightly lit, don't even think about trying to make it look 'filmic', I say this as I was also screening movies from 35mm to DVCAM transfers and it looked way worse than the DV. To fill a cinema screen with a decent filmic image you need LOTs of lumens, 6K as a minimum, over 10K is better. And those projectors cost big time.

The other thing you might need to think about if this cinema isn't too tech savvy is most use an AMX automation system, so they'll most likely want a DVD player that supports AMX automation. This seems to be one reason why the cinemas I've been in still use Sony Minidisc players, they use the automation to start / stop the background music.