[Frameworks] a question about negative film stock for s-8mm

[Phaeton Graph]

"The difficulty of projecting and scanning color negative stock is the 
reason why the discontinuation of 100D is such a blow for amateur and no budget analog filmmaking."

This is indeed the dreadful blow that has been dealt to low budget film enthusiasts, film students (as opposed to students of digital video) and experimental filmmakers everywhere.



________________________________
 From: Florian Cramer <flrncrmr at gmail.com>
To: Experimental Film Discussion List <frameworks at jonasmekasfilms.com> 
Sent: Saturday, 25 May 2013, 15:34
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] a question about negative film stock for s-8mm
 


Hello,

The colorist said that my material was not excellent, but well within
>the normal-to-good range for S8mm. He said I should have worked with
>reversal film, because Super-8 cameras were never designed and
>calibrated for negative stock and cannot thus yield good results on
>negative emulsion. 
>

Sorry for my language, but you've been told utter bullshit. Of course, Super 8 cameras can perfectly expose negative stock - just like any analog photo camera can expose negative stock. After all, analog photography and cinematography are about a lens, a shutter and film emulsion, and your Schneider is optically better than many photo camera lenses! 

Negative stock is much more difficult to scan because of its orange mask and high dynamic range. You need a scanner whose sensor chip has deep color resolution and a high dynamic range - 13 f-stops for Vision3 50D, for example. Otherwise, there won't be enough color information to filter out the orange mask without muted colors and clipped highlights/shadows resulting. Which is what you got.

Most low- and mid-end film scanners (such as MWA Flashscan and Müller HM73) that are typically used by affordable film scanning service providers use industrial video cameras such as the Pike F-145 for the scanning/digitization. The Pike is equipped with a Sony ICX285 CCD sensor that has a dynamic range of about 67db, the equivalent of 11 f-stops. So you'll lose at least two f-stops when scanning Vision3 with one the above scanners. Reversal film has a much lower dynamic range - 100D about 8 f-stops - so scanning it on these systems is unproblematic. 
 
I'm no expert on good scanning services for Super 8 stock (AVP in Munich has an outstanding reputation and works with a Rank Cintel), but 
here's an example (not exactly my cup of tea of film) of Vision3 Super 8 scanned relatively inexpensively by Ochoypico [http://www.ochoypico.com] in Spain, a company whose scanning results always struck me as very "filmic": http://www.filmkorn.org/scharfe-vision-200t-und-500t-in-super-8/ (You could still criticize the result for having a green tint, but probably this could fixed with run-of-the-mill digital color correction.)

The difficulty of projecting and scanning color negative stock is the reason why the discontinuation of 100D is such a blow for amateur and no budget analog filmmaking.
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