K40 Stills transfered by The Flying Spot

Post by **CleanCut** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 2:36 am

Here are a few K40 stills I posted. Amazing transfer! I will post more, including video, in a few weeks

http://www.8mm.filmshooting.com/scripts ... one_manual

Hit the next picture link to view the other 3.

Tam

Post by **mattias** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 2:51 am

yeah, amazing quality for sure, not just the transfer but the photography too. as always though i'd love to see some full frame stills or even full frame video, and the comparison with the diy transfer is hardly fair when the brightness is so different.

/matt

Post by **CleanCut** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:05 am

ah yes, the DIY was actually a local transfer i payed for. we had some "miscommunication" where he made it fairly clear he was using professional equipment. I thought the rates were too good to be true :roll:

By full frame do you mean 720x480?

Post by **mattias** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 9:22 am

CleanCut wrote:where he made it fairly clear he was using professional equipment

why is this way too common?

By full frame do you mean 720x480?

yes.

/matt

Post by **T-Scan** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 10:55 am

Very good stills! what camera did you use? i'm glad someone posted Flying Spot K-40 xfr. are the rates the same as color neg? i'm bulking up some more 500T i can't wait to send in to them.

Post by **CleanCut** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 9:54 pm

Not too sure about frame rates? I havent projected the film before...

mattias, I'll post some full frame shots later on in the next few weeks. These smaller images are for my site. I've posted quite a few here:

http://community.netidea.com/degrace/cl ... elson.html

Mix of digital and super8 stills...but i bet you guys can tell which is which

Post by **CleanCut** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 9:55 pm

By the way T-Scan, I used a Bauer s709 XL.

Post by **mattias** » Tue Jul 13, 2004 11:34 pm

love those images too. looking forward to the high res ones. the reason i want them is that super 8 transferred to video tends to break up above around 512x384 or so and become either soft or grainy, or both, while at smaller sizes it almost always looks sharp and smooth...

/matt

Post by **shralp** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 4:07 am

Nice Stills! I've got some BMX stuff on K-40 from Woodward West in Bakersfield, CA that I shot in their park during a Hi-Def shoot. Flying Spot X-fered this straight to HD for the TV shows and I've got a DVCAM master. As soon as I can figure out how to get this up on the site, I'll try to post some.

Alex · Post by **Alex** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 7:52 am

Maybe it's my monitor but the set-up looks slightly crushed on the Flying Spot transfer.

ZERO Black is BS, IT'S WRONG! I am getting sick and tired of the zero black set-up movement for NTSC. It's wrong. 7.5 is absolutely necessary to create more detail in the darker part of the image.

I'm starting to read from "experts" about how NTSC digital needs to have zero black for maximum quality. It's BS. I just was able to compare digital 8 footage shot by two different people on two different Digital 8 cameras.

The cameras were an older model TRV-340 and a newer model 450. The older model absolutely blew away the newer model. The one basic difference was the older model used 7.5 set-up and the newer model used Zero IRE for set-up.

I think it wise to stick with 7.5 IRE from the get go no matter what the transfer houses tell you.

Post by **mattias** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 8:34 am

Alex wrote:I'm starting to read from "experts" about how NTSC digital needs to have zero black for maximum quality. It's BS.

no it isn't. it's right there in the dv standard and decks are supposed to add the correct setup on playback. if you feed 7.5 ire to a digital deck it should clip it to 0 digital, and if you add the setup again the deck will still add it putting your black at 15 ire. take it or leave it.

(some or even many decks, like many d8 ones, fail to adhere to the standard, which is why the d8 camera you tried output 0 ire. it shouldn't, but internally it still should. if you have one of those and need to make an analog dub, by all means go ahead and add the setup or the signal will be wrong, but keep it at 0 for all digital work)

/matt

Alex · Post by **Alex** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 9:53 am

Here's the problem as I see it. All IRE is not created equal. I think most people seem to think that the 0 - 7.5 IRE is no different than say, 50.00 IRE - 57.5 IRE.

This is where the problem lies.

It sounds like we are only dealing with 7.5 range of IRE when we talk about set-up, but it actually is more like 50 IRE when compared to the brighter part of the Waveform scale. So when digital keeps the zero black right around zero, valuable detail is lost in the shadowed areas of the signal.

The difference between a camera that uses 7.5 IRE in low light situations versus a camera that uses zero black is huge in terms of being able to optimize actual color tonalities.

Post by **mattias** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 10:07 am

cameras almost always use the entire range. creating the correct levels, gamma and contrast for broadcast and so on is a post problem. you'll see a difference on the video monitor between cameras that treat the analog levels differently, but in the digital realm all the info is there in all cases. a telecine with black at zero is not lacking any information in the shadows, but you will lose some if you output it with 16 or whatever digital "ire" is as black, which some decks do. however, if you use a deck that follows the standard it will outpu zero as 7.5, meaning nothing will be clipped. if you follow a strictly digital post path you shouldn't have to worry about setup at all. a dv[cam] broadcast master *should* have black at 0.

/matt

Alex · Post by **Alex** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 4:45 pm

I think TV's aren't as linear as we want to give them credit for. It sort of like what the human ears can hear, there is a sound frequency drop off point .

What can the television screen phospers ideally really display?

How can compression codecs properly handle so many subtlties in the very low end gray scale if those subtlties are all crunched around the zero IRE?

I'm looking at low lit video footage with real nice sculpting around the face of the person talking and the reason it looks so good is that a 7.5 base has been incorporated while during shooting, not after. The picture is optimized because of this. Why would I want to shoot that same scene with zero black when the only result would be that I would now have pitch black in parts of the edge of the face whereas now I can actually see detail?

If it's recorded with zero black, that usually means that detail will never exist whereas at 7.5 the additional gray tones are visible.

Post by **mattias** » Wed Jul 14, 2004 5:01 pm

Alex wrote:How can compression codecs properly handle so many subtlties in the very low end gray scale if those subtlties are all crunched around the zero IRE?

good point, but every video signal has to be clipped somewhere since no ccd can capture the entire range of either reality or a film reversal or print (i'm not sure about film negatives). where you put your black is a matter of exposure and knee setting, not legal signal levels. simply bring your shadows up to a digital level of 16 if you're concerned about subtle shadow detail.

/matt