vision 200T vs Kodakhcrome 40

[Pedro]

Only some comments due to my personal expieriences.

Agree totally with Moviestuff and others. The ultimate top stock is K40. I have never seen a finer grain, better saturized colors and a better contrast lattitude for big screen projection, where every imperfection is outed.

The best and sharpest results for projection, I always achieved with a slight UNDEREXPOSUREING, about 1/3 stop, or at least a correct exposuring conforming DIN adjustments. All cameras (exept the 9008) I owned had from factory a wrong exposuring adjustment, they over exposured the film, perhaps in order to compensate the weak bulbs in many consumer projectors.
Slight and careful under exposuring of K40 gives a crispy sharp impression when projected. The contrast rises, the colors become deeper, and there is less diffusion between the grains that may result in less sharp pictures.
However, over exposuring may cover some of the grain, but wash out colors and contrast, resulting in "milky" projection with unnatural skin tones and too clear landscape shots.

For telecine, you should remember, that any video media has about the half of the latitude of film, so the contrast cannot be used in the same way as an as it is possible for projection. They main concern should be to keep contrast low.

Concerning negative, I recently had to do some fotografic work under LL conditions and wanted to take advantage of a high speed film. As a Kodakchrom fan, I wanted to buy some rolls of Kodacolor Gold 800. But the lady in the shop advised me, not to take that "super grainy" stock, better stick to Agfa or Fuji. So I took the Fuji 800 ASA film, and was very astonished of the results. There was virtually no grain at all, and the contrast was very good looking, not that heavy color contrast like in older high speed stock, making all faces red. Now it would be interesting , to project it side by side with a slide film of the same speed.

When comparing negative stock (what´s only good for telecine) and reversal stock (basicly designed for projection) we should not forget, to distinguish between standard reversal stock (Fuji, Ektachrome) and silver film (Kodachrome). For my informations, the old fashioned silver technology of Kodachrome is one of the reasons for the extreme good quality.

Pedro

[marc]

If you shoot everything just right and your lighting setup is done properly and then you have it transfered to video with a one time, best light color balance, is it still recomended to do color corretion work in post production?
Marc

[mattias]

reversal is always sharper than negative, *except* when it comes to the super grainy ektachrome vnf stocks. this is where the confusion comes from, and once we've settled that i think we can all agree upon the rest. :-)

and yes, i've tested it. same scene on vision 200 and vnf 125, bracketed exposure. the vnf stock was grainier (and uglier in other respects as well). i also tested k40 with the same scene, and it obviously knocked the others out before the match had even started...

/matt

[crimsonson]

My beef with K40 is the color. Unfortunately, for trandtional narrative it looks dated. It does not have the color of modern negative stocks. If I ask my actors to put on an afro and bell bottoms - I can have a convincing "period piece." 200, 100 and 50 I think are great stocks.