Colour Print Film Split Bath Experiment Part 1

Okay,

So I got 1000ft of Vision Print Film I intend using for pictorial purposes. It is process ECP-2B, which is CD-2 based, I have dry CD-2..

As Jon Irenicus would say; "It is time for more... experiments. The pain will only be passing; you should survive the process."

This is the third test and first one worth showing.

The recipe I used is as follows;

Bath A:
7g/L CD-2
9g/L Sodium Sulphite

Bath B:
40.5g/L Sodium Carbonate
1.0g/L KBr



Both images shot in unfiltered heavy indoor tungsten.

The 50D ain't too bad, the density range for the layers on the 50D is right in the middle, a little thin on the range but pretty reasonable, of course it's a real low contrast scene and low contrast film, it would probably excel for a high contrast situation outdoors.

On the print film, all the layers have a wide range, cyan and magenta have the lowest dMin starting at nothing basically, but the range is pretty good, dMin and dMax together should be higher for better quality, dMin is slightly high on the yellow layer, and dMax a bit too high.

Future tests will increase the amount of CD-2, KBr, and I would add KI if I still had some.. would be very nice to. Oh well, benzotriazole and phenidone in Bath A are also on the list.

Once I get a good formula, I may compare it to a CD-3 version instead (ECP-2 is CD-2 based, ECN-2 is CD-3, E-6 is CD-3, C-41 is CD-4) to see the difference on the print film (ECP-2 film).

Kodak Australia Helpful

Left a message on the Kodak site U.S. asking the difference between 5219 (Vision3 500T, http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/Products/Production/Color_Negative_Films/5219.htm) and 5230 (500T, http://motion.kodak.com/AU/en/motion/Products/Production/Color_Negative_Films/5230.htm) as it was newly listed with a newer data sheet.

Received a phone call from a Kodak Australia rep (Fuji Australia last year or the year before I had to chase down numbers which most were no longer working it seemed..) explaining that 5230 is basically Vision2 (iirc) and lower cost and aimed for TV dramas etc etc. with a more limited format size and length range. He was quite helpful and enthusiastic

5219 is still the latest and greatest 500T. It comes in 100ft spools.. so it's ready to bulk load, so I dont have to buy a 400ft core and rewind by hand into a bulk loader.. which takes some damn time last time I tried.

50D comes in a 200 ft core at the smallest size.. which isn't too bad, I'd like to try that too.

And also 1000ft of 65mm.. to trim down into my saved up 120 spools and paper.

16mm Motion Picture Film Developing Tank Mk1 aka "Missile Launcher"

Okay so the first developing tank is completed, it has numerous problems in operation, though isnt expensive to make, is a pain in the arse to actually use, I have already learned a lot and have a number of refinements for the heliacal-spiral type, though I'm 'putting my money' on a simple 2D spiral type.

Ultimately I want to construct something that has semi-automatic loading of up to 1000 ft in lengths in both 16mm and 35mm formats, which I have a few ideas for the future for.

Anyway, I've posted a video on vimeo detailing on putting this first version together, I will post chemistry mixing for ECN-2 and other videos in the future, such as other tank versions, and actually processing ECN-2 film, and B&W motion picture reversal stock.

http://vimeo.com/12522602


Video journal of the "missile launcher" (since it likes to launch the inner tube like a missile if you dont tape the end cap on when using it).

This shows construction of the first 16mm ~100ft I built (ended up being 86.5ft in this one).

There are problems with this design I didn't know about or think of until I went to use it.

This design takes a long time to construct, is very difficult to load.

I would also recommend if using the heliacal-spiral type like this desig of mine, to have the spiral track cut into a tube (perhaps a wooden solid cylinder?) about 0.5cm+ deep so the film can be crank-wound on.

Currently, at the moment I recommend a 2D spiral type on a base board that gets placed into a bath, a spiral may seem hard to make, but you can do it with vertical rods (nails, dowel, otherwise, etc) rather than two tracks at bottom and top like a 35mm/120 roll hand processing tank for still film.

If your film needs to touch against something (such as the rod 2D spiral type or rack processor, or this tank in the video) wind it on so the emulsion side is not touching anything, then it is perfectly fine.

I'll make a new tank and show a video, as well as mixing up useable formula for processing ECN-2 at some point.

I'll be scaling up my final design when I find the perfect design after building enough 100ft tanks for 400ft and 1000ft and 35mm as well.

Gold Coast Super 16mm HD Telecine Experience

Fuck me, this is going to be a rant, and a warning (hopefully) to others about using The Post Lounge (http://www.thepostlounge.com/) for telecine transfers (example at the end)

Just got out S16mm HD telecine back that we got done at The Post Lounge at the warner studio lot and I am angry.

Originally it was $450 for our HD telecine for the hour, uncompressed 10-bit onto a drive we supplied, and get it back same day.

Anyway, they notified us like 2 days before they were increasing the cost to $1000 iirc (and we ended up only in there for 20 minutes), which included postage (postage was like $250) to their Brisbane office so they could capture the tape.

They also notified us that they were scheduling us an hour earlier (hold - we're paying for it and booked our time - and now we're paying over double for it, for a worse end result, and we have to do it to their terms when they know how far we have to drive up to supervise?)

We didn't have have a choice to send it anywhere else after that, since it was already up there for processing and then delivered to the place for our arrival to supervise the telecine (nice and sharp on the raw telecine, soft as a soggy kleenex once we got the footage back). We were also asked "where's your film?", they had to go chase it up after we reminded them that it was delivered to them directly from the lab (which is the usual case), that's not really even an annoyance or concern for me though.


Anyway after the telecine operator went through it, he put it out to tape, which ended up being HDCAM, not HDCAM SR, but HDCAM 3:1:1 8-bit 1440x1080

Which sucks, what I'd like to point out at this point, is when we got the footage back, I noticed that the gamma and white points the operator had set, suit when the camera is spinning up or spinning down (which exposes the negative more and hence increases overall density) and not when the camera was at speed (in our case, 25 fps), so the white point has been set for the brightest highlights 2+ stops above our useful footage.

A fucking monkey pressing an auto-levels button could do that, why the fuck would you pick the sections where you turn on and off the camera (which have the greatest highlight density) to set the white point to?!

Now if we were getting the uncompressed footage, this wouldn't be a problem, may even be not so bad with HDCAM SR, but that simple fact means we have vastly less information/bit distribution etc for our useful footage, he may as well have just run an auto-levels over the entire lot of the footage in one go and set black to minimum neg density, and white to maximum neg density.


Oh, and the footage went through a second stage of lossy compression during capturing at the Brisbane location, which just makes it worse.



What it means, is twice the cost, for an inferior service and end product (soft, noisy, simple grading after levels correction causes banding), and a wait of a week, instead of same day.


So, apparently, they no longer have the facilities to do a transfer at their Gold Coast presence (and the packaging they put the drive in must be made out of gold foil to justify the $250 postage price for the drive).

So I would just like to put that out there in case there happens to be even one of you out there on a production considering getting a telecine done on the Gold Coast - I'd say to you, consider if that suits your needs, and if it does, I'd say it'd be cheaper and less time consuming to shoot on HDV. If it doesn't - look elsewhere, courier to Sydney etc (will cost a lot less too).


Verdict: Shameful service, just because we're only getting 400 ft of film done doesn't mean they can neglect our service, put a lovely tax on us (over twice the cost in total including $250 for postage over a distance of 100km?!), do a fucking shameful job, and after charging us over double compress out footage down using a codec with a shitty bit-depth and nasty chroma-subsampling with an anamorphic aspect ratio (throwing out resolution) that is 13 years old to tape only to be captured and lossy compressed again.

Do you even give a fuck about your business, or the job you do and quality of service you provide?

Here is one example of a typical well-exposed scene at EI50 (Even if it was underexposed, which it wasn't, a normal telecine operator would sit correct it and set the white point, gamma and black points), and the version after that I simply set black and white points on, not even touching gamma, gosh that was such hard work!

Simply click on the examples for the full-resolution ("1920" x 1080) image.