Best practices with the Video WorkPrinter

[jessh]

If you want an analog camera you might try and find a Sony TR700, they seem to go for reasonable prices on ebay, last one I saw went for $120. It is a high end Hi8 camera, with manual exposure, white balance and focus. has 1/3" CCD's and gives great results for Hi8 (used to be Sony's top of the line 1chip prosumer).

~Jess

[studiocarter]

just a quick note about manual exposures.
Kodachrome R8 film has tremendous range of lights to darks. Old movie films in hand have deep shadow and white car, white shirt or yellow jacket. How to expose it? Default exposure burns out the white car and shirt because there is so much shadow in the frame. Manual exposure darkened it enough to show detail in the lights but the darks went black?? The yellow jacket burned out on high exposures but the grass looked better.
My decision was to retain the details in the lightest lights of the subject, not a background white house or sky chunk showing above a fence. Details on the white car and white shirt were retained and the details were retained on the yellow jacket. Darks went where ever they went.
Upon making a SVCD and viewing on the television, it was too dark, so, contrast and brightness were adjusted on the television.
WAALAA! Fabulous color in the darks. Looks just like the film! The lights didn't burn out and retained all the detail in them. The darks lightened up so you could see them.
I havn't gotten any good pictures of the TV yet. Perhaps a tripod while tv is on pause, hand held they were all blurry. But, take my work, all you have to do is increase the contrast and brightness on the television to restore the film to the color levels of the transfer.

[focusgroup]

Andreas

Would you please explain the procedure of using dodcap with premiere for the pulldown? Do you motion capture through premiere and then transfer to dodcap? do you capture through dodcap do the pull down and then edit on premiere? I tried the previous version of dodcap and couldnt really get it to work correctly. Also the capture using dodcap didnt appear to have the same quality as premiere capture though I dont know how thats possible using the standard DV NTSC codec.

thanks

George

[jukkasil]

Here is one mpg-videofile example of K25 ( standard 8 ) quality:

http://www.sorb-i-tol.com/standard8k25example.mpg

[studiocarter]

Well, that sure settles any question about the worthiness of R8 as a source film format.
Beautiful, full screen, full motion.

[supa_ate_sixteen]

jukkasil, will you ask your client if I can pay him to use some small clips of his footage for my next short film ? I love the stuff on what appears to be a boy on a camping trip.

[jukkasil]

jukkasil, will you ask your client if I can pay him to use some small clips of his footage for my next short film ? I love the stuff on what appears to be a boy on a camping trip.

OK, I'll ask him about that. Right now he is in Peru, so just wait couple weeks, ok?

[Brandt]

The technique used for white balancing a workprinter will be different from white balancing for production.

In production, the light hitting the white sheet of paper is reflected off of it, so you are getting an accurate representation of what is white under those circumstances.

The light hitting the camera through a piece of film is transmitted. In this case, you are seeing the light directly through the film, so white will be where the light comes through clear parts of the film. Under these circumstances, you will get accurate color reproduction of the rest of the colors if you color balance against the bulb.

Roger, let me know if I've missed anything here.

[Brandt]

Nevermind my last post...I hadn't seen that the question has already been answered...

[tfunch24]

Wow! That clip looked great!

After seeing this clip and hearing about Dodcap, I'm beginning to regret not buying a Workprinter when I had the chance.

Tom

[StopMoWorks]

just a quick note about manual exposures.
Kodachrome R8 film has tremendous range of lights to darks. Old movie films in hand have deep shadow and white car, white shirt or yellow jacket. How to expose it? Default exposure burns out the white car and shirt because there is so much shadow in the frame. Manual exposure darkened it enough to show detail in the lights but the darks went black?? The yellow jacket burned out on high exposures but the grass looked better......I havn't gotten any good pictures of the TV yet. Perhaps a tripod while tv is on pause, hand held they were all blurry...... all you have to do is increase the contrast and brightness on the television to restore the film to the color levels of the transfer. My decision was to retain the details in the lightest lights of the subject, not a background white house or sky chunk showing above a fence.

I don't have the workprinter yet, but in my long time ago amatuer attempts to dupe film or still photos, I remember "flashing" the film, that is, exposing the film to very small amount of light, then rewinding the film back and then shoot or click off a frame or shot (a double exposure) ..... it helps to reduce the contrasty nature when duping. Definitely takes some experimention. I know there are formulas (adusting f-stops and other things) for this and since I don't do it frequently, I forgot, but stored in my reference library somewhere. You definitely found a trick via the adjustment of the contrast/brightness control on TV, but trying to get the right exposure adjustment in the transfer would be nicer, but hey ..... whatever works!

P.S. I was talking about film-to-film transfer/duping and of course, one cannot backwind a DV cam. Maybe, I am getting confused and one would want to "flash" the K-40, before you shoot the live-action, then after processing you would get a lighter contrast print, so when you do the transfer, the contrast will not be so much. Definitely takes some experimentation. I've never done it myself, but I read of a beamsplitter set-up in front of cam lens, so you "flash" while you're filming (the live action scenes).

[MovieStuff]

Of course i was talking about film to film transfers/duping. With video set-up you cannot rewind, so some kind of beamsplitter glass in front of DV cam lens would be necessary to reflect that flash-light while you're transferring, but this makes everything a bit more complex.

Hi, Lio!

I've played around with the idea of using a piece of glass or the like to "flash" the film while transferring to video but, really, it doesn't work the same as it does if you are copying film to film. Raw film WILL respond to the pre-flash as you are creating a chemical response in the emulsion by flashing (either before, during or after exposure). But CCD's react differently and all you do is dilute the black areas it seems. The overall effect is definately one of lower contrast but not one of extending the range of information you can retrieve from the dark areas of the film (which is the whole point, otherwise just flatten the image electronically and blow off the flashing).

If you flash film, you sensitize the dark areas so that they will respond to less light than normal. Due to the "curve" of exposure range on film, this helps to compress the contrast a bit and you can actually pick up more detail in the dark areas than you otherwise could in a straight dupe. However, CCDs do not have the same dynamic range as film to begin with nor do they respond to "pre-sensitizing" the way that film emulsion does. Again, film will respond the same whether you flash before, during or after exposure of your target subject. Video can only be flashed during or after transfer; not before. And, again, even if you COULD preflash the CCDs, they simply do not react the same as film does so all you really end up with is diluted blacks. Any shadow detail that was lost during a "non-flashed" transfer will be no better if you use a beam splitter to wash out the dark areas.

Now, what WILL work is if you flash your Kodachrome stock when you shoot the original footage in the field. That will definately compress the contrast quite a bit and allow for a nicer video transfer but will create an original that is pretty flat when projected for normal viewing on a screen. It is impossible at this point to have it both ways; nice for projection and nice for telecine.

[StopMoWorks]

Hey Roger,

I was just looking in my reference library and corrected/edited my post script at the same time you wrote your reply. So when I posted, I suddenly saw your reply. You are right, video definitely has different characteristics responding to light and does not behave the same like flashing to film.
LIO

[mattias]

may i suggest a technique used in dye transfer printing of stills all the time, and sometimes also when shooting static high contrast scenes, both stills and motion pictures. the idea is that if you do multiple passes, you can concentrate on getting one part of the range correct each time, and then its just a matter of combining the results in some way.

the easiest way to try this with the workprinter would be to transfer twice, the first time with a one stop underexposure, to get good highlight detail, and once one stop over, to bring up the shadows, and then just superimposing or "overlaying" these in the computer. i've used this technique for a lot of things, and it's really powerful. don't know what results it would give with the workprinter, but i'm curious and it seems like it could work, as long as there's detail in the film of course. you won't be able to create information already lost...

/matt

[mattias]

i just had to bump this up to the top again. it would be really cool if somebody could try this, or at least give me some kind of feedback...

/matt