b/w developer / high-res transfer tests [update]

Post by **christoph** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 1:15 am

ok, i did some tests with various developers the other day to see which one transfers best with my unit, and while it might take a few days until i have time to properly analyze everything here is a teaser

(click for full frame)

more about developer, cameras etc later, time to go to bed (soon ;)
++ christoph ++

ps: the above is the original frame grab, most people would probably preffere a somewhat sharpened version (although i'll have to see what happens to the grain in motion)

Post by **mattias** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 2:13 am

cool. very nice latitude. the low contrast in the film is probably due to the weather, but there's no excessive contrast in the transfer either. did you develop this flatter or something? there's not a single dead black and hardly any burnt out white pixels in the entire image.

/matt

Post by **VideoFred** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 8:20 am

Well done! 8)

Is this Berlin?
Strange... it could be Ghent, too.
We have the same buildings here.
It looks so familiar to me.

Fred.

Post by **david** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 10:52 am

I'm really curious to see it in motion, even the original frame grab looks really sharp. And dynamic range seems great too.

Waiting for infos about chemicals used, dilution, times etc.

Thanks for posting this.

david

Post by **christoph** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 11:09 am

mattias wrote:cool. very nice latitude. the low contrast in the film is probably due to the weather, but there's no excessive contrast in the transfer either. did you develop this flatter or something? there's not a single dead black and hardly any burnt out white pixels in the entire image.

yeah was indeed a very low contrast day, wanted to shoot some stuff with sun too but that usually means to wait till summer here in berlin ;)
this sample was processed in a negative developer (prolly xtol, will have to check notes) so transfer contrast is a non issue - it hardly uses half of the histogram. the downside seem to be that seperation is not as good.

VideoFred wrote:Is this Berlin?
Strange... it could be Ghent, too.

yeah, that's in front of my door :)
i thought about driving over to ghent and asking you about a projector modification :) .. it's 7hours to drive though :/

++ christoph ++

ps: camera on this part was a 5008 as far as i remember, 6-80mm, focus set to 8m, f-stop around 4, 7mm on zoom, exposed at 100ASA.

Post by **VideoFred** » Thu Jan 18, 2007 11:33 am

christoph wrote:

yeah, that's in front of my door

I grew up in an environtment like this.. I love it.
I'm a city man 8)

i thought about driving over to ghent and asking you about a projector modification .. it's 7hours to drive though :/

Try e-mail first :lol:

Fred.

Post by **studiocarter** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 3:35 am

Hi,

That picture is 1253 x 918 pixels. Is that Pal HD???

Local new cameras are 1080i that play on a progressive DVD player and screen so it becomes progressive from the camera interlace. A film capture would be progressive anyway.

Michael Carter

Post by **christoph** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 3:51 am

studiocarter wrote:That picture is 1253 x 918 pixels. Is that Pal HD???

nope, thats cropped (minus sproket holes etc) 1376x1024 machine vision cam resolution ;)

final storage medium will most likely be 1K (1024x778) or if i'm feeling crazy 1280x960.
++ christoph

Post by **MovieStuff** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 5:01 am

Looks great! Love to see it move!

Roger

Post by **johnnhud** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 6:44 am

Please stop posting these images! I can't afford a new high rez camera and your postings are just frustrating me! Oh well, back to my SD camera....

Post by **wado1942** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 8:38 am

Funny, one of my best friends' name was Christoph, a keyboard player who moved to your area from Texas. He's a retro guy too.
Great image. I'd love to see all the technical specs about how it was developed and transferred.

Post by **Skylab001** » Fri Jan 19, 2007 8:49 pm

what machine vision cam are you using with your set-up? Sorry I know you've been working on the Hi-res telecine for a while so you may have mentioned it in other posts but I've been so busy I've probably missed them. And are you using this cam with a WP or home built system?

Post by **christoph** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 8:32 pm

ok, here's some more:

all shots are from the same roll, plus-x exposed 100ASA, downsampled to 1K color corrected to the same brightness and slightly sharpened ...

developed in D76 as negative

developed in D94A as negative

developed in D94A/R10/D95 as reversal

a zip archive of the original size .png files without any resizing/filtering can be found here (2.2MB)

and for those who are interested in the pure original scans, there's a zip archive of the above pics here (6.9MB)
be warned though that those are linear 16bit files, so they look like crap unless you adjust them properly in photoshop or the like.

i had some shots in XTol as well, but unfortunately i exposed that part of the roll as 25ASA, so they are pretty blown out. i'd expect them to look slightly finer grained than the D76 tests.

it's strange how much sharpness you loose in the reversal process, they were all scanned in the same batch, so it's unlikely that it's a focus problem (unless the silver layer shifts a lot).

actually if you look at the D94A negative shot a lot of detail has already gone there.. shows again that it's very hard to make a high contrast developer that keeps fine detail. the upshot is that there's hardly any grain ;)

oh well, now to the night shots.
++ christoph ++

Post by **paul** » Mon Jan 22, 2007 10:17 pm

christoph wrote: i thought about driving over to ghent and asking you about a projector modification .. it's 7hours to drive though :/

++ christoph ++

Ghent is great! I 've been there a few times. Together wth Brughes it's worth the drive>

Post by aj » Mon Jan 22, 2007 11:25 pm

For comparison you may want to have a look here : http://www.super8.nl/english/e_frame_research_chem.htm
Plenty of examples, use the TEST buttons at the top and click the images...