Keep Your Crew Involved

Your director of photography and your editor probably know a lot about film and video image quality. Keep them involved throughout the entire process, from digital image enhancement to mastering your videotape to film transfer.

35mm Film Prints

High-quality video footage is the key to a successful tape-to-film transfer. Everything that looks bad on video is going to look worse on film, especially when projected. The resolution of 35mm film is much, much greater than that of video, and any overexposed whites will read as large expanses of white nothingness, without the detail you would normally expect to see in film. In addition, any artifacts, noise, focus problems, and other image flaws will be enlarged as much as 25 times. If you shot your video properly—that is, if you took the time to light it like film, and set your video black-and-white levels properly when you created your videotape master—then you’ll be giving your film recordist the best possible image containing the most information. Avoid any type of image processing that removes information, such as deinterlacing. In addition, avoid any image processing that adds artifacts or noise, like boosting the video gain. The company that does your video-to-film transfer will take care of these things. If you’re careful, well-shot HD footage transferred to film can look surprisingly good.

There are two ways to deliver your footage to the film recordist: digital files or videotape. We’ve already discussed how to best create a textless videotape master via a professional online session or by doing it yourself. This is the easiest and most practical way to deliver your film to the film recordist. The other option is to deliver digital video files, usually DPX, QuickTime, Targa, or sequential PICT formats, on a hard drive. Talk to your film recordist before assuming that she can work with digital files.

The primary reason to deliver digital files is if you’ve done some effects work, such as color correcting or compositing, and do not want to recompress those shots by going back out to tape. Titles should also be delivered digitally as high-resolution 2K files, or else they should originate on film via optical printing. (See the section on titles for film in Chapter 17, “Titles and Effects.”) Ask your film recordist how she prefers to have titles and effects shots delivered.

Reel Changes

If you’re heading for a film transfer, you’ll most likely have to break your project into 20-minute segments to accommodate reel changes. Talk to your film recordist about this as early as possible. Be sure to make these breaks at a hard cut, not at a dissolve. In addition, make sure they’re at a natural lull in the soundtrack, not in the middle of a line of dialogue or music—the transition from one reel to another might not be seamless. As a rule, make sure there isn’t any important dialogue in the one to two seconds leading up to and following a reel change.

438 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

The Film Printing Process

Modern 35mm motion picture finishing has changed a lot, thanks to digital technologies. Whether you shot on HD video, a digital cinema format, or 35mm, the postproduction process is pretty much the same: high-resolution media is brought into an editing system where it gets edited, color graded, and mixed before printing to 35mm film. This simplifies the film printing process greatly. The final color graded cut of the film is exported to a digital file format that works well for film printing, usually DPX, QuickTime, Targa, or sequential PICT or TIFF formats on a hard drive.

Transferring your digital video project to 35mm film can dramatically improve the look of your final product. If you’re planning to make a film print of your digital media, it’s important to understand the traditional film printing process (see Figure 18.12). For example, 16mm and 35mm motion picture films are very similar to 35mm still film: the negative is exposed in the camera, and the film is taken to a lab where it is processed and used to create a print of the film. If you’ve ever compared a bad “one-hour photo” print to a professional print of the same image, then you know how different two prints from the same negative can look. Good film printing is all about controlling the look of the final film print. Some film transfer companies have their own labs, others work closely with a nearby lab, or others will work with the lab of your choice. Once you have a negative, you’ll follow the same process as traditional film printing.

It’s important to choose a lab for your film print fairly early in the editing process. Each lab has a different, usually proprietary, method for transferring digital media to film, and they will have specific instructions for you—how long each reel should be, how the white levels and black levels should be set, how to deal with text on-screen, and so on.

They will probably suggest that you let them handle the entire finishing process, rather than a do-it-yourself file-based output from your own system. This will cost more money, but the resulting quality might be worth it. However, if you’re really on a shoestring budget, you should shop around for a lab that thinks they can work with your DIY file-based master. Technically, this shouldn’t result in any significant image problems if you have good image quality.

Printing from a Negative

The film recordist takes the digital file and prints each frame in the file to a frame of 35mm motion picture film negative (see Figure 18.12). The negative is then used to strike a positive film print. In traditional filmmaking, several trial prints are made at this stage. The final, successful print is called the answer print.

Once an answer print is made, an intermediate is created using the answer print. The intermediate will either be a color internegative (IN) or an interpositive (IP). The IN or IP is then used to strike the release prints. Because these intermediate prints are used to strike release prints, you can store your original negative away for safekeeping. If your intermediate print gets damaged, you can create a new one from your original negative.