PRO8 50D, 200T, 250D & 500T CLIPS, PIX & INFO POSTED

[Pedro]

actually very interesting results!

I am only wondering, why in any S8 transfer to digital I saw up to now, the S8 footage always looks out of focus while the direct digital DV pics look crisp sharp. Theoretically S8 provides more resolution.
In contrary, when I project K40, even setting my projector in still mode and going close to the screen to examine sharpness, I cannot find that imperfections the transfer results always show, every looks sharp, up to a certain system limit. Projecting in parallel to a TV set and to the same size, the TV screen looks like a toy! Why not the scans of pro8???

I could imagine, that the reason is the still no perfect transfer technology for such a small gauge.
Or is it the extreme 220 degree shutter and the lack of a triplet?
Or the performance of the totally open lens, that might be weaker than a DV lens that has a fixed middle opening, regulating the exposure electronically?

What is stunning, is the totally diferent reproduction, expecially of the active lights in the scene! Nearly not notable in DV, but brilliant in S8!

The DV scenes are lower exposured than the S8 scenes. There is more sky in the DV pic than in the S8 pic, that might have caused a darker result. The weaker DV colors are "also" a result of a differnt exposure.

What would be interesting is a comparing shoot with both cameras on a triplet, with the same lens angle, direction and position and an exposure braketing in both systems.
The later comparing should be done TV screen X movie screen, to avoid the incluence of imperfect transfer technology.
Too bad, that all that stocks are only negative and that there is no service offered for making positive prints!

Pedro

[S8 Booster]

That´s many questions Pedro and I can reply to some and give you my opinion on others but I will make a total summary to do this.
Give me a little time.
Things may not look the way they really are judged from the stills amomgst other the moving images becomes noticably sharper.

I need to post the DV clips so you can check out some of this yourself.
They are 100% identical to what I got from PRO8MM (MinDV "files")

Need a little time.

R

[S8 Booster]

Pedro, I will try to answer your questions but my answers are limited to this test and tested with my equipment etc so they may not be valid for all.

First, this is PAL 25 fps DV.

actually very interesting results!

I am only wondering, why in any S8 transfer to digital I saw up to now, the S8 footage always looks out of focus while the direct digital DV pics look crisp sharp. Theoretically S8 provides more resolution.

Pedro

There are some very technical differences between film VS DV and S8 Cams vs DV Cams:

Film has a different texture
Film may have equal or better resolution
Film, particulary the neg film has wide contrast range, looking less "sharp"
-> Film looks "softer"

If you remember back in the ´70s, if my memory serves me right, it was a common fashion to end many feature or documentary films with a single still frame. It was surprising how grainy and unsharp THAT frame looked compared to the moving images. It is the same with the frames I posted here. The moving images are say, twice as sharp as the stills.

Regarding the cameras it is important to keep in mind that modern DV cams, or almost any video camera use digital or optical image stabilisation. Image shapness will suffer close to none when the cam is hand held.

Due to limited time for the side by side shots, the last hour before complete darkness and a real doubt if I would get any images at all I disgarded tripod.

Some of the dark shots were made at 150° and some at 220° shutter (1/39s - 1/58s shutter speed) . The big stills posted initialy were shot at 220° shutter with a handheld camera on V500T. Hardly the best starting point for comparing resolution or sharpness.

Also easier to make "sharp" DV images due to lower colour information processing.

In contrary, when I project K40, even setting my projector in still mode and going close to the screen to examine sharpness, I cannot find that imperfections the transfer results always show, every looks sharp, up to a certain system limit. Projecting in parallel to a TV set and to the same size, the TV screen looks like a toy! Why not the scans of pro8???
Pedro

When it comes to K40 I have said before that I will applaud someone who can transfer the true resolution/image quality about 1:1 to video. I have yet to see anything near that anyway. Even though PRO8MM can transfer the k40 too I do not believe thay can do anything near 1:1 with Super8.
It seems that many transfer systems loves the grains more than the images.

I could imagine, that the reason is the still no perfect transfer technology for such a small gauge.
Pedro

I think one of the posters from Italy (Ugo?) used some company there that gave extremely good results and maybe there are better technologies/systems are available for S8.

What is stunning, is the totally diferent reproduction, expecially of the active lights in the scene! Nearly not notable in DV, but brilliant in S8!
Pedro

There is no doubt that the image quality, colour balance, general impression, is superior with the film medium. On the big images, look how good it resolves the colour in the very dark areas compared to the DV.
Even in the extremely dark shots shown at the start of the split film - the forrest floor, I was confident that there wuld be absolutely no images at all. The film became very underxposed and grainy but the colours remained.

My fellow DV filmer commented that the colours on the film on the dark "takes", to him, were better than reality compared to what our eyes saw and with the DV it was less than what our impression were. I agree with him on that.

The DV scenes are lower exposured than the S8 scenes. There is more sky in the DV pic than in the S8 pic, that might have caused a darker result. The weaker DV colors are "also" a result of a differnt exposure.
Pedro

Your observations are right but it does not help the DV a lot. All the comparing shots (look at the split film) in brighter light as well shows a way cooler and colourless "tame" look on the video although the images look sharper.

What would be interesting is a comparing shoot with both cameras on a triplet, with the same lens angle, direction and position and an exposure braketing in both systems.
The later comparing should be done TV screen X movie screen, to avoid the incluence of imperfect transfer technology.
Too bad, that all that stocks are only negative and that there is no service offered for making positive prints!
Pedro

Unfortunately I ran out of time and light on this "session" and I had no idea what the results would be so there was no possibilty for me to do a comparisation like this on this occation.

Also there was always some jitter. The V200T was quite good. I would say that it had less jitter than the old Agfa Moviechrome A40 of the day believing that the optional pressureplate might have solved all of this.
The V500T had more jitter than the 200.

The jitter problems of the 50D, 250D seemed to be worse at the start of the cartridge for some reason but were present all the way through.

R

[Cheezy]

In video, the quality of a still picture can sometimes be a problem, depending on whether you freeze one or both fields. Freezing one field can result in a picture that is less sharp and has more noise and aliasing... since you remove a field from an interlaced image, it's like removing half of the visual definition. Freezing both fields sometimes gives you a feeling of flicker. Progressive scan video and film don't have this problem. But as film transfered to video becomes interlaced... :roll:

[Cheezy]

WHat ASA settings do you have on the Canon ? I'm suprised because even my Beaulieu stops at 400 ASA.

[S8 Booster]

The default auto max setting for the Canon 1014 XL-S is 400ASA but it is possible manually over/underride the Auto exposure by up to +/- 1 full stop by a compensation dial which gives 800ASA max speed by -1. The compensation dial is free rotating but naturally stopped at 1/3 steps.

Using the compensation dial allows the cameras light metering / exposure control system operate as if there was a "standard" film used even shooting 500 or 800 ASA.

Outside that external light meters and maual aperture control is required.

The Nikon R10 goes up to 640ASA by default auto setting and +2/-1 stop by manual compensation.


R

[Cheezy]

We have discussed this in a nother post lately, and I know of a simple way for my Beaulieu: set it at 250 ASA and close it 1 stop more than the meter reads.

[S8 Booster]

Yes this method sure works well.

The good thing about using the compensation dials for cameras like the Canon and Nikon (I am sure there are more cams capable of high speed films) is that the internal light metering/exosure control works perfectly as normal without having to adjust for every shot. It works just like using a "normal" film for the camera up to 800 ASA for the Canon and 1280 ASA for the Nikon, if there were any 1280 available of course.

PRO8MM sells 800 ASA for your inf.

R

[S8 Booster]

DV sample film clip posted.

Posted this ftp://ftp.filmshooting.com/upload/video/P8V500T.dv
sample of 10 seconds of the V500T film. About 35 MB.

This clip went through 2 format changes because the DV cam I borrowed could not record back from the computer and the program could not store DV clips directly on the computer. Thus it went through quicktime.mov and back to .dv format.

Anyway, I can not see any quality drop on my 1200 pix plasma computer screen so I hope it will make justice for you too.

R

[Tom]

Pedro & S8Booster,

You have to be careful when comparing Super 8 and DV that all things are equal.

If the DV camera has 1 chip or even 3 chips of a small size then its ability to resolve colour is impaired though this has nothing to do with the tape format. When using that same camera for telecine transfer it has a lot easier job to record the saturated colours of the original super 8, because the sampling is made so much easier than with a 'live' signal.

Please note colour issues with DV are about resolution not levels or saturation - this is why it is difficult to do blue screen work with DV. 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 means that the colour is sampled at half the rate of luminance. With professional cameras containing quality digital signal processors you can get very good saturation but you will always be limited by the 8 bit colour depth of DV - i.e. you can have any colour you want but only in 255 levels with a consequent impact on resolution (more jaggies compared to pure luminance derived images) - film is more or less infinite but you cannot improve video colour resolution by only telecining Super 8.

The ultimate resolution of Super 8 transfered to video can never be 1:1 (or indeed with any film format), because it is limited by the resolution of both the video camera and tape format (in SD 720 x 576) and is FURTHER compounded by the combination of the two limited resolution - Super 8 and video. This is also true of film prints made from Super 8 - you will get a poor print from a Super 8 original wether contact or optical - you will get a better print if you blow up to 16mm, and even better to 35mm and so on.

A rank Cintel will always be the best telecine method because the picture is scanned rather like the television image is itself. Transfer even with the Workprinter will always be limited by the optical path of projector, condensor lens and camera lens.

Regards.

[Cheezy]

Tom, you are absolutely right! Still, be careful not to mix Rank Cintel & telecine. It's like calling NL editing "Avid", or saying "Kleenex" for a handkerchief... Other telecine manufacturers exist, and that have Super8 gates too. But maybe were you mentioning the Rank because of the flying-spot technology it utilizes?

[Tom]

Thank you Cheezy,

You are perfectly right I am using a trade name generically when I should be outlining a system - my apologies.

Regards.

[Lucas Lightfeat]

It seems to me from the images I've seen posted of Vision stocks, that they look pretty lousy when they're used as a "low light" stock, but when they are used in normal daylight situation, where you would use K40, for example, they allow the lens to close down, giving a level of sharpness equivelant to K40 filmed with a more open lens, but giving the advantage of greater latitude and more modern colouration. I personally love the slightly surreal artistic colours of K40, but dislike the 3 stop latitude with it's washed out whites and tendancy to underexposure. It seems that Vision 200T can look like nice 16mm when used in good lighting conditions, but looks like video with it's gain turned up if used in low light. Roll on the release of 500T Mark II !!!!!!!

Lucas (Super8 negative stock virgin) Lightfeat

[S8 Booster]

Pedro & S8Booster,

You have to be careful when comparing Super 8 and DV that all things are equal. .......


Regards.

Hi Tom. I think both Pedro and I are aware of this and even different computers and screendsreproduce the images/clips differently.

However, I think there is a big difference and it is no doubt that the information sampling is much lower with the DV/DV stuff.

Here is some info from Kodak for reference: http://www.kodak.com/US/en/motion/story/fact3.shtml

Resolution
Similar to sharpness, but distinctly different, is resolution – or the ability of an imaging system to sense and reproduce fine detail. Today's highest resolution motion picture film scanners are able to extract over 12 million pixels of information from just one frame of 35mm film…and this is limited only by the capability of the scanning device.

You can also examine this from a sort of a “z” direction, which is the bit depth of information. Film’s tone scale is closely approximated in today's high-end digital scanners by 14 bits linear or 16k discrete levels.

R

[Tom]

S8Booster

High resolution motion picture scanners are not for transferring film to video but for scanning film into compters for CGI work on theatrical cinema releases - they have nothing to do with telecine. If you telcine you can never supercede the resolution of the video format and infact will always have something considerably less than that for the reasons I outlined.

My point was that you will obviously take a resolution hit with Super 8 to DV rather than the original scene on DV, just as you would with a Super 8 copy as against the original scene- there really is no mystery there.

One other point I forgot to mention is that Super 8 reversal has a projection gamma that also compounds resolution issues when copied - this is why 16mm film used for television production was always of a special low contrast gama.

Regards.